Mercury Falls (15 page)

Christine snorted. "Natural gas explosion! You sent a pillar of fire to incinerate the house!" Christine was only guessing. She had no idea who was responsible for the pillar, but this joker seemed like a good bet. "A
Class Three
pillar of fire," she continued, jabbing her finger at Uzziel. "What, a Class Two wouldn't have gotten the job done? That's just sloppy, if you ask me."

Uzziel sighed. "Mercury was a problem," he said. "He had access to some sensitive information about the Apocalypse, and he could have caused some trouble for us if he decided to. We were watching the interplanar energy channels for his signature. It was decided that if anything came up, we'd torch him."

"And everybody around him."

"We suspected you were with Mercury," said Uzziel, "and that you had the Attache Case of War. Collateral damage is sometimes unavoidable. You were another X-factor, another unknown that could throw off our calculations. And we couldn't let the case fall into the wrong hands."

"Right," said Christine. "No telling what could happen if it got into the hands of someone really dangerous. The next thing you know, there'd be rivers of blood, stars falling from the sky. . ."

"We're not about chaos or violence for no reason," explained Uzziel. "That is, that's not the
plan
. I'm sure the other side has differing ideas. These things have to be orchestrated in a very precise way. Otherwise, the Apocalypse would degenerate into pointless mayhem."

"Well, that would clearly be a problem," observed Christine acerbically.

"Enough explanations," Uzziel said. "Does Mercury have the case?"

"I. . .don't know," said Christine. "I haven't seen him since Berkeley. . ."

"Hello?" said Karl. "Don't you remember leaving him with the movie guys in Lodi? The ones that you said were going to—"

"Karl's not quite himself," interjected Christine. "He got hit on the head when that lunatic tried to kill him in Lodi."

"What movie guys, Karl?" asked Uzziel.

"There were these two guys on motorcycles. At first I thought they were cops, but it turned out they wanted to put me in the next Charlie Nyx movie. We went to Charlie's Grill in Lodi, because I can eat there for free, and they were talking about movies and stuff and then I had to go to the bathroom and that's when Christine said she was Secret Service and we had to leave and I didn't get to pee until Stockton."

"Did you get their names, Karl?"

"Uhhhh. . .one of them was Izzy, right, Christine?"

Christine sighed. No point in resisting anymore. She wasn't even sure whom she was protecting, or from what. "Izbazel and Gamaliel."

Christine thought she saw the angel turn even more pale.

"What did they want?" asked Uzziel.

"I told you," said Karl. "They were going to put me in a movie."

"They wanted to kill Karl," said Christine. "They said, 'No Antichrist, no Apocalypse.' They were trying to get Mercury to hand him over without a struggle. That's when I grabbed Karl and left."

Karl stared dumbly at Christine.

"So," said Uzziel, "we've got another faction in play. Someone trying to stop the Apocalypse at all costs."

Harry scoffed, "You can't
stop
the Apocalypse. It's God's will."

Everyone's eyes rolled. Even Karl's.

"I'll put together a team to find Mercury and the other angels and retrieve the case," Uzziel said. "We'll have to open a portal to Lodi. These emergency portals are killing me. I'm so over budget on this thing as it is, Michael's going to have my head. So," Uzziel said, "you really don't know anything about the earthquake?"

"You mean other than the fact that it almost killed us and probably leveled my building?" Harry said. "No."

"So you don't have. . .it?"

"Have, um, what?" asked Harry.

"Why," said Uzziel, "the Attache Case of Death, of course."

"The Attache Case of Death can cause earthquakes?" Christine asked, dumbfounded.

"Among other things," said Uzziel. "It's the most powerful of the four. If it's fallen into the hands of the renegades. . ."

"Yeah, it'll totally mess up your whole Apocalypse," said Christine. "We get it."

"Not only that," said Uzziel. "This faction threatens the balance between the forces of good and the forces of evil. Lucifer might use this as an opportunity to. . ."

Christine and Harry looked quizzically at Uzziel.

He continued, "But I'm getting ahead of myself. We're still in damage control mode for now. Assuming we can pick up our three renegade cherubim and recover the Case of War, we should be able to get back on track. If we watch the channels for the signature of the Attache Case of Death, we should be able to pick it up the next time they use it. If we can recover the Case of War, we should be able to pull off the Apocalypse even without the Case of Death. We'll be a little over budget, but we'll get it done. We all want the same thing here, right?"

Harry nodded. Christine snorted. Karl started, "I'm not sure I. . ."

"Right," said Uzziel. "OK, Harry and Karl, I'll take you to a portal that you can use to get back to Los Angeles. Christine, you stay here." He pulled what appeared to be a small silver bell from his pocket, shook it three times, and then, despite the fact that it made no discernable sound, slipped it back into his pocket.

"Wait," Christine said. "What am I supposed to do here?"

"Nothing," answered Uzziel. "You're going to wait out the Apocalypse here. I've summoned Perp to come back and keep you comfortable. Just don't be stingy with the tips."

Christine got to her feet, openmouthed, trying to decide whether she was going to protest and, if so, what she was going to protest about.

"Listen, Christine," Uzziel said as he ushered Harry and Karl to the door. "There are two reasons for someone to be designated as a Person of Apocalyptic Interest. There are people who have a clearly prescribed mission, such as Harry Giddings, General Isaacson, or—and I can only assume here—Karl Grissom. Then there are the wildcard PAIs—the people that a representative from either side has identified as a potential troublemaker. People who have the potential to derail the plan. People like you."

"People like
me
?" Christine protested. "What did
I
do?"

"It's nothing you've done. . .that I know of. But you're an unknown quantity. Too risky to leave you down there. Anyway, it will be over before you know it."

"Why can't I just go home? I never wanted to be involved in any of this anyway. I don't even understand half of what's going on. How would I interfere with it?"

"You're a little too close to the action to be an unknown quantity. We've been watching you, of course. The Apocalypse Division has its agents, and then there's the MOC, but we're spread a little thin and we have to wait for the MOC's reports to be approved by the Observation Committee. . ."

"Does it matter at all to you," Christine said, "that I have no freaking clue what you're talking about?"

"Angel politics," said Uzziel. "Forget it. Hopefully none of it will matter by the time I get back."

Perp opened the door and buzzed back into the room. "You rang?"

Uzziel said to him, "I need you to take care of this one for a little while."

"Of course," said Perp. "You can substitute olive oil for butter in most recipes."

"If you have more questions," said Uzziel to Christine, "Perp here can help you out."

Uzziel escorted Harry and Karl out of the room and closed the door, leaving her alone in the interplanar limbo with Perpetiel.

"Do you suppose it was a trick?" asked Gamaliel.

Izbazel glared at him.

"Some kind of trick spoon? What kind of angel carries a trick spoon?"

"Forget it," said Izbazel.

After ditching their motorcycles and changing into civilian clothes, Izbazel and Gamaliel had checked into a depressing motel in East LA. With the Covenant Holders conference going on, it was the closest vacancy they could find to Anaheim Stadium. The motel was called the "Aloha," presumably because for any sane traveler pulling into this place, hello would also be good-bye. There was no evidence beyond the name of any kind of Hawaiian theme—unless the toilets in Hawaii made a horrific screeching sound that resembled a hippopotamus gasping for air through a saxophone. The two angels sat on the edge of the lone double bed in the room, plotting their next move.

Izbazel prided himself on being a particularly clever angel, and he didn't like the idea of being outsmarted by an interloping amateur like Mercury. Nor did he like the idea of Gamaliel knowing he had been outsmarted by Mercury. Gamaliel's involvement in the angelic rebellion was an important element of Izbazel's plan, and his involvement depended on his confidence in Izbazel. Gamaliel was a rather malleable angel, if you knew which buttons to push, but it hadn't been easy to get him to go along with a plan to assassinate the Antichrist. And if he started to get the feeling that Izbazel didn't know what he was doing. . .

Izbazel didn't need Gamaliel in order to execute the plan, certainly. But his involvement lent their project a certain legitimacy. No one would be particularly surprised to see Izbazel rebelling against Heaven—in fact, they might even figure out who he was really working for. But Gamaliel. . .it was hard to see him as an agent of Lucifer. It wouldn't be at all difficult to convince the authorities that Gamaliel was only pretending to be rebelling, and that he was, in fact, working undercover on orders from someone higher up in the angelic bureaucracy. And that's exactly what Izbazel was counting on.

"So, what now?" asked Gamaliel.

"Nothing has changed," replied Izbazel. "Things have progressed far enough in the Middle East that the Case of War is no longer necessary. We've ensured that the gaze of Heaven is fixed on the Olive Branch War."

"What about Karl?"

"It would have been nice to have disposed of the Antichrist," admitted Izbazel. "But in a way, it's better to let things progress a bit first. If we wait until Karl has been formally denounced, then there's no wiggle room for either side. They can't try to pull a designated hitter on us."

"A what?"

"A designated hitter," said Izbazel a bit condescendingly. "You don't follow Mundane baseball?"

"Not much of a sports fan," said Gamaliel.

"In the American League, you can designate an alternate hitter if your pitcher can't hit the ball."

"Isn't the idea of baseball that everybody on the team has to hit? It seems like that rule kind of goes against the spirit of the game."

"One of Lucifer's more ingenious ideas," Izbazel mused in a thoughtful tone.

"To be sure," conceded Gamaliel.

"The point is, we don't want to kill Karl only to have Heaven claim that he wasn't really the Antichrist after all. Once he's been formally denounced, there will be no legal recourse. Both sides will have to admit that the Antichrist has been taken out of the game. Lucifer will cry foul, and the whole business will be tied up in the courts for the next five thousand years."

"No Antichrist, no Apocalypse."

"Exactly."

"And we're certain he will be formally denounced at the Covenant Holders conference tonight?"

"Absolutely," said Izbazel. "Christine will take him to Harry, and Harry has been led to believe that his whole life has been leading up to this. He won't let us down."

"It's helpful that these people are so predictable," said Gamaliel. "It takes a lot of the guesswork out of these sorts of schemes."

"Quite," Izbazel said. "That's the great thing about these Covenant Holders. You publish a book with the right words in it, and they'll burn it. Call somebody the Antichrist, and they'll denounce him. They're well trained."

"What I don't get," said Gamaliel, "is what's in it for them. I don't understand what makes someone want to accept what amounts to a prepackaged belief system. Wouldn't the sane thing be to evaluate every part of any belief system, in case there were mistakes in it somewhere?"

"Ah, but that would lead to anarchy," chided Izbazel. "You can't have every adherent of a religion picking and choosing from among the different elements of the religion, as if it were some sort of buffet."

This answer seemed to puzzle Gamaliel. He said, "But there must be something like a thousand different religions on this plane. Don't you already have to pick a religion? I mean, using your buffet illustration, hasn't a person already had to choose which restaurant to go to before they even get to the buffet? What sense does it make to force everybody at a particular restaurant to order the same thing when they can just go to a different restaurant? You're letting them make one big decision but denying them a bunch of little ones. It makes no sense."

"What you're failing to understand," said Izbazel, taking the tone of a patient teacher imparting wisdom to an eager but slightly dim pupil, "is that people find it comforting not to have to make all those little decisions. Sometimes it's easier to pretend that all the little decisions have been made, so one doesn't have to worry about them. We angels don't fully appreciate the complexity of living on the Mundane Plane. The number of choices that a person has to make in a typical day can be overwhelming."

"But these people," Gamaliel replied, "these Covenant Holders, they keep talking about growing spiritually. How can you 'grow spiritually' when you refuse to grapple with any of these little questions? Aren't the little questions the ones that really matter in the end? The big questions don't matter if you get all the little ones wrong."

"It's not that they don't grapple with them," said Izbazel. "It's just that they have all the answers given to them in advance. Their version of grappling is to keep asking themselves the questions over and over until they get what they've been told are the right answers."

"That sounds to me more like conditioning than growing."

"True," admitted Izbazel, "which is what makes them so useful to us. But don't be too hard on them. Angels often act the same way. We assume that the higher-ups have thought through the ramifications of the SPAM. We assume that we're part of a system that ultimately makes sense to Michael, or God, or
someone
. All the little details may not make sense to us, but we go along with it anyway."

"But
we
have a responsibility," said Gamaliel. "We're soldiers in a conflict that is much greater than us. If every individual soldier were to question his role in the conflict, you'd have. . ."

"Anarchy," said Izbazel. "Soldiers refusing to follow orders for the sake of following orders. A military-style organization becomes impossible to maintain. War itself ultimately becomes impossible."

Izbazel went on, "Look, don't you think that humans feel the same way about their role in the Universe? They have to believe that they have a responsibility to a higher power, or their lives mean nothing. So they give up some of their free will, telling themselves that at least some of the questions have already been answered and some of the decisions have already been made. Life becomes livable, at the expense of a little freedom. Humans and angels are no different in this respect."

"But we. . ." said Gamaliel. "We're different, you and I."

"Certainly," said Izbazel. "We're doing the right thing, despite the fact that we're going against what we've been told is right."

"I suppose," said Gamaliel. "But for some reason it still doesn't
feel
right."

"Such feelings are the result of the conditioning you mentioned earlier. We've been trained to feel bad when we break from the SPAM."

"Maybe," said Gamaliel. "Sometimes I have the nagging sense that it's more than that."

"Listen, Gamaliel," said Izbazel. "I used to feel the same way. But now I
know
what we're doing is right. You'll get to that point too. For now, I just need you to trust me. This is going to work out. Do you trust me?"

"Yes," said Gamaliel. "I do."

"Good," said Izbazel. "Now I have some business to attend to. You wait here."

"What kind of business?"

"Nothing you need to concern yourself with, Gamaliel. It's better if you're not privy to all the little details. Plausible deniability, you know."

Gamaliel nodded. "Yeah, OK."

"We'll meet back here at four. That should give us plenty of time to get to the stadium and kill Karl after Harry denounces him."

"OK," said Gamaliel. He didn't look happy that Izbazel was leaving to attend to some secret business, but he was resigned to his limited role in the scheme. Poor sap, thought Izbazel. He has no idea what he's mixed up in.

"See you at four," said Izbazel, walking out the door.

It was a good thing Gamaliel was so malleable, thought Izbazel. With incompetents like Ramiel and Nisroc on the team, Izbazel ended up having to micromanage everything. Somehow the two of them had managed to burn through nearly two dozen corpses and cause two earthquakes, yet they still hadn't gotten the channel reconfiguration right. Izbazel wasn't going to let them screw it up this time. If the reconfiguration wasn't done by the time Karl was killed, Heaven might have a chance to figure out what Lucifer was really up to before he could put his plan into action. And Lucifer would blame Izbazel.

"Bloody incompetents," muttered Izbazel as he miraculously popped the locks of a Nissan Pathfinder in the motel's parking lot. He jump-started the vehicle and got on the northbound freeway, heading for the desert north of Los Angeles.

Back at the motel, Gamaliel was breathing a sigh of relief that that pedantic twit Izbazel was finally gone. He found it excruciating to listen to Izbazel wax philosophical when it was clear that Izbazel didn't even fully understand the mission that Lucifer had entrusted to him. It was all Gamaliel could do to play the dutiful lackey while trying to keep Izbazel from irreparably screwing up Lucifer's plan.

Lucifer's weakness, Gamaliel had concluded, was his pathological need to be demonstrably superior to anyone around him—a trait that precluded him from hiring underlings who were more than marginally competent. Izbazel was the epitome of this sort of minion, a sycophant untainted by conscience or even critical thinking. Izbazel was so intent on pleasing Lucifer that he had jumped the gun, so to speak, with that psychopath Danny Pilvers, trying to get Karl killed before he was even officially denounced. That would have been disastrous for Lucifer; Gamaliel had been on the verge of intervening when Christine and Mercury showed up at Charlie's Grill. Now, thanks to Mercury, Lucifer's scheme could proceed as planned. Up to a point, anyway. Gamaliel had his own reasons for wanting to subvert Lucifer's plan, but the time had not yet come for that.

For now, he had to do his best to keep events proceeding as Lucifer expected—and this required more work than Izbazel realized. Gamaliel made a brief encoded call over Angel Band, requesting two temporary portals. He needed to get to the planeport to make a quick trip across the Atlantic and back again before Izbazel returned. He had some last-minute details to take care of.