The cab ride south was brief, passing along the walk where they’d been sprinting only minutes before. Rolling by the CPUSA wreck, the Baron spotted a gaggle of NYPD beat cops standing around an empty vehicle. Marco was nearly lying down at this point, and Phyllis had her eyes shut. The cabbie spotted the same threats and drew his own conclusions, pulling his arms inwards and leaning low over the steering wheel.
He was guessing half-correctly that they’d been in the wreck, and he wanted no part—not even eye contact—with the police. It was the right attitude. The cabbie needed to believe that he couldn’t say a word to anyone about this.
For the Baron, this was a moment of immense strategic importance. No CPUSA merc remained with the wreck, and New York’s sedan and cultists were all absent from the scene. It was incredibly likely that the Oracle and his crew had successfully captured the CPUSA mercenaries and fled the scene. New York didn’t have to chase the Baron and his allies any further if they could simply interrogate the Baron’s enemies.
Sometime this evening, there was a strong chance that a CPUSA merc would crack, and New York would discover that the Cat o’ Nine Lives was loose in their city. They’d grasp that the Soviets were operating under their nose, and they’d mobilize their forces—a literal army of vassals, and their trump card himself, Meister Schuler.
But CPUSA mercs were stubborn, even suicidal. The Baron could expect some leeway, and if fortune favored them, they might escape the full wrath of the world’s largest cult for another day. The whole mess might vanish into a series of dodges.
He doubted they’d be so lucky. The cab rolled on.
The intersection of Broadway and Canal Street somehow managed to combine the worst of both roads. It was far from the glamorous stretch of theaters and shops that drew the nouveau riche to dine in the afternoons and enjoy plays and musicals in the evenings. It was also distant from the bustling neighborhoods of Chinatown and Little Italy. Sitting just south of Soho and north of Tribeca, it was a lifeless non-neighborhood of white stone office buildings, pale grey asphalt, and undecorated sidewalks slanting down to gaping storm drains. Beneath their feet, the actual canal of Canal Street still ran westward, draining off marshy groundwater and sluicing it away from the recovering slum of Five Points to the Hudson River.
They stopped at the nearest corner and got out. The cabbie sped off without a further word, abandoning them in this mass of concrete boxes over a century-old sewer.
“That was a lot of money for a short ride,” the Baron said.
“He won’t say shit,” Phyllis muttered.
“You sure? CPUSA and New York will be questioning the cabbies tonight.”
“I said, he’ll keep his mouth shut,” Phyllis replied, glancing around quickly. “We should get off the street. Come on. There’s a maintenance path off the station platform.”
They crossed the street and took the Canal Street station entrance, stepping down into the Earth along a single slope of rubber-coated stairs. A central railing divided them into upstream and downstream traffic, but nobody was coming up at this hour, if only because nobody lived here. For that matter, nobody was going down, because nobody worked here on a Sunday. Right now, fewer stations in the city were more desolate than this.
The station was minimal, hosting only a couple of small platforms with white tile walls and cheap bands of colorful, abstract mosaics layered across the surface. The ticket offices were at the far ends of the platforms, each having a poor view of the stairway. Phyllis turned right, led them down to a couple of steps at the station’s end, and pulled open an unlocked maintenance gate without any hesitation. They walked out onto a narrow, shallow extension of the rail platform. It had maybe two feet of spare room for people to walk single file, and twenty or thirty feet ahead, they could see a signal light glowing softly green at the head of a lamp post. The walkway ended at its foot, and there was a maintenance door to their right.
“This heads into the Canal Street access tunnels. There’s an old storage room that’s been cleared out and wired up.” The door had a new combination lock on it. Phyllis seemed to know the numbers by heart. She pulled it open and guided them in. Without the signal light or the diffuse illumination of the platform, they were swallowed up in the dark.
“Lonely,” Marco whispered.
“This is why it’s safe,” Phyllis said, her voice low but loud in the enclosed stone. “Put your hand on the left wall and walk slowly. It’s about fifty feet from here.”
In pitch darkness, they walked forward. The Baron followed Phyllis’s presence, that strange sense of full space that his other senses fixed into the dark. It was a poor substitute for vision, erratic and warped by the imagination, but it was real. Sensing body heat, maybe?
He could hear Marco shuffling along behind him. Having open eyes in absolute darkness was a strange experience. Random neurons fired, stimulating others to fire, creating dim hallucinations—not dissimilar to the moment of entering the temple sanctuary. Rolling rings of snowy, grey lines shrank towards the center of vision, as if he were falling backwards through a tunnel.
“Here it is,” Phyllis said. She pulled open a quiet door, a soft gush of air marking its passage. She stepped inside. The Baron followed. Marco shuffled in last.
“We’re all in,” the Baron whispered.
“Close the door,” Phyllis commanded.
Marco closed the door. It shut with a click.
Phyllis snapped a knife-blade switch closed. Two lamps came on in a large room at the end of a short hall. The lights were dim and yellow, but they were as bright as the rising sun for unready eyes. There was a stack of cots, shelves of food, a table and chairs, but their eyes could barely register any of it before they were inexorably drawn towards a single spot.
A man in a sharply pressed suit was seated behind the table, a tin of peaches neatly opened in front of him with a fork handle rising from the syrup and sliced fruit. He wasn’t eating, only waiting, and his eerie, empty smile silently told a story of victory. He was tall, broad-jawed, and built for combat. His shifting eyes measured them each in turn.
The Baron’s heart began to hammer in his chest. Phyllis was frozen up. All security was gone. In the best case scenario, they’d have to crawl all over the room from floor to ceiling, and they’d probably never find what they were looking for. Marco choked back a small sob of disappointment. He must’ve thought this man was a Communist—CPUSA or Soviet—but he was much, much worse. He was a member of the Order of the Cincinnati.
“Would you like to introduce yourselves?” asked the man cheerily.
“Everyone, keep calm,” the Baron said. “This is Robert Heckhaus, Special Operations Group. He’s from Langley, Virginia.” The Baron stepped around Phyllis and glanced into the near corners of the room. “Where are the rest of your men?” he asked.
Heckhaus laughed pleasantly. “One moment, Baron.” He picked up his fork and ate a slice of peach neatly, then set it down back in the syrup and talked only after swallowing. “They’re out in the dark, listening. They could be here very quickly, but for now, I’m at your mercy.” He pointed at Phyllis’s pants like his finger was a pistol. Bang, his thumb dropped like a hammer. “Heard you shot a revolver, cultist of Artemis. Got any rounds in the cylinder?”
“How did you find this place?” she asked. After dodging, she couldn’t have a gun; his commentary was either a test for information or a bit of mocking cruelty, which she ignored.
“Does a magician reveal his secrets?” Heckhaus asked.
“Are you a magician?”
The Langley cultist laughed even louder. “I’m more like a ghost, aren’t I?”
“You do haunt me,” the Baron said. He tried to imagine how Heckhaus had beaten them to the safehouse. There was a lot of evidence of their presence in Brooklyn. There was even reason to believe that the ruckus down here in Manhattan would’ve been widely known, at least among CPUSA and anybody who was watching them. For that matter, Heckhaus’s people might’ve spotted them after their dodge when they escaped the 8th Street Temple. There were lots of opportunities to pick up the trail and follow it, if he knew what he was looking for.
But why here? How did he know about this safe house? How did he get here first?
The Baron guessed at an answer. “You’ve got the Cult of Artemis mapped out in New York. They’re a radical faction, and you want to keep tabs on them. You heard we dodged into Greenwich Village and took a chance that we’d come to the closest safe house.”
Heckhaus’s smile expanded until it was genuine. “Very good, Baron. We’ve got the underground mapped to hell and back, and rooms like these are on our maps.”
“What men can do with a lot of time and money,” the Baron said softly.
“Only if they’ve got the zeal to root out communist threats.” Heckhaus forked another slice of peach and finished it off in short, sharp bites, slicing it to chunks with his incisors. “Luckily for the Cult of Artemis, they’re not communist, so we don’t care. Let them live.”
“Very progressive,” Phyllis said darkly.
“Ha, hardly! There’s not a woman in the Order for the same reason there isn’t one anywhere else. They’re impractical, hated!”
“By you?”
“By everyone else. The persecution of occult women is an endless assault on the Apostate in effigy. It’s foolish, of course. They should be lauding her genius. She rejected the values of the system and stole immortality from the gods!” He snatched at the air, as if trying to grasp the dim light in his hand. “She’s a role model, not a villain. Gods help any man of the Order who doesn’t learn a lesson from her example. We are here to win, and she was a winner!”
The admiration of a Langley cultist was surely aggravating to Phyllis, but she knew enough about Langley to know she shouldn’t argue the Apostate’s values with a fanatic. The Baron patted her carefully on the shoulder, but she didn’t respond. If the Baron’s support was appreciated, she still wouldn’t dare show it to Heckhaus. Weakness here could be fatal. He could only tell she was unhappy by her stance, her slumped shoulders. It was a reasonable reaction. A SOG operative was making himself at home in the center of her secrets.
The Baron decided to direct the conversation away from the Apostate. “So why are you here?”
Heckhaus snapped and pointed at him. “There’s been a lot of violence today. The stories I’ve heard are incredible. Shootouts, murders, big public wishes—all in New York’s playground. If I didn’t know better, I’d say we were looking at the opening volleys of an occult war.”
“But you know better,” Phyllis said.
“I do,” Heckhaus agreed. “If this were a war, why, there’d have to be something worth fighting for. Something big. The kind of thing I could only trust the Baron would tell us about, since he’s such a good American citizen. Aren’t you, Baron?”
The Baron said nothing.
Heckhaus said nothing in turn.
They were both ready to wait in silence, and neither would break.
Phyllis cleared her throat and stood by the Baron in solidarity.
Thirty seconds passed in agonizing silence. It was such a pointless game, but the wrong move had very real consequences, and the Baron needed to ignore that question. Any admission about the Cat—on the record—could spell doom for them all.
It was Marco that broke first, likely drowning in his own adrenaline. “He’s been helping me,” he explained in a shaky voice.
“The son of the dead man speaks!” Heckhaus said. “How are you feeling?”
“Leave him be,” the Baron ordered. He glanced back at the teenager. “Marco, don’t answer any of his questions. He’s not your friend. He’s nobody’s friend. It’s all business.”
Heckhaus sniffed disdainfully. “Speaking of business, if you were called here to start a war, it’d have to be over something huge, something the Soviets want back. It’s not an Apple—I would’ve seen the damage. It’s not the Whistle—the body count is too low. Nobody would go to war for the Lazy Woman. What other artifacts are there in the Soviet arsenal?”
“I’m not here to start a war,” the Baron said.
“Of course not, but if you were, it would be the Cat o’ Nine Lives, wouldn’t it?”
“I suppose so,” Phyllis answered quickly, “but this is about Cosa Nostra politics.” She looked at Marco. “His enemies are punishing the son for the sins of the father. I’d know. I’m the new dock boss for the crews around Red Hook.”
“There was a gunfight in Red Hook,” Heckhaus said, “so the story checks out, and that makes me glad, honest Injun. It’d be a disaster if this were a fight for the Cat.”
“Why?” Marco asked.
“Well, young man, imagine what would happen if it were the Cat. If I could confirm it, let’s say because the Baron failed to keep it a secret from New York, or he threatened to lose it to the Bolshevik faction of the Soviet cult… Why, Langley would have to step in.”
“Is it that important?” Marco asked.
“Yes. If it were official right now, I’d be compelled to slaughter everyone in this room and root through their guts for the prize. But it isn’t, is it? The Baron is handling an internal conflict between vassal cults. I don’t have to kill anybody, do I?”
“No, sir,” Marco said.
The Baron thought Heckhaus’s message was a little heavy-handed, but the point was well taken. It’d been far too easy to deduce what artifact was in play. Once anyone realized that the Soviets were opposing the Baron, they could connect the dots. Marco had been mortally wounded, shot in plain daylight, but within hours he was dodging into temples, and it wasn’t likely that the Baron had healed him. It had to be the Cat in his belly, and the Soviets wanted it back.
Since Langley was intimately familiar with the internal politics of the Soviet cult, it would’ve been obvious to Heckhaus that the Bolsheviks were making a play to recover what the Orthodox faction had lost. This all assumed that their intelligence networks didn’t pick up on the entire scenario from other sources. A potential shift in power made a lot of noise, and the Langley cult was tied into one of the world’s most extensive secular intelligence networks. The Baron never forgot that they were CIA agents with authority, even if their cult didn’t run the agency.
Heckhaus was giving the Baron a second warning. Permission was being given to finish the job. As long as plausible deniability was maintained, Heckhaus would stand aside and watch. The Baron almost admired him for his unwavering pragmatism, much like one might admire a predator for having bloody claws and long fangs. Heckhaus embodied CIA politics exactly. On the record, he followed every rule and law to the letter, promoting American ideals and loyalty above all else. Off the record, anything was fair game, and he would make unethical decisions or betray his ideals if he knew that he would win.
Nevertheless, this wasn’t an open agreement yet, and there was a challenge buried in Heckhaus’s story. He’d suggested that it’d be worth killing the Baron himself for the Cat, and that half-threat demanded a response. “Your hypotheticals are bizarre. If we had the Cat, there’d be no point in killing me and risking the Zombie’s retribution. It’s only powerful in conjunction with other pieces of the Soviet arsenal. It’s nothing more than a novelty, at least on a global scale.”
“We couldn’t win the Cold War with it,” Heckhaus agreed, “but that wouldn’t be the point. It’d be about denying the Bolshevik faction, about weakening the Soviet arsenal of artifacts. Funny that you mention the Zombie though. He certainly isn’t around. This would be the best time to kill you, down here in the dark. How long would it take for him to find you, do you think?”
Phyllis blindly touched the Baron with a hand. “I wish you had a half day of my prestige.”
He felt the value settle on him, the pleasure of prestige vastly overwhelmed by the crushing responsibility it represented. He had to save himself for the Zombie, even if it meant her death, Marco’s death, and the loss of the Cat to Langley.
If things went wrong, he had to live. But things hadn’t gone wrong yet.
Heckhaus pursed his lips. “That wasn’t necessary. This is a friendly conversation. I just happened to be in town, and I have a nose for sniffing out trouble, so here I am.”
“You happened to be in town?” Phyllis asked skeptically.
“You haven’t read about it? The papers are running paranoid, though I can’t imagine why. The New York Army National Guard is on a standard training exercise out of LaGuardia Airport.”
“You’re kidding,” the Baron said, “you’ve ordered in the National Guard?”
“Baron, please! I’m overseeing a training exercise. I didn’t order in anyone. This came down from the Department of Defense. They’ve had these plans on the books for years.”
“What plans?”
“We’re simulating a response to a Soviet invasion of the five boroughs.”
The Baron blurted out, “That’s ridiculous!” He couldn’t help it, the ruse was so incredibly thin. “We’re on the east coast, and the naval yards sail out of the Hudson.”
“You wouldn’t laugh if the Soviets started their invasion in Queens,” Heckhaus said. “The citizens of the United States are glad to know their finest are prepared for anything and everything. This exercise is only one of many possible emergency deployment scenarios, and thanks to our tireless planning, the National Guard could be mobilized anywhere in the continental forty-eight within twenty-four hours. Vigilance, my friend, is never ridiculous.”
Only a CIA agent could deliver a joke like that without a trace of irony. Langley was preparing to fight with the New York cult and the CPUSA using a secular army, and they hardly bothered to conceal their might, stretching what little plausibility they could muster over the elephant in the room while pretending it was well-hidden. If the Baron failed or lost the Cat, Heckhaus could strike the first blow of an occult war right here on American soil.
New York was surely aware of this secular threat, and they’d been receiving reports of the Baron and Zombie fighting in the streets. No wonder they were afraid. From their perspective, the situation was already escalating out of control, and they couldn’t divine a reason why.
Heckhaus ate another slice of peaches while his speech settled among his audience. Once he was finished, he pointed the fork at Marco. “Do you know why it’s important?”
“What is important, sir?” Marco asked.
“The Cat o’ Nine Lives. Do you know why artifacts are important?”
“Sort of. There isn’t anything else like it.”
“Not in the whole world,” Heckhaus said, “and there never will be again. Young man, how long have you been a cultist? Not long?”
“I made my first wish today,” he said.
Heckhaus stuck the fork deep in the tinned fruit. “Do you know the Fall of Curses?”
“Yes sir.” Marco did his best to recall what little he’d gleaned from the Zombie’s summary. “The gods changed the rules. No more artifacts.”
Heckhaus leaned back and told his version of the story.
Young man, it’s one of the great disasters of human history! Before the Fall of Curses, a wish could change an object. It could be magically blessed or cursed—permanently. The only risk was that the artifact, that investment of prestige, could be destroyed.
Imagine the logic of the ancients. Shatter a magic staff, and the power was lost. Smash a clay seal, and the demons were released from servitude. It only made sense. Artifacts could do terrible things, but only because someone could destroy them. It was insurance against abuse. Evil things weren’t cherished. Like men and all of their works, they were broken.
People protected their investments, of course. The Cat is nigh invincible with blessings, though it doesn’t compare to something like the Ark of the Covenant. And even artifacts like these were carefully guarded. Once one was out of your hands, it was difficult to defend. Opposing cults could wish for its location and crush it. Snap! Just like that! No more power!
Kings and generals found that frailty unacceptable, young man. They always demanded something better—a sharper sword, a stronger shield, a faster horse. We still think this way even now. Atomic bombs prove our nature; presidents and premiers want the power to turn cities into rubble and corpses without lifting a finger. Their coffers spill open, and we invent planes, mechanisms, and machinery—all to make mass murder simpler, more reliable.
Now imagine you’re an ancient king or a medieval general. You can curse an amulet to wither all the crops within ten miles, but someone will always find it and destroy it. You’ll waste your investment, so you ask your wizards to invent a magic bomb, a foolproof vehicle for a cursed property. You ask this again, and again, and your wise men all fail without exception. Do you give up? Do you believe there’s no hope in killing your enemies?
By the 14th century, the Vatican held that creating such an artifact was logically impossible. They argued that an artifact was a fusion of substance and form, inseparable and unchanging. If either piece was modified, the artifact was destroyed. They believed that an artifact could only be made from stable things, having permanence of both form and substance.
You couldn’t curse a fire. Nobody could bless water in a cup. The air you breathed could never be enchanted. Skin couldn’t be imbued with the strength of stone, and flesh could only be molded and shaped within the boundaries of nature. Wishes could target these things, but wishes could never permanently change them.
But there was a flaw in this thinking, which some very clever men noticed. This system of blessings and curses wasn’t perfectly rigorous. If you blessed a ship, you could replace every inch of its wood, plank by plank, and it’d remain an artifact the entire time. The presence of one particular plank or another was irrelevant.
Now you might think, why does this matter? Why is a spy telling me about the legal definition of an artifact? The answer is the critical insight. If there wasn’t a large degree of flexibility, no artifact could’ve survived for more than a fraction of a second. A single rub of a finger would’ve removed a few atoms, and the artifact would’ve failed. The rules must be flawed. With only a slight shift in philosophy, the cracks could be laid bare.
That shift came in 1310 or so. An alchemist, Paul of Tartan, argued that all metals were composed of two fundamental substances, mercury and sulphur. He was dead wrong, but his theory provided a framework. He thought mercury was fundamental, indestructible, and that every metal in the universe contained a fixed portion of it.
His theory implied that form and substance weren’t actually unified. Form was just the pattern—or the mix—while the fundamental substance was unchanging. Under this paradigm, alchemy was the reorganization of basic substances, rather than their transmutation or whatever other nonsense. Paul created a science of materials—however crude—which allowed him to identify objects by substance alone, not by shape!
Since Paul was a cultist, he took this to mean that one didn’t need a solid object to bless or curse. One only needed to have a clear idea of the substance to change. At the behest of a French noble, he prepared a flask full of mercury, and he explained this consequence to a Vatican audience of more than four hundred powerful cultists. The Vatican needed a weapon—just as strongly as we need the atomic bomb now—and he could provide it.
His argument is written in Apostasy, word for word. “The mercury in the flask would remain the same mercury no matter what transpired. It could participate in other forms, but it would remain itself even without form.” Do you know what that means? No?
Paul argued that he could curse the mercury itself, changing its properties. With the Vatican’s prestige, he did. The gods followed his logic and were forced to allow him to proceed.
By every measure of power, Paul was a winner. He cursed the mercury to dessicate plants that partook of it, then dumped the flask in the fields of a European kingdom. It was exactly the weapon every king and general had wanted for thousands of years. As a liquid, a fundamental substance, it couldn’t be shattered. As a liquid, it couldn’t be found. Paul supposed it would spread a few hundred yards, mix with local materials and remain there forever. He drew pictures of perfect little dead zones, telling the Vatican how they could target only the fields of the enemy while sparing their allies and friends.
He was terribly wrong—beautifully wrong! The weapon worked better than anyone imagined. It spread, drying up most of Europe’s crops in the middle of one of the four rainiest years of that century. When wheat harvests began to fail in locations as remote as Ireland, it became clear that Paul’s weapon was the opening horn of Armageddon.
History calls it the Great Famine of 1315. It killed a tenth of Europe’s population, and started the Fall of Curses. The gods offered a prize for killing Paul, and changed the rules to never allow the blessings or curses of anything ever again.
When the ‘good guys’ found Paul of Tartan, they diced him alive into dozens of tiny pieces. Bone chips and hamburger, boy, just out of spite. To punish him for power! Then they used the huge prestige reward to delete the mercury, destroying the artifact that was killing the crops. Do you see the lesson? Do you understand the true implications of this event?
Fine. I’ll tell you.
Artifacts are meaningless in a world with guns and bombs, young man. But prestige matters. With enough of it, a wish can delete anything, even an atomic bomb.
Heckhaus giggled like a schoolboy. This singular thought was his true joy. Enough prestige trumped nuclear weapons. Enough of it could win the Cold War.
“Jesus,” Marco said.
Heckhaus gave him the finger guns. “You said it! In any case, we come back around to the Cat. Old wishes are grandfathered in, so after the Fall, any and all artifacts became incredibly valuable. If the Cat were here, I’d offer to take it simply because no one man, even if protected by the Zombie, could conceivably carry it in safety. It’s that important.”
“Fortunately, the Cat isn’t here,” Phyllis said, speaking before Marco could respond. “I assume it’s still in Stalingrad.”
Heckhaus ignored her objection and spoke to Marco. “If you were in possession of it, no organization would allow you to hand it to their enemies. The escalation of force would be extreme, the resistance beyond deadly. The only way out would be to entrust the artifact to a cult that could defend it and protect you.”
“I don’t have it,” Marco replied.
“Imagine if you did, and I offered to help. What do you say?”
Marco hesitated, considering his response. “I’d do the right thing.”
Heckhaus clapped three times, slowly. “A politician’s answer. What is the right thing?”
“I don’t know. I’d have to figure it out.”
“If you had the Cat, you’d figure it out?” Heckhaus asked.
“If I had the Cat.”
“But you don’t.”
“No, sir.”
“Interesting. One last hypothetical, young man. Would you trust Baron d’Holbach to take care of the Cat, even if you died?”
No hesitation here. “If I had it, yes.”
“Why?”
Marco blinked, looked down at his shoes, and then looked up. “Trust is trust,” he said, pausing to swallow with a dry mouth. “And he has the Zombie.”
Heckhaus smirked and cast a gaze towards the Baron. It was a silent request for commentary, and this one was worth answering.
The Baron took one step forward. “I don’t expect you to have faith in me, Heckhaus. I can’t kill everyone here with my bare hands. You can. Unlike the rest of the morons at the CIA, you’ve trained for it. You work all day, every day, to become more dangerous. Yet I do have the Zombie, and that single advantage outweighs all your skills.”
Heckhaus tilted his head very slightly, a generous acknowledgement to a genuine compliment. “I don’t have any faith, Baron, it’s true. You’ve locked yourself into bizarre labyrinths of philosophy, and you use your secular, atheistic worldview to justify your bad behavior—your chronic opposition to the way of the world. You and the Zombie go around inserting yourselves like wrenches in the gears of civilization. Someday, you might break the machine.”
“I always aim to save it, even if you think otherwise.”
“Mm. Your aim is poor.”
“I’m usually the only one in position to take the shot. Not because I’m better, but because I’m independent. That’s scarce in the occult world.”
“Independence is overrated,” Heckhaus tutted. “What matters is actions.”
The Baron stared Heckhaus down. “If we had the Cat, I’d do what’s best for everyone, and I’d face the consequences without the threat of starting a secular war. It’s all hypothetical, but you know the advantage that only I would have—the Zombie is my failsafe.”
“The young man isn’t you.” Heckhaus barely even maintained the pretense.
“That doesn’t mean I’m a useless guardian.”
Heckhaus took a long breath, grabbed his fork, and speared two slices of peach, which he shoved into his mouth whole, messily, leaving syrup on his lips. He chewed and swallowed, and cleaned his face with only his tongue, almost reptilian in its spontaneity, like a lizard licking its eye. The little tin of peaches wasn’t quite empty, so he went back and picked out the last few scraps, shoveling them into his mouth like he was a child with dessert.
He chewed, swallowed, and sighed.
“Are you going to do something,” Phyllis asked, “or can we have our safehouse back?”
Heckhaus tapped the tines of his fork against the table. “I’m glad we had this talk. If anything interesting happens, Baron, just remember. We’ll be watching. We can help.” He set the fork down neatly by the tin, rose from his chair, and walked towards the hall. They split to either side to let him leave. He paused in the open door, light streaming out into the empty maintenance tunnel. “It’s a lucky thing. The Cat really wouldn’t be worth the incident.”
“If it was here,” the Baron said.
“Stay safe,” Heckhaus said. “I’ll tell the Zombie where you are. If we can find him.” He swept around and shouted into the dark. “Turn it out! Nothing to see here!”
More than ten flashlights switched on in the tunnel, held by figures in black suits huddling against walls. Various submachine guns were draped over chests, hanging from well-worn straps. Then Heckhaus slammed the door, and the vision of his personal army was gone.
“What the fuck was that?” Phyllis asked quietly.
“Don’t talk,” the Baron commanded. “He planted a bug in here, probably several. Just eat, relax, and put the day aside for now. There’s nothing else to do.”
“Thank God,” Marco said.
“Thank the gods,” Phyllis corrected.
“They had nothing to do with this. You saved yourselves.” d’Holbach looked at the others, who seemed too tired to respond further. Then he noticed for the first time that Phyllis’s fists were clenched. She’d been on the edge of fighting. He looked at the young man, bloodied and scarred. Marco’s knees were shaking. He’d been on the edge too—and the Baron couldn’t imagine what would’ve happened if he’d cracked.
Bad things, he supposed. Heckhaus hadn’t brought two full SOG teams underground just for personal protection. There were other ways this could’ve gone, because Langley was only tolerant. They were not their friends. They were nobody’s friends.
Marco started shaking so badly that he had to sit down.
It didn’t matter that the hour had barely tipped towards the evening. The day had been one long series of traumatic events, revelations, ill-omens, and threats by powerful men. They were each exhausted, Marco more so than any. After a few minutes of arranging furniture and quietly eating tinned foods, they each flopped onto a cot with varying degrees of grace, and released their steely claims to consciousness. They slept like the dead.
Author’s Note:
A close call with the CIA, but they are given a little more time to struggle onwards.
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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