Mercury Revolts: (Book Four of the Mercury Series) Page 8

  Lucifer expected to encounter resistance to his plan from Heaven, but after working on the king and parliament for a few years he was surprised at how smoothly it was going. Guys like Edmund Burke tried to talk some sense into parliament, but Lucifer had George III in his pocket, and there were still enough sycophants to the throne that it was no great feat for the more intemperate minds to shout down the voices of reason. The Brits went along with every bad idea Lucifer whispered into George’s ear, culminating with the Tea Act in 1773.

  The only difficulty Lucifer had in his plan was his failure up to this point to incite the colonists to do anything particularly rash. Other than a mild riot in 1768 and the so-called Boston Massacre in 1770, his agents had been unable to foment any large-scale violence whatsoever. The Boston Massacre was a particular disappointment: months of groundwork had resulted in the killing of a grand total of six colonists, followed by the orderly arrest and trial of the implicated soldiers. Lucifer began to wonder whether there was something congenitally wrong with the colonists that left them so ill-disposed toward violence. They weren’t cowards; he knew that. They’d shown no qualms about letting King George know exactly what they thought of his unreasonable demands. But if Lucifer was going to get the crown to crush the colonists with an iron fist, he needed the Americans to lash out in anger. He’d had several of his agents assigned to trying to stir up the rabble in Boston, but nothing had come of it. Finally, having decided that the matter required a more subtle touch, he summoned an old acquaintance who had no shortage of experience in plotting coups, revolutions, and other sorts of mayhem. The two met on a moonless night on the English moor in the spring of 1773.

  “You’re late, Tiamat,” grumbled Lucifer. They had agreed to meet at the stroke of midnight.

  “Humblest apologies, dear,” replied Tiamat. “I’ve been dreadfully busy suppressing Jesuits in Portugal.”

  “Hmph,” replied Lucifer. Tiamat’s new thing was religious persecution. Lucifer had given up on persecution as a means to bloodshed and chaos when Constantine converted in 312 AD. As Christianity was a religion based on love, peace, and respect for the conscience of the individual, Lucifer had presumed that the dominance of Christianity would mean the end of orthodoxy enforced at swordpoint. As usual, though, Lucifer had underestimated humanity’s capacity for irony. Tiamat, who had long been jockeying to get in on the religious persecution game, had taken over where Lucifer left off, inciting the emperor to outlaw various heresies and gleefully overseeing the execution of Pelagians, Antinomialists, Donatists and anyone else not willing to toe the line on any of the various complex and obscure Church doctrines that had been settled on. Lucifer still wasn’t sure what Tiamat’s endgame was; he suspected that partly she was just resentful of organized religion ever since the Babylonians picked that pinhead Marduk over her as their patron deity. As with most haters of religion, her hatred was more about herself than any particular creed.

  “In any case, I’m here now, love,” said Tiamat, in the highly affected aristocratic accent she adopted whenever she was in Britain. “How might I be of service to your lordship?”

  “You can drop the ‘love’ nonsense,” said Lucifer. “I’m well aware that you hate me, and be assured the feeling is mutual. And it would be ever so wonderful if you’d stop trying to sound like you’re at high tea at the palace.”

  “Fine,” said Tiamat, dropping the accent. “What do you want, Luce? I’m busy.”

  “I need your help,” replied Lucifer. He’d practiced the words, but he still had a terrible time getting them out.

  “Wow, that must have just about killed you,” said Tiamat. “Must be important. Are the seeds of rebellion you’ve been sowing not bearing fruit?”

  “A bit of a mixed bag,” said Lucifer. “I’ve got King George and parliament passing repressive laws left and right. And from what my agents in America tell me, the colonists are just about fed up. The only problem is, I can’t get them to react. Ordinarily I’d expect angry mobs burning King George in effigy and the like, but these Americans are impossible to get riled up. You know me, I’m all about violence and mayhem. If I don’t see peasants with pitchforks, I start to worry.”

  “So you want me to stir up some trouble in the colonies?”

  “Not necessarily,” replied Lucifer. “I was hoping you could make some calls, figure out if Heaven’s running some kind of psy ops campaign.”

  Tiamat chuckled. “What, an angel on Sam Adams’ shoulder, that sort of thing? You have demons in Boston, don’t you? Wouldn’t they have noticed something like that?”

  “I would have thought so, yes,” replied Lucifer. “But maybe it’s something subtler than that. Something my agents are missing. I’d just like to know what I’m dealing with.”

  “I can look into it,” said Tiamat. “I’ve still got quite a few well-placed angels feeding me information. What are you going to do for me?”

  “Well, what do you want?”

  Tiamat smiled. “France.”

  Lucifer coughed. “What? The country?”

  “No, the laundry detergent. Yes, the country. I want you and your demons out of France.”

  “What are you planning?”

  “None of your business.”

  Lucifer thought for a moment. He, Tiamat, and several other demons had been fighting for dominion over Western Europe ever since the fall of Rome. Tiamat had substantial influence in most of the Catholic countries, but Lucifer had free rein in Britain, Germany and the lowland countries. He only had enough agents in France to keep Tiamat in check.

  “For how long?” he asked.

  “Fifty years,” said Tiamat.

  “Thirty,” said Lucifer. “And I want your spies out of Britain for the same period of time. Don’t insult my intelligence by acting like you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  Tiamat smiled. “Deal,” she said.

  “Hang on,” said Lucifer. “You haven’t said what you’re going to deliver to earn your prize.”

  “What’s your goal?” asked Tiamat. “What do you really want out of this?”

  “The usual,” replied Lucifer. “Mayhem and destruction.”

  Tiamat sighed. “You know what drives me nuts about you, Lucifer?”

  “My impeccable fashion sense?”

  “Your complete lack of imagination. It’s all riots and lynchings and massacres with you. You don’t see the big picture.”

  Lucifer didn’t argue the matter. When Tiamat wanted to expound on something, it was usually best just to let her. And if he was honest with himself, she did have a point: Tiamat had always been better at seeing the big picture than he. The whole religious persecution thing was only one example. But Tiamat’s focus on the big picture was also her downfall: her tendency to overlook details had more than once brought one of her grand schemes crashing down. It was how Lucifer had been able to maintain the edge in their rivalry over the past 4,000 years.

  “So I ask you again,” Tiamat went on, “What do you really want out of this mess in the colonies? What’s your endgame?”

  Lucifer tried to think like Tiamat, focusing not on petty crimes and minor massacres, but on the big picture.

  “War,” he said.

  Tiamat smiled. “Better,” she said. “I’ll give you a war.”

  “When?” asked Lucifer. “I don’t want to have to wait a century for this thing to boil over.”

  “Within two years of today,” said Tiamat. “There’ll be a pitched battle between the Americans and the British.”

  “Two years?” said Lucifer dubiously. “You realize I’ve been working on this for close to a decade. These people do nothing but talk. The British pass an outrageous law and the Americans tear it up and send an angry letter to the king. That’s all they’ve done for five years now. It’s like trying to start a fire underwater.”

  “Give me two years,” said Tiamat. “You’ll have your war.”

  Lucifer shrugged. “Then you’ll have France, my dear.”
/>
  Chapter Eleven

  San Francisco; August 2016

  “So this Mercury,” Suzy said. “Is he an angel or a demon?”

  “Ehhh…” Eddie replied.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well, you remember when the Moon got imploded?”

  “Doesn’t ring any bells.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Of course I remember when the Moon got imploded. How would I not remember something like that? A third of the Moon just disappeared, and nobody knows why.”

  “Yeah,” said Eddie. “That was Mercury.”

  “Um, no. It was the Moon.”

  “No, I mean Mercury was the one who imploded the Moon.”

  “Whoa,” said Suzy. “So a bad guy then?”

  “He was actually trying to keep Earth from getting imploded.”

  “So a good guy.”

  “Ehhh…”

  “You’re not being very helpful.”

  Eddie sighed. “Mercury is basically a good guy. He’s gotten into some trouble in the past though, because he doesn’t always follow orders.”

  “But that’s good, right?” Suzy asked. “He follows his conscience instead.”

  “Ehhh…”

  “Stop doing that!” Suzy snapped.

  “Mercury tends to do his own thing,” Eddie said. “But I think he could be convinced of the seriousness of the problem. He’s a good guy to have on your side, if you can keep him focused.”

  “So how do we find him?”

  “Well, he’s easy enough to spot,” said Eddie. “He’s about six foot four and he has silver hair. Also, he tends to stand out for other reasons.”

  “Like?”

  “He’s… well, he’s just… Mercury.”

  “Milhaus, Texas has a population of 2,014,” said Rosenfeld, looking it up online. “Shouldn’t be too difficult to find an unusually tall guy with silver hair in a town that size.”

  “Unless the feds have already found him,” added Suzy. “What’s the date on that PowerPoint?”

  Rosenfeld peered at the screen. “File was created August ninth.”

  “Shit, that’s two days ago,” Suzy groaned.

  “Hang on,” said Rosenfeld. “The date on the title slide is August twelve.”

  “So that’s the date the presentation will be made,” said Suzy. “With any luck, nobody’s even seen this yet!”

  “Nobody except whoever made the presentation. And whoever they got the intel from.”

  “Is there a name on the presentation?”

  “Not that I can see.”

  “It was probably put together by some low-level paper-pusher,” said Suzy. “Look at the rest of this crap. It’s all standard project management jargon about low-hanging fruit and core competencies. This is probably just a standard weekly project status update.”

  “They buried a serious threat to their entire program on the sixteenth slide of a PowerPoint presentation?” asked Rosenfeld skeptically.

  “You have to understand how these guys work,” said Suzy. “This isn’t a military intelligence operation. These guys are mostly software geeks and engineers. So when they see a potential problem, they make a note of it and it goes on a PowerPoint presentation for some manager to deal with eventually. Somebody at the FBI or some other agency probably spotted Mercury—if he stands out as much as Eddie says, he’s undoubtedly on some terrorist watch list—and they reported it to their higher ups. Somehow that information eventually filtered over to somebody inside Brimstone, and they put it on the PowerPoint for next week’s meeting.”

  “So it might have been days or weeks ago that Mercury was spotted in Milhaus,” said Rosenfeld. “There’s no telling where he might be now.”

  “Well, if this is the only guy who knows how to put a stop to Brimstone, we’ve got to take our chances.”

  “Whoa, I didn’t say that,” said Eddie. “I said I thought he might know how the demons were kept out of D.C. I don’t know whether he’ll be able to help with Brimstone, or whether he’ll even want to. Besides, Gary and I have a lot of work to do here.”

  “What kind of work could be more important than preventing the government from creating an illegal nuclear bomb whose only purpose would be to commit a major terrorist attack?” Suzy demanded.

  “Look, we’re not activists,” said Rosenfeld. “We’re journalists. We just gather information and post it online. We don’t have an agenda.”

  “Of course you have an agenda!” exclaimed Suzy. “What’s the point of any of this if you don’t have an agenda? What’s the point of exposing that the U.S. government is overrun with demons if nobody does anything about it?”

  “You seem to have gotten over your skepticism,” Eddie noted.

  “Frankly,” said Suzy, “I don’t know what to believe. A few days ago I suddenly realized that I was working on a secret program to build a nuclear weapon, so apparently it’s time for me to reassess some things. I’m not entirely convinced that you guys aren’t a little loony, but you seem to have a better grasp of what’s going on than most people I’ve talked to lately. So if you tell me there’s a guy in Milhaus, Texas, who might be able to help put a stop to Brimstone, I say we go to Milhaus, Texas.”

  “We can’t just leave,” Rosenfeld protested. “We’ve got a website to run. There are thousands of people depending on us for information.”

  “Yeah, more people hiding in their apartments not doing anything about the secret coup that’s somehow taken place under all of our noses. You know they have the Internet in Texas, right? You can update the site from there.”

  Eddie and Rosenfeld fell silent. It was clear that neither of them had any interest in leaving the apartment, much less traveling to Texas.

  “Fine,” Suzy snapped. “I’ll go myself. I’ll find this Mercury guy and we’ll put a stop to this.” She had hoped she might be able to shame them into going, but neither of them took the bait.

  Rosenfeld handed her a BitterAngels.net business card. “Email me if you find him,” he said. The card showed two angels, complete with halos, standing back-to-back, their arms crossed and frowns on their faces.

  “Whatever,” said Suzy, pocketing the card. “I need to use your bathroom.”

  Eddie pointed to a room down a short hall and she stomped off.

  She was washing her hands when she heard a loud crash from the other side of the door, followed by the commotion of several men bursting into the apartment and shouts of “On the floor!”

  Suzy ran for the one small window in the bathroom, and struggled to get it open. It wasn’t locked, but it appeared to have been painted shut. She pulled as hard as she could, but it wouldn’t budge.

  Another crash sounded behind her, and she realized someone had kicked in the door to the bathroom.

  “Hands up!” yelled a gruff voice. “On your knees!”

  Suzy sighed and held up her hands. But as she did so, she noticed something odd: the paint had cracked all along the edge of the window, and the window was slowly sliding up.

  “Hey!” yelled the man behind her. “Don’t…” He trailed off. “What the hell?”

  Suzy risked a glance behind her, and immediately saw the cause of the man’s consternation. The man was wearing full combat gear and pointing an assault rifle at her, but the barrel had begun to droop, slowly going limp before his eyes.

  “You’re getting older,” Suzy said. “Nothing to be ashamed of.” And with that, she launched her upper torso through the open window. Vertigo overwhelmed her as she took in the view of the street below. She was only on the second floor, so a fall was unlikely to kill her, but it was also unlikely to be painless. And if she broke a leg, she’d never get away from these gun-toting goons. There was a small ledge outside the window, though, and from there she thought she could jump to the fire escape.

  She managed to climb the rest of the way out the window and get herself perched on the ledge. Just as she was about to jump, though, a hand reached through the win
dow and grabbed her ankle. She lost her balance and fell, bracing herself for impact with the street below.

  But the hand held on. After a moment, another hand gripped her ankle, and then a head appeared. It was the same guy who had busted in the bathroom door.

  “Hey, it’s Mister Projectile Dysfunction,” Suzy said, hanging upside down. “You’re pretty strong. Steroids?”

  “Ha ha,” said the man. “I’m going to pull you up now. Don’t fight me, or—” He broke off as the sound of gunfire erupted inside. “Shit!” he exclaimed, and began to pull her in through the window.

  But Suzy, who was convinced that if she were apprehended now, she’d never see daylight again, did fight. She kicked and screamed and twisted, trying not to think about what would happen if she actually managed to get away. Down below, a garbage truck was making its rounds, and Suzy had seen enough action movies to know this was just the break she needed. If she could time her fall with the passing of the garbage truck, she’d only fall about five feet. Still farther than she’d ideally like to fall, especially considering that she’d be doing the falling head first, but she’d probably avoid serious injury.

  As the truck approached, she fought with even more ferocity, and finally the man apparently had enough. He let go and she fell toward the truck below.

  And missed it by six inches. She’d either miscalculated the truck’s speed, or the man had let go a half-second too late. Either way, she was about to kiss pavement.

  But she didn’t.

  For the second time in one day, she stopped falling in mid-air, eight inches from the ground.

  And then she started falling again.

  And stopped when she hit the ground.

  “Son of a bitch!” she yowled, curling into the fetal position and holding her head. Falling from a height of eight inches was surprisingly painful. She wasn’t bleeding, but she was going to have a nasty bump on the top of her head.

  “Sorry about that!” called a voice from the window. It was Eddie. “I got distracted. Oh, shit.” He disappeared back inside.