Conspiracy of Angels Read online

  “Hang on,” he said, gripping Bryce’s big hand. “Hang on, buddy.”

  He lay on the horn and tried to remember the fastest way to the hospital.

  TWO

  Geneva knew, way back before she decided to do this, that they might kill her if they found out. She just never thought she would screw up this badly.

  She kept the radio off on the highway, nothing around her but the sound of wet pavement beneath Brutus’s tires. Squeaking windshield wipers. The steady growl of the engine.

  She coasted down the exit ramp. At the bottom, she turned back under the highway and bumped over the railroad tracks. When she finally got to a stoplight, she let everything out at once, shouting obscenities at no one, grabbing the horn ring and letting the noise blast out over the warehouses and rail yards, into the gray sky.

  Then she sat back in the seat, breathing deep. Trying to stay cool. Stay focused.

  She patted the dashboard. “Sorry, Brutus.”

  She stared at the red traffic light, thinking. Trying to figure out how she could have gone so wrong. What was this guy’s game? It had hit him hard when she said Jocelyn’s name. Didn’t he know that the Archangel had killed her? Why was he lying to her? What did he have to gain?

  Or was he only repeating the lies he’d been told?

  He claimed he’d been in prison all these years. But if that was true, the Conspiracy would have gotten to him by now. They would have killed him. Unless he was one of them.

  None of it made any sense.

  The light turned green and she hit the gas. Brutus rumbled through the intersection. She glanced down at the fuel gauge and her heart sank.

  She’d used almost a quarter tank on this trip, and Michael would want to know why. He’d ask her where she’d been.

  Oh, nowhere, Michael. Just trying to find out just how deep your lies go. Trying to find out if you’ve been using me all these years to do your dirty work. Doing what you always taught me: research the target.

  Only this time, Michael, the target is you.

  She shook her head. She had to concentrate on the here and now. She had to cover her tracks.

  She wasn’t supposed to fill up at the same gas station twice. Michael had always been strict about that. They had cameras inside, when you went to pay. They could track you that way.

  She’d told him, “Why don’t we just use debit cards, pay at the pump? There’s places you can get debit cards for cash, they can’t trace you.”

  He’d just put his arms around her shoulders and squeezed, the way he did when he thought she was being naïve. “Genie,” he’d said. “Just trust me, and we’ll all get out of this alive.”

  But the only gas station between here and home was a Conoco she’d been at a few days before.

  She watched the red-and-white sign grow closer. Thought about turning around, getting back on the highway to find another place. Thought about red-bearded Raph always cleaning his guns, the way he watched her that made her skin crawl. He’d wanted to kill her for a long time now. If Michael found out she’d betrayed him, he might stop protecting her. And the first opportunity Raph got, he’d make her disappear.

  She was almost past the Conoco. She could turn back, hope to find another gas station.

  Screw it. She turned the wheel and pulled up to a pump.

  There wasn’t anyone else there. Just a guy in the garage putting tires on a gold Saturn, impact wrench rattling.

  She was careful not to put too much gas into Brutus, just enough to make it look like she’d only gone to the store like she’d said.

  She went in to pay and the guy came in from the shop, trying hard to look cool in his Buddy Holly glasses and sideburns. The name Ruben was stitched on his shirt. He wiped his dirty hands on a red shop towel and nodded his chin at Brutus. “Nice Cougar you got there.”

  “Yeah. Thanks.” She dug money out of her pockets, uncrumpled a couple of bills.

  “1967?”

  “It’s a sixty-eight.”

  He nodded. “Cool.”

  “Yeah. Um, Ruben, you want to take my money, or what?”

  She paid him for the gas and bought a Gatorade. She was halfway back to the car when she heard his voice from the doorway.

  “So where’d you get it painted, anyway? That’s funky.”

  The sun had broken through the clouds while she was inside, and it sparkled on the stealth nanofabric that Michael had used to cover every inch of Brutus’s body. From here, it just looked like black paint with some kind of oily shimmer.

  Without breaking stride, Geneva looked back over her shoulder. There was an old car parked behind the building, long peeling turquoise fins and new tires. “That your car back there?”

  “The Studebaker?” Ruben shoved his hands into his pockets. “Yeah. Bought it a couple months ago.”

  “Is it fast?”

  “It will be. Once I get the engine done. Gonna drop in a Chevy 327, best engine Detroit ever made. No offense, now, to your Cougar.”

  She had to smile at that. She gave him a thumbs-up.

  The guy looked like he was going to ask her something else, so she got back into Brutus, gunned him to life, and laid down a couple strips of rubber without really meaning to.

  She saw Ruben in the rearview mirror, walking out into the street to watch her drive away, his glasses dark on his face.

  By the time she got back to the hideout, she was so worked up about trying to stay calm, her stomach was clenched in a knot. She tried to breathe easy, in and out, be cool.

  Home, at least for the moment, was a boarded-up concrete building with six numbered garage bays. Geneva pulled around to the back and waited a minute with the engine running until the door rolled up. Gabe in his tidy black turtleneck appeared, pushing up the door with a two-by-four. In the shadows of the garage, she could see a crouched black shape. That would be Raph, with his AK-47, making sure she wasn’t being followed.

  She thought about turning on her headlights, putting the bright beams on him, just to show him. But she didn’t. Just pulled in, the sound of the motor echoing back at her off the concrete walls.

  She turned off the ignition and got out, almost forgetting to get the bags out of the trunk. Behind her, Gabe rattled the garage door shut and screeched the lock closed.

  She carried the plastic bags into the kitchen, a big long room where they’d rigged a microwave and a fridge. She put the bags down on the table where Michael was working on his laptop. The screen showed a picture of a big warehouse with an empty flatbed truck out front, and what looked like a schematic of a security system superimposed over the building.

  Michael looked startled when she walked in. Not much, just a little twitch that likely no one else would have noticed. But she knew him. Knew when he was trying to hide something. He clicked a button and the picture vanished.

  “What’s that?” she said.

  Michael didn’t answer. He laced his fingers together behind his head, leaned back in his chair and studied her. His cheekbones stood out in the light of the laptop’s screen, making him look even thinner than he was. He kept his black hair slicked back these days, wore tight black T-shirts that showed off his chest, as if he was trying to prove something.

  His gaze made her nervous. It was like he knew everything she was thinking.

  Geneva started emptying the bags. “Whatever. I got the wires and the power supplies. They were all out of regular duct tape. I don’t know how we used ours up.” She dug out a plastic-wrapped roll of black tape. “But check this out. Black duct tape. How cool is that?”

  “Leave it. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  “‘We’ meaning you and Gabe and Raph. And not me.” She threw the roll of tape down on the table. “You know, I’m getting sick of all this sitting around, you and Gabe acting like you know something I don’t, Raph sitting out there in the dark about ready to go postal.”

  Michael pursed his lips. “Genie, love, do you think you could perhaps be a bit more difficul
t?”

  She finished unpacking the bags, slamming down packs of batteries, putty, spools of cable.

  “You do know that Gabe and Raph are like family. This mission has been their life ever since we came here. Now that we’re getting down to the wire, it’s a bit hard for them to share.”

  She gave him a cautious look, hoping he’d mistake the fear in her eyes for something like hurt.

  He smiled. “Sooner or later, we’re going to catch the creature. Believe me. It’s going to happen. We’re very, very close. And when it does, we’ll be able to do things the way that others before us should have. And when this part of the mission is over, it will be hard for them to move on, even knowing we’ve all done such a good thing together.”

  Geneva kept watching him. “We are going to kill it. Right?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “You said catch the creature. You mean kill it.”

  “Yeah. Catch it. Kill it. When we’re ready.”

  “I’m ready right now.”

  “Absolutely. That’s what I love about you. But there are certain things we need to learn from it first.” He folded his arms and studied her. “If I didn’t know you better, I’d say you don’t believe me.”

  “No.” She tried to look honest. “I believe you.”

  “Then I can count on you, when the time comes. You don’t have any doubts.”

  “No.”

  “Good. I’d hate to think you’d want to murder me in my sleep.” He closed the screen of his laptop. “At any rate, we’re all stretched a bit thin. Give Gabe and Raph a little room to breathe. They don’t have anything against you personally. You’d think by now they would, but no.”

  Geneva came around the table, sat on it close to Michael, looked down into his eyes. “Raph is a creep.”

  Slowly, Michael said, “By ‘creep’ I assume you mean efficient. Raph does what he does very well. He’s useful that way.”

  Soft footsteps came in from the garage and stopped in the doorway behind Geneva. She got that creepy feeling on the back of her neck she got whenever Raph was staring at her. She didn’t turn around.

  Michael looked past her, the expression on his face going serious. “Yes?”

  Behind her, Raph’s gravelly voice: “It’s just like you said.”

  Michael nodded. “Take care of it, then. You and Gabe.”

  Raph made a low sound, like a grunt, and then his footsteps slipped away into the garage.

  Geneva kept watching Michael’s face, trying to see what was going on beneath the surface. Then the moment was gone, and Michael gave her a warm smile.

  “Don’t worry, Genie.” He patted her leg. “Raph and Gabe just have to run an errand.”

  “I thought I did all the errands already.”

  He just kept smiling, but she could see the look in his eyes, like he was thinking fast. It scared her, seeing it up close, and it pissed her off, too. She knew he was lying. She could see it.

  She pushed his hand away and got up. Without any particular plan in mind, she grabbed a pack of lightbulbs from the bag and went down the hall toward Michael’s bedroom.

  “Genie?” His chair scraped as he got up. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Just going to fix that lamp in your room.”

  “No, it’s fixed. It’s done. Genie?” He trotted down the hall after her.

  Someone had put a shiny new deadbolt on his door. On the outside.

  “Geneva?” All the warmth was gone from his voice. “Don’t do anything rash.”

  “Like finding out what you’ve been hiding from me?” She turned the deadbolt knob and pushed the door open.

  All the furniture had been taken out of the room, leaving only the bare concrete floor. In the middle of it sat a fat gray-haired man in a white collared shirt spotted with blood. He was duct-taped to a wooden chair, a rectangle of silver tape over his mouth.

  In his eyes, she could see terror. He tried to talk through the tape. He fought against the chair, scraping across the floor toward her.

  “Oh, God.” Geneva backed out of the room. “Michael? What the hell is this?”

  Michael reached past her and closed the door, blocking her view of the man. He turned the lock knob, and metal scraped. He leaned down close, so close all she could look at was his dark eyes.

  “This,” he said softly, “is part of the mission.”

  THREE

  The doctors at Swedish Hospital rolled Bryce away on a gurney, with an air mask over his face. A tired-looking orderly in green scrubs handed Mitch a clipboard full of forms and told him to sit down and wait.

  Mitch ended up in an empty hallway, sitting on a blue plastic chair. Something in the pocket of his bathrobe banged against his leg. He pulled out the goggles the girl had dropped in his living room.

  They were heavy for their size. Thick black lenses in a dinged-up metal frame. Looked like they had seen a lot of use. A tiny A-shaped socket stuck out of one side, as if for a computer cable, but it wasn’t labeled. The lenses on the inside, each ringed with rubber, had a flat greenish color, like old TV sets. Above them was a little row of knobs and a couple of buttons.

  Mitch messed around with it for a minute, until he figured out how to turn the goggles on. The inside lenses lit up black and white.

  Carefully, Mitch held the goggles up to his face, letting the strap dangle.

  At first, the hallway around him looked like it came out of a bad black and white movie, grainy and indistinct. He fiddled with the knobs, and the walls faded to a ghostly haze. Everything started to glow from the inside.

  He stood up and looked around. He could see the metal legs of the chairs through the plastic. He could see the hard concrete floor beneath the tiles, and the crisscross of metal beams beneath that. The perspective was warped, though, like everything was underwater, a little bit to the side of where it should’ve been.

  Weird.

  He played with the knobs some more, and everything started to look normal again. But then he noticed glowing lines running everywhere. It took him a moment to figure out that he was seeing power lines in the walls, running above the ceiling to the light fixtures.

  Everywhere he looked, he could see electricity. The ceiling lamps glowed like they were surrounded by mist. The wiring in the walls lit up like neon stripes.

  He slipped the strap around his head and held out his hands. The faint outlines of bones glowed inside his fingers. His arms left trails of energy in the air when he waved them.

  “Mr. Turner?” A woman’s voice, behind him.

  He turned around and looked straight into a glowing skull, two black pits for eyes.

  He stumbled back and fell into a chair. Whipped the goggles off.

  A lady in a doctor’s smock stood over him, holding a clipboard, frowning. “Mr. Turner? Are you all right?”

  “Oh, yeah.” He swallowed. The hallway was normal again. No skeletons. “Peachy.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He worked on slowing down his breathing. He smiled and straightened his bathrobe, dropped the goggles back into his pocket. “Never better. How’s my brother?”

  “He’s doing fine.” She studied him for a few seconds, like she was trying to puzzle him out. Finally, her gaze dropped down to her notes. “Having asthma as long as he’s had, I’m going to recommend switching his medication. And more frequent check-ups with his regular doctor. Also, I’m prescribing some pain meds for his head contusion and his sprained wrist.”

  “His what now?”

  She looked over the clipboard at him. “He got a little hurt while you were getting him here.”

  “Oh. Damn. Sorry about that.”

  “Would you like to see him?”

  When Mitch got to the room, Bryce was watching TV. He waved his new blue wrist brace. “Dude! They’ve got Cartoon Network.”

  Mitch smiled and sat down next to him. “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Got a headache. Don’t worry about me.”

  “
You’re kidding me. Why would I worry?”

  The doctor wrote something on her clipboard. “Bryce, we’re going to want to keep you here overnight.”

  “Overnight?”

  “It’s not every day that someone just stops breathing. It’s just for observation.”

  Mitch gave Bryce a mock punch in the shoulder. “She’s afraid if they let you go now, all the drugs they got you on, you’d go on a rampage. Start tearing up the joint.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” Bryce’s gaze went back to the TV. “Hey, check it out. Space Ghost.”

  Mitch ended up staying the rest of the afternoon there, watching TV, not saying much. He got Bryce some sodas and snacks from the vending machines in the hall, having to use his brother’s money because his own wallet was at home on the dresser.

  Bryce finally fell asleep, and Mitch decided it was high time for a shower. Time to get back into the real world, stop feeling like a loser.

  It was dark. As Mitch drove, he thought about one thing he had missed so much in prison: going out to eat. And here he was, driving past all these places, a lot of them lousy chain restaurants, but a few of them good. Places he remembered, from back when Jocelyn was still alive. Only he’d hardly ever taken her out to eat, and when he had, she’d spent most of her time acting like she didn’t want to talk to him. Which was fine, because he hadn’t really known how to talk to her. The closest he’d ever gotten was when he’d taught her how to drive. Or tried to, anyway.

  Fifteen years old and all business, she’d walked into the kitchen with her arms folded, stood at the head of the table glaring at him while Lanny and the guys finished up their sandwiches and beer and broke out the cards. Mitch could tell, without even looking up from his turkey-and-Swiss on rye, what kind of look she was giving him.

  Mitch chewed slowly, savoring the horseradish sauce, studying the water condensing on the outside of his half-full beer, the light of the summer afternoon streaming across the table. And all the while, the conversation died down around him. Finally, when he couldn’t stall any longer, he wiped his mouth and looked up. She was still standing there with her arms crossed, just as mad, only a little more hurt than he expected.