Mercury Revolts: (Book Four of the Mercury Series) Read online

  Nisroc shook his head. “It is too late,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” asked the woman.

  “I flipped the switch. The bomb is armed. It will explode in thirty minutes. I mean, thirty minutes after I flipped the switch.”

  “Holy shit,” said the woman.

  Eddie glanced at the cell phone. “It’s been fifteen minutes since we nabbed you. How long before that did you flip the switch?”

  “Oh, not long,” said Nisroc. “Maybe a minute or two.”

  “Where is it?”

  Nisroc figured it didn’t make much difference at this point. If there was a Balderhaz Cube at the top of the building, there was no way they were going to get the bomb out of the building in time. “In the janitor’s cart,” he said. “Under the trash.”

  Eddie hit a button on the phone. “He’s not answering!” he said after a moment.

  Nisroc heard a door open behind him. “Wow, it’s cozy in here,” said a voice. “Got room for one more?”

  “Mercury!” exclaimed the woman. “The bomb is in a janitor’s cart on the thirty-fifth floor. It’s going to detonate in less than fifteen minutes!”

  “Hmm,” said Mercury.

  “Hmm? All you have to say is ‘hmm’? Go get the bomb!”

  “The problem is,” said Mercury, “they’ve shut down the elevators and they’ve got guards in the stairwells to keep anybody from getting to the roof. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem, but with that Balderhaz cube up there, I can’t get past them. Can’t fly up there either. The cube seems to have a range of about a hundred yards.”

  “So, what?” asked the woman. “We just sit here in a supply closet until the bomb goes off?”

  “Hmm,” said Mercury again. “Hey, what’s that stuff on the bottom shelf? Is that spray paint?”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  New York; Autumn, 1780

  Such had been Arnold’s reputation among his fellow officers that when incriminating documents were found bearing his signature, he was not immediately suspected of foul play. The papers found their way into the hands of Colonel John Jameson, who commanded a cavalry outpost a few miles from White Plains. Assuming the documents were part of some elaborate ruse on the part of the British, Jameson wrote a letter to Arnold, explaining what had happened. Rather than send the letter directly to Arnold, however, he sent it by courier along with another—with similar contents—addressed to General Washington. Washington was traveling at the time and ended up taking a different route than was expected, with the result that the courier missed him. The courier delivered the letters to a residence where Arnold was supposed to be meeting Washington and several other officers for breakfast. If Washington hadn’t tarried to examine some defensive fortifications before the meeting, it would have been a very awkward breakfast for Benedict Arnold indeed.

  As it was, Arnold read the letter and, with admirable composure, finished his croissant, took a sip of tea, and excused himself from the table. He said goodbye to his wife and infant son, ran to the yard, leaped on a horse, and galloped down to the river, where he took a barge to the British sloop called, rather ominously, the Vulture.

  Washington soon received the letter addressed to him and, having learned of Arnold’s flight, quickly deduced what had happened. He alerted the men of West Point to the possibility of an attack, thus undoing the British advantage. As Washington dined that evening in the very room Arnold had fled in the morning, he received a letter from the traitor insisting on his wife’s innocence in the matter. Summoning one of his officers, the broken-hearted general said quietly, “Go to Mrs. Arnold and tell her that though my duty required no means should be neglected to arrest General Arnold, I have great pleasure in acquainting her that he is now safe on board a British vessel.”

  Having evidently exhausted Lucifer’s use for him, Benedict Arnold never saw his mysterious benefactor again. It became clear to all concerned shortly after the West Point debacle that the British cause was lost, and it can be assumed that Lucifer decided his energies were best spent elsewhere for the time being. This is not to say, though, that Arnold was never visited by another angel. In fact, while brooding on his fate on the deck of the Vulture that night, he noticed a familiar figure leaning against the railing.

  “Pretty nice sloop,” the man said. “One of the better sloops I’ve seen, and I’ve seen some sloopy sloops. I think this sloop is the sloopiest sloop.”

  “What do you want, Lord Squigglebottom? Or is it Mercier today? Or Mercury? Or Long-Drink-of-Water?”

  “Just Mercury,” said the man. “Sloop is a great name. Almost as good as man-o-war. What’s your favorite kind of ship, Bennie?”

  “Frigate,” said Arnold.

  “Watch your mouth,” chided Mercury. “It was an innocent question.”

  Arnold sighed. “So are you here to add to my torment? To tell me I was wrong to betray the American side?”

  “Nah,” said Mercury. “I’m pretty sure your conscience is going to be eating at you for the rest of your life, so I don’t really see the point in piling on. If it makes you feel better, that Rezon guy was actually Lucifer. You know, Satan? You’re not the first person he’s tempted to doing something they later regretted.”

  “Yeah,” said Arnold. “I had deduced as much myself.”

  “Really? And you went along with his plan anyway?”

  Arnold laughed bitterly, staring out at the moonlight reflected in the calm water. “You know why they hang traitors?” he asked.

  “Um,” replied Mercury. “Something to do with loyalty, I think.”

  “If an American officer is captured by the British, they treat him like a houseguest. Same thing for a British officer captured by the Americans. It’s all tea and crumpets and no hard feelings. Neither side would ever dream of executing an officer just for being on the wrong side. It’s universally considered barbaric. So why the gallows for a man who switches sides?”

  “Um,” replied Mercury again. “I’m sticking with the loyalty thing.”

  “Because the traitor reveals the inherent absurdity of war,” Arnold went on. “If the British are all just basically good men doing their jobs and the Americans are all just basically good men doing their jobs, then switching from one side to another should raise eyebrows no more than a man walking down the street to save a farthing on a loaf of bread. But allowing officers to change sides at the drop of a hat would make a mockery of the whole idea of war, so we create this elaborate fiction around the idea of ‘treason.’ The traitor’s only crime is to listen to his conscience rather than blindly accept the absurd contradictions of war.”

  Mercury raised an eyebrow at this. “Conscience?” he asked. “Is that what you’re calling it?”

  Arnold sighed heavily. “Perhaps my conscience is faulty,” he admitted. “Perhaps I’m not so much following my own inner voice as rebelling against the decrees of small-minded men. I don’t like my actions being dictated by the whims of fools.”

  Mercury had no response for that. He didn’t particularly like it either.

  “In the end, though,” said Arnold, “I suppose I’m just a pawn in a game that’s beyond my grasp. Tell me, Mercury, how does it all end?”

  “What all?” asked Mercury.

  “America,” he said.

  “You mean, do the Americans win?”

  Arnold thought for a moment. “Yes, that, I suppose. But I’m really wondering whether, in a bigger sense, the American ideal survives.”

  “The American…”

  Arnold laughed. “Ah, never mind,” he said, wistfully. “Someone in your position, on the outside, you can’t see it. There is something special about this place, though. And about the people. Something about the combination of the British love for law and order and this wild, untamed country. You can see it in the best of America’s citizens, like Washington himself. If this country can follow his example, and not fall victim of the sort of petty backbiting and narrow self-interest that has befallen me—
and which I, to my regret, have engaged—this country could become something the world has never seen. A beacon of freedom and justice. I want to know whether that could really happen, or whether men like Washington and Jefferson are doomed to be disappointed by what this country becomes.”

  To this, Mercury had no answer, and for a long time the two stared quietly out across the water.

  “Sloop,” said Mercury quietly at last. “Sloopy sloop.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Grand Rapids, Michigan; August 2016

  The silver-haired figure burst from the clouds and plummeted toward the roof of the Vanden Heuvel Building. At first he fell limply, as if he were asleep, but as he approached the roof, he began to look around frantically, as if suddenly realizing where he was. But by then it was too late: he was caught in the Balderhaz Field, making it impossible for him to exert control over the interplanar energy fields. His eyes went wide as the roof grew steadily bigger. On the roof, almost directly under him, was a black duffel bag. He wondered what was in it. He wondered if he could make himself hit the duffel bag, and whether it would break his fall.

  Fortunately, he didn’t have to worry about the pain caused by hitting the roof, because when he was still about a hundred yards up, he was riddled with automatic weapon fire. It seemed that hiding behind various ventilation ducts had been several men wearing camouflage that made them virtually indistinguishable from the gravel of the rooftop.

  The figure hit the roof about three feet from the duffel bag, which, holding only a cinder block, wouldn’t have done much to break his fall anyway. He lay unmoving as the men ran out from their hiding places, their guns still trained on him. The door to the stairwell burst open and Zion Johnson ran out to examine the main. He pulled out a cell phone and punched a button.

  “It’s me,” he said into the phone after a moment. “We got him. I’m sure, yeah. My guys tore him up pretty bad, but there’s no mistaking the hair. So far, he’s the only one who’s shown up, but we’re working on tracking down the other two. When this guy comes to, we’ll put the screws to him.”

  Zion Johnson hung up the phone. Michelle had told him Mercury was the ringleader of the group, the one they needed to capture at all costs. The other one, Eddie, was a mild nuisance at worst, and Michelle was convinced that without Mercury he was no threat. Suzy was nothing to worry about either; they’d already gotten the thumb drive with the Brimstone data on it, so she had no proof of anything. Mercury was the one big x-factor, the fly in the ointment of Michelle’s plan.

  He grimaced as he approached the bloody figure on the roof. Zion Johnson had been given mug shots of Mercury, but there was no chance of identifying his face in this condition. If it weren’t for that ridiculous hair, there’d be no way of knowing it was really him.

  Zion Johnson grabbed a walkie-talkie from his belt. “This is Big Dog. Quicksilver is in the bag. I repeat, Quicksilver is in the bag. Send the elevator to the roof. Let’s get moving.”

  One of the men threw the silver-haired figure over his shoulder and they made their way to the elevator. They took the elevator down to the parking garage, where they loaded the limp body into an unmarked van and got inside. The driver had been waiting for them; Zion Johnson threw his crutches inside and managed to climb into the passenger’s side. The van peeled out, heading for the exit.

  “Bomb… in… garbage…” moaned the silver-haired man in the back. One of the men kicked him in the ribs.

  “Shut up!” yelled Zion Johnson. “And don’t try anything. I’ve got this cube thing.” He pulled the Balderhaz Cube from his pocket and regarded it. He couldn’t help but laugh, despite the pain in his leg. “You guys aren’t so special. All it takes to bring you down to our level is this little black cube.”

  The tires screeched and the Balderhaz cube jumped out of Zion Johnson’s hand as the van came to a sudden stop.

  “What the hell?” said Zion Johnson. But when he looked up it was clear why the driver had stopped. He’d been just about to pull out of the garage when a couple had walked in front of the van. And not just any couple: a weasely-looking guy and a chick with purple hair. They were standing in the middle of the sidewalk, momentarily paralyzed with fear.

  “Apprehend those two pedestrians!” growled Zion Johnson.

  The van door swung open and four of the men jumped out.

  Eddie and Suzy took off running, but they didn’t get far. The men tackled them, ziptied their hands, and dragged them back to the van. They were hoisted into the back of the van along with the silver-haired man. Zion Johnson’s men climbed in after them and slammed the door shut. The van pulled onto the street.

  “Ha!” exclaimed Zion Johnson, looking behind him at the trio tied up in the back of the van. “I not only got the big fish, I got the two little ones too.”

  “…garbage…” the man in the back murmured.

  “Yeah, good job on that,” Suzy sneered at him. “You’re like some kind of tactical genius.”

  “Suzy!” snapped Eddie.

  “What?” said Suzy. “It’s too late for him to do anything about it. It’s up to Mercury to stop the bomb now.”

  Zion Johnson felt a sinking feeling in his gut. It was possible this was some sort of ruse, but it didn’t feel like one. He jumped out of his seat, grimacing as pain jolted through his leg. “Out of my way!” he yelled at the men crowded into the van, as he clawed his way toward the man lying curled up in the back. He leaned over the man and grabbed his hair, yanking his head back so he could see his face. But it was no use; the man’s face was still badly beat up and covered with blood. He understood that these BIOS—Beings of Indeterminate Origin, that’s what they were calling them—healed at an extremely accelerated rate, but maybe the cube thing was interfering with that ability.

  He pulled his hand back and found it sticky with blood and… something sparkly? It smelled like solvent. He turned to Suzy. “Is that… spray paint?” he asked, already knowing the answer. The sinking feeling had become more of a plummeting-in-free-fall-without-a-net feeling. He drew his gun—a Desert Eagle .44 magnum—and held it to the man’s temple. “Who are you?” he demanded.

  “…bomb…” the man with the spray-painted hair murmured.

  “His name is Nisroc,” said Suzy. “He’s from Chaos Faction.”

  “But then…” said Zion Johnson, “Chaos Faction is here?”

  “You seriously didn’t know?” asked Suzy.

  Zion Johnson said, “They were supposed to be… I mean, I thought they were…”

  “They’re here,” said Suzy. “And they’ve got the bomb.”

  “…couldn’t find the red X…” the man with the sticky silver hair murmured.

  “Shut up,” Zion Johnson growled, and shot Nisroc in the face.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Grand Rapids, Michigan; August 2016

  Mercury crashed through a window on the top floor of the Vanden Heuvel Building, hitting the carpet and rolling several times, finally coming to a halt as he slammed into a heavy wooden desk.

  “Ergh,” he said, as he lay on the floor trying to orient himself. He’d waited as long as he dared for the men with the Balderhaz Cube to leave, but knowing that the bomb could go off any minute, he’d had to make the last fifty feet or so of the flight inside the field. He’d had to get up to a hundred miles an hour and aim slightly above the window to compensate for gravity, since he would be relying on momentum to get him the last fifty feet. He was a little amazed it actually worked.

  He groggily got to his feet and looked around. He was in a reception area, beyond which was a maze of cubicles. “If I were a cute little nuclear bomb,” Mercury mused, “where would I be?”

  After a moment he remembered that Nisroc had said the bomb was in a janitor’s cart. He sprinted down a hall between two rows of cubicles and turned at random down another. The cart was nowhere to be seen. He sprinted down another hall, but still didn’t see the bomb. Realizing too late that he should have used a mor
e systematic method, he made another turn and found himself back where he had started. Or was he? All of these posters selling PERSEVERANCE and DEDICATION and AMBITION looked alike. It seemed to Mercury that anyone who possessed any of those traits wouldn’t be stuck in a place like this, but maybe that’s why they had so many of them. Had he passed that seashore already? That mountain range looked familiar.

  While trying to get his bearings, he literally stumbled on the janitor’s cart, banging his knee against it while he was trying to make out whether a distant poster read DELIVERANCE or PERVERSITY. He rooted through the trash, finding at the bottom a lumpy, almost rectangular mass of components wrapped in brown plastic, about the size of an Oxford dictionary. Mercury shuddered. It looked just like the Wormwood bomb. He could try disarming it, since now he knew which wire not to disconnect, but he didn’t want to take the chance that they’d swapped the wire colors for the Mark II bomb. There was no visible timer on this one, so it was impossible to know when it was going to detonate. It was also impossible to determine why the bomb smelled like gasoline, but that was a question for another time. He tucked the bomb under his arm, sprinted across the floor, and crashed through the nearest window.

  And immediately began plummeting toward the ground.

  Mercury had taken so long to find the bomb that he’d assumed the agent carrying the Balderhaz Cube would be well out of range by the time he jumped through the window, but apparently he’d been mistaken. He managed to get ahold of enough interplanar energy to slow his descent a bit, landing with a crash on the roof of a parked Buick sedan, shattering the windows and crushing the roof canopy. It was late enough that the streets were mostly deserted, but the few pedestrians in the area stopped and gaped at him.

  “Hey, it’s that terrorist from TV!” somebody yelled. “And he’s got a bomb!”

  This struck Mercury as a little unfair. Even if he was a terrorist, there was no way anyone could know that what he was carrying was a bomb. He didn’t even think it particularly looked like a bomb. It could be a box of blueberry muffins for all they knew. Mercury wished it was a box of blueberry muffins instead of a device for starting an uncontrollable nuclear reaction that would level twenty blocks. He loved blueberry muffins.