It was four in the afternoon. Damp, cool winds blew over the city, and occasional rumbles of thunder rolled off the North Atlantic like the workings of a vast and terrible machine. On a truck radio, the National Weather Service reported a warm, high-energy nor’easter. After last month’s historic blizzard, meteorologists spoke with relative relief about torrential rains and storm surges. Boston was already drenched, and the waves in Long Island Sound were crashing over the rocks. In a little more than an hour, lightning would strike Queens.
If the Soviets wanted to fly ahead of the storm, they’d need to take off on schedule. For good and evil, they must arrive at LaGuardia within half an hour.
The Baron laid on his stomach in the bed of a panel truck. His head was tipped to one side, using a folded jacket for a pillow. The Zombie sat in the open rear door, watching the airport to the east. Phyllis was several steps away from them both, sitting on the only bench in the park and chatting with the landscapers she’d hired to supply their mobile hiding place.
“Park” was the only designation on the plaque by the road. It was a crescent of grass at the end of a rarely used loop of 96th Street that crossed the top of a steep wooded hill overlooking Ditmars Avenue. Here, between the sparse trees, one could spy a grand view of the terminal and the airfields and all the exercises of war therein. A concentration of black cars, olive jeeps and heavy antiaircraft positions surrounded the recently decommissioned Marine Air Terminal. It was the temporary headquarters of Langley and the National Guard.
Across the airfields themselves, all four runways were in heavy use for a mixture of both military and civilian flights. C130s were circling around in the afternoon sky, rushing to disgorge jeeps and troops flown in from locations all along the coast. The state’s armories were already deployed, a hundred vehicles lined up neatly across the grass and backed by sturdy, waterproof tents—logistics for the motorised infantry. Armored vehicles were scarce; most were already in the field or deployed into the city as soon as a fuel truck finished filling them up.
Personnel moved endlessly, shifting between preparations and reconsiderations. In the aggregate, they gave the impression of aimlessly milling ants.
At any given moment, at least a couple hundred men were streaming from the main terminals to the airfields to the Marine Air Terminal and back again. Others marched slowly in ragged clumps, creating patrols and boundaries that followed no geographical sense and seemed to move arbitrarily from one landmark to another.
Altogether, they created an endless shifting field of observation that covered all the buildings, tents, and vehicles with fresh eyes, but the execution was imperfect. It seemed like the whims of an insane general, not a patrol plan. It was difficult to tell how the chain of command would function this close to chaos. It likely wasn’t meant to work.
When the Baron first saw it, he said it was an invitation and a challenge from Heckhaus. The CIA was giving the impression of maximized security while slowing any response until the Guard could collect itself and assert a command structure. If there were violence, there’d be a short delay before the full force of the military could collapse on any trespassers.
The Zombie speculated that Heckhaus wanted the Baron to win, even as his superiors required him to oppose the Baron’s actions. Heckhaus, a true Cold War spook, followed orders without question but never failed to push his personal agenda at the same time. He wouldn’t be a world-class operative if he couldn’t satisfy several contradictory demands at once.
Or maybe Heckhaus was just neurotic, Phyllis suggested.
Regardless, the Baron and the Zombie saw a slim opportunity here, which they had to take. The stakes were too high to hold back and risk failure. Soon, they’d deploy to the trees below the hillside, next to the terminal roads.
But first, the Baron would finish waiting for the molten heat of the Cat to repair his shattered spine. “How’s my temperature?” he asked his friend.
The Zombie grabbed onto the doorframe and carefully leaned over the Baron, putting a hand just above the healing lump of tissue that’d filled in the hole in his back. “You’re cooling down. Doesn’t even smell like cooked meat. Just blood and fat.”
“I can feel the bone growing,” the Baron said. “It’s like someone shoving hot knives into me. Also, I can feel my legs again. For real.”
The Zombie grinned. “What’s that like?”
“If I tell you, does it mean anything?” the Baron asked, half-joking.
“I like the similes, assuming a soulless man can like things at all.”
“Ha! It’s like I hung myself upside down by shoving meat hooks through my thighs.” The Cat’s puppetry was rapid and graceless. It would’ve done a lot of damage to him, if he weren’t abnormally resilient. He was glad he’d had some time to recover.
“You think you’ll be ready to go soon?” the Zombie asked.
“I’m probably ready to go now.” d’Holbach wiggled his feet. “See? All nerves, no Cat.”
“Good. Have you thought about how you’re going to get the Cat out?”
“Ah—about that. I’d like for you to cut it out.”
“I can do that.”
The Baron licked his lips nervously. “Do you still have that pocket knife? The one I saw earlier?”
“Yep. I stole it from Tammany. I’ve sliced a few throats with it. It’s sharp.”
“That’s comforting,” the Baron replied. He couldn’t wait to have the Cat removed. Its occult presence in his stomach was distracting, even domineering at times, defining both experience and life. He was a robot when he died, an occult machine programmed by his brain and clumsily manipulated by its engines of fire, but he wasn’t spared any pain.
He’d had it a little easier than Marco of course. His will was stronger because he was far older, and his pain tolerance was greater because of the wish that kept him alive. Even so, carrying the Cat was physically stressful, eventually crippling. Clearly, he was supposed to recover through occult means; the entire artifact seemed to be designed with the assumption that he could wish offhand for knowledge and good health, things which were impossible to acquire by prestige or at least incredibly expensive in the modern world.
“I’m going to take a brief nap,” the Baron said. “Wake me up if anything happens.”
“Can do.” The Zombie slid off the back of the truck. “Phyllis, you got a minute?” he asked, even while he closed the back doors and left the Baron to rest.
Wind buffeted the truck, gently rocking it. The Baron couldn’t really sleep, but he needed some time to concentrate and think alone. How was he going to assault the airport? What would he do if all plans went to hell, as they inevitably would? What were his resources?
He considered the Cat o’ Nine Lives. What were his deaths? He’d perished when the Browning machine gun had clipped his neck. That was the first and most painful death. He’d been shot twice when fighting broke out on the Queensboro Bridge, once to the large intestine, and once to a rib and kidney. One or both of those wounds might not count as deaths, but he couldn’t rely on good luck. For now, he assumed the worst. Three deaths. He’d been punctured through the right lung during a firefight—large, bloody wounds. Four deaths. He’d been plugged with a .30-06, damaging his heart. Was that only one death or two? The exit wound had ruined a lung as well. Call it two, just to be safe. Six deaths so far. He’d been shot in the calf. That one probably didn’t count. The bullet to his arm was only a wound as well. The last clear fatality was the shot to his spine. It’d paralyzed his lungs, maybe stopped his heart.
Seven deaths altogether. He could only die twice more, barring incredibly good fortune. If the gods were lenient, some of those deaths might’ve been nonfatal injuries, but he couldn’t know for certain until he was shot too many times and still survived.
Then there was the Zombie. Invincibility was a powerful resource. In an ideal world, he would’ve handed the Cat over to his friend and sent it in for delivery, but there was a clear flaw in that plan. The Zombie technically wasn’t a man. With deep pools of prestige, the Bolsheviks could wish against him, potentially disabling him on sight and at a great distance. They could probably wish his grasp open; not easily, but with time and ingenuity they could bend him.
Even if they couldn’t change him, they could throw him into the sea alongside the Cat, leave with Denisov, and win the security from the Orthodox faction. Make no mistake, entering LaGuardia was incredibly dangerous, but the Zombie couldn’t go alone. Maybe with time the Baron could’ve devised a solution, but he couldn’t think it up on the spot, so if they were going to place the Cat in Denisov’s hands—if they were going to win—then the Baron would have to go down to LaGuardia in person, risking death, with the Zombie as his shield.
The sharp pains of bone growth slowly receded to a dull ache. That must be the end of the Cat’s regeneration. He’d waited long enough; the Cat’s normal rate was about an inch of flesh an hour, it seemed. More than enough time had passed to close the wound.
He got up slowly and opened the rear doors, pushing them out against a blustering wind. Emerging into the day, he looked towards the storm, then paused in the door, gawking.
The nor’easter dominated the atmosphere. After two hours of approach, it’d become a squall line stretching across the horizon—a wall of clouds swallowing half the visible world. Spilling forth from their crowns, a thin dark sheet raced ahead to blot out the sun. Billowing out from their bases, tattered storm fragments burst over the Atlantic, casting ghostly, dark ribbons of rain over the ocean. Hidden forks of lightning illuminated them from behind—brief glows of ethereal light refracted by the rain. The city of New York now lay in the shadow of a steel grey sky.
Nor’easters weren’t like regular thunderstorms. They weren’t just one line of clouds; they were massive galaxies of storms, dozens of dense fronts rotating over the ocean and continent in distinct arms, thousands upon thousands of square miles of rain conveyed in dreadful bursts for days and days. The city would be miserable and damp, huddled down while tallying up damage to the coast. The wall before them was only the beginning; hidden behind it was a storm so large that it defied imagination and found comparison only among hurricanes. Tomorrow and for the foreseeable future, the forecast was nothing but rain unending.
How much longer until the nor’easter hit? Thirty minutes? An hour? It was insane to imagine anyone flying a plane before the grand, sweeping force of the Earth, but the Baron doubted that the Soviets would accept a delay or grounding. They’d risk it, and technically their planes had an altitude ceiling nearing 20,000 feet. They could fly above the cyclone.
The Baron hopped out and stretched his back and arms. His joints were stiff but serviceable. His spine was whole again; his legs were his own. Everything he wore was crusted with blood, but they had a plan for that. They’d change one more time, buying the clothes of the landscapers right off their backs. It’d cost Phyllis quite a bit extra, but her help had agreed ahead of time to strip down and hand over their shirts and jackets.
“Let’s get ready,” the Baron said to Phyllis and the Zombie.
She was staring at him from the bench. The Zombie was standing beside her idly. They must’ve been watching the storm as well, waiting for him to emerge.
“What time is it?” the Zombie asked.
The Baron checked his watch. “Four ten. We have a few minutes at minimum.”
Phyllis called to the Italian boys collecting branches. “Swap ‘em out!”
They dropped their bags of lawn clippings and started stripping rapidly. They were down to undershirts within seconds. The Baron stripped off his own ruined shirt and jacket. He didn’t have an undershirt. Black flakes of clotted blood stuck to his skin. His scars were large, pale, and thicker than the surrounding flesh. It’d take a while for them to disappear.
“Were you in the war?” asked the boy handing over his loose shirt.
“Not World War II,” the Baron said, “but I was shot.”
“No wonder they got you working for the docks. You’re tough.”
The Baron shook his head. “Just lucky.” He donned the shirt and the pale brown wool jacket. He still wore bloodstained pants and socks, but they were dyed black. They didn’t look bloody so much as filthy, which was acceptable at a glance.
The Zombie was taller than anyone else here. The shirt he put on was clearly too small, but the jacket still reached his waist, and he didn’t seem to mind stretching the cloth over himself. He looked ridiculous, but it was better than bloodsoaked cuffs.
“You won’t look like a crime scene,” Phyllis said.
“Should be a crime to dress like that,” the Baron muttered.
The Zombie was tugging at the hem of his shirt to keep it at his belt. “I don’t care,” he said airily. “It’ll all be ruined soon enough.”
Phyllis dismissed the landscapers. They packed up the Baron’s and the Zombie’s bloody clothes into sacks with clippings and branches, then drove off in their truck. Once they were gone, she waved the Baron on over to the bench. “We need to talk. You need prestige.”
The Baron sat down and gazed at the airport. The scattered march of armed men was intimidating. His stomach sank a little whenever he tried to count their numbers.
“Yes,” he said.
“How much?” Phyllis asked.
He couldn’t beat ten soldiers in a straight firefight, let alone one hundred. Phyllis’s offer was a tremendous relief. She was their only friend with any prestige left, at least in New York State. Nobody else would sell to him here and now. He needed her prestige.
Still, he felt compelled to offer her a way out. Artemisians largely had to snipe tasks, and the cultist she’d worked for was dead. Every day of prestige she’d earned was infinitely more precious and rare. “I already owe you a lot,” he said.
She shrugged. “How much?”
The Baron scratched his eyebrows, one, then the other. “Two years?”
That was a significant amount of prestige, twice what’d been spent on Marco that morning. Phyllis wasn’t surprised, but she still asked, “And you’ve got a plan this time?”
“Let’s say I need to remove the Cat, but I’m mortally wounded.”
“A likely outcome.”
“If I pulled it out before I regenerated, I’d die.”
“So you’d need to heal first.”
“Right, but I could eke out a heavy discount here. I’d wish for the gods to heal me in a way that assisted the Cat. I’d recover in seconds what usually takes two hours.”
The Zombie walked up behind them and carefully placed his hands on the bench. “You could actually afford it then, assuming that works.”
The Baron continued, “There are other ways too. How about this? While the Cat is in me, it’s not truly a fatal wound. It should be cheaper to recover then.”
“What about the stomach wound?” Phyllis asked. “Think you’ll survive that?”
“Yeah. So long as I don’t bleed out, I’ll be fine. I can’t develop sepsis.”
“Have you put that to the test yet?”
“I’ve been sewn together after some heavy hits. No infections. No inflammation.”
“Böhme built him to last.” The Zombie grinned. “I’ve seen him lose more blood than a man should, and I know what a man can lose. He’s never died until today.”
“It’s the Diviner’s advantage,” the Baron explained. “Böhme was close to the system, deeply aware of how the occult worked. He knew exactly what he wanted, and he had an obscene amount of prestige to spend. It was like engineering—superefficient wishing. Elizabeth modeled her agelessness after mine. Nobody has found a tougher condition.”
“I’ll buy that,” Phyllis said. “Is all the prestige for your health then?”
“No, that’s just part of the cost. If I’m right, it’s the smallest.”
“Good. What else?”
“I need to be able to release the Zombie if they find some way to bind him.”
Phyllis frowned. “That’s right. The Commies put him in the water yesterday, didn’t they?”
The Zombie drummed his hands on the back of the bench. “I don’t have a soul, so I’m not a man. They can target me with wishes.”
“Can they change your mind?” Phyllis asked.
“Nope, I’m still invincible.”
“Schuler fouled him up too,” the Baron said. “It’s not common, it’s not cheap, but this is a secret battle in the Cold War. They’ll dig deep for any advantage.”
Phyllis meditated on the notion. “So you can’t send him alone.”
The Zombie hummed thoughtfully. “It never occurred to me that we weren’t both going.”
The Baron took a deep breath. “It’s not just the Zombie that needs help. I’ll likely spend some of the pool on small, tactical wishes. Guns, vehicles, who knows?”
“Guns?” Phyllis turned to look at him. “Are you going to kill people?”
“Yes,” the Baron admitted. “I won’t risk it again. Not today.”
“Good.” Phyllis stood up. “Do you think you’re going to win?”
The Baron stood also. “I don’t know. I hate to use the word, but that’s an army down there.”
“Malik will have his occult Spetsnaz,” the Zombie noted.
The Baron frowned. “Miracles don’t happen, but I might need something better than good luck. I might need an intervention—from them, whatever they are.”
“The gods?” Phyllis asked.
“They’re not gods,” the Baron said vaguely. “They’re just powerful.”
“What exactly do you believe in, Baron?”
“I believe they’re related to humans, but aren’t human themselves. Sorry, I don’t think we have enough time to explain it all right now.”
Phyllis furrowed her brow. “You all but admitted that you might die down there. If you go without telling me first, it’ll drive me insane.”
“It’s complicated—”
“Give me the highlights then. It’s part of the price for my prestige.”
The Baron sighed loudly. “Fine, but it’s just a story. It’s the latest one, but I’ve had a whole series of stories, you understand?”
Phyllis crossed her arms. “Go on.”
“So, when I first learned about prestige, I imagined the gods were natural philosophers. Powerful ones, somewhere far away. They’d reasoned out the clockwork of the world, mastered it somehow, and all of this so-called magic was a kind of sublime science. I couldn’t figure out why though. In the end, I thought they just wanted to be powerful.”
“You don’t think that now?” Phyllis asked.
The Baron shook his head. “No, but bear with me a moment. When I started, sanctuaries weren’t treated like time travel. They were just days you lived by yourself, like insertions in the calendar, or a thirteenth hour on the clock.”
“That’s in Apostasy,” Phyllis noted.
“Because Elizabeth wrote it a half-century too early. When H.G. Wells wrote The Time Machine, that’s when people started saying the sanctuaries were time travel.”
“That’s when the new stories started!” the Zombie said gleefully.
The Baron snapped his fingers and pointed at his friend. “Yes. I had a bunch of ideas then, things I scribbled into letters. I thought the gods were like the time traveller from Wells’ book, but I still couldn’t explain their motivations. It wasn’t a complete story. The explanation didn’t compel their behavior.”
“Then there was Heinlein!” the Zombie continued, grinning like a dog.
d’Holbach shrugged. “He showed me a novella in a magazine, ‘By His Bootstraps.’ In the story, a man time travels, interacting with himself again and again. It’s a bunch of half-accidents, a mess of coincidences, but bit by bit, the protagonist builds up the history in which he becomes the dictator of a future tribe. But the weird part—the compelling part—was this notebook in the story. It helped the main character translate between English and a future language. He finds that notebook in the future, steals it from his future self, and uses it until the pages are about to fall out. Then he copies all of the text into the same notebook, which he bought in the past—and loses it to his past self! In short, he fills the notebook with information from the notebook, and he wonders—where did the notes come from? He didn’t invent them. Nobody did. He only copied them. In some sense, it was like the notes made themselves.”
The Zombie shouted with delight: “That’s sci-fi, baby!”
The Baron ignored his friend’s joy. “Fiction writers call it the bootstrap paradox in honor of Heinlein, and it’s the bit that completes my story.”
“Which is?” Phyllis pressed.
The Baron finally smiled, allowing himself a small measure of pride in his story. “Sometime in the future, I think our descendants create time travel, and the first thing they do is look at their past. They discover all the ways they’ve already interfered in history, and they realize they’re trapped. Maybe they don’t have a choice because they’ve already done it, or maybe they just want to preserve the history that gave them time travel. Either way, they do everything exactly as they already have. They complete history as they see it.”
“What, they… repeat what they saw themselves do?” Phyllis asked.
“Basically, yes. They already used time travel to alter the past, so they do what they’ve already done, no matter what.”
“How?”
“They insert things into the past, or swap them out, or alter them—I don’t know the methods exactly—but for them, it’s a science. They see every so-called miracle they’ve ever done, every task they’ve ever offered for good or evil, and they set about doing all of it. In this story, the whole system of prestige is like the contents of that man’s notebook. It’s a translation medium between the goals of time travelers and the motivations of their entire past, all bootstrapped into being by time travel alone. That’s why it’s so random, so accidentally cruel. It’s noise in the flow of human history, the exact static needed to complete the future.”
Phyllis stared at him like he’d grown a second head.
He pushed on, knowing he sounded as mad as a hatter. “Maybe all of this is necessary before time travel can even exist. Maybe they’re just learning to become better time travelers, and all the little painful moments are acceptable costs. I don’t know. It’s a story, and none of it really matters. The point is that science can become the whole explanation. Even the motivation! And to me, that story is more convincing than any argument from faith. Any claims about souls or free will. It explains the time travel in the system itself.”
Phyllis released an awestruck chuckle. “Baron, that is the most overwrought, overcomplicated, and insane story I’ve ever heard about prestige. I can explain everything by saying there are gods, there’s magic, and there are souls. It’s that easy.”
“I just don’t believe any of that exists,” the Baron replied. “None of it is strictly necessary.”
“What about the afterlife then?” Phyllis asked. “What about all the little ways the gods prove themselves? What’s it all for, according to your story?”
The Baron folded his hands at his waist. “I think the wish for the afterlife means you get to participate in the future of this history—to become a time traveler, if you want. This ties into my eschatology, my end-of-days. I think they’re going to become excellent time travelers, maybe even perfect, and everyone who wishes to go to them will get to experience their process. Then, when they’re finished, they’ll collect everyone else from the past.”
“Collect? How?”
“They might copy us from the moment of our deaths, or maybe swap our bodies with dead meat. I don’t know. I’m just trying to explain Elizabeth’s behavior.”
“Wait—what does the Apostate have to do with anything?”
“She thinks life is worth living, but she also thinks the afterlife is good. That feels like a contradiction unless the gods are fundamentally kind.”
“You believe in universal salvation because of Apostasy, but you don’t believe in divinity?”
“Yes. Salvation doesn’t require divinity, only virtue. I think the gods will save us and give us a better world. Because that’s the moral thing to do if you have power. Money, time travel, the Zombie himself—in a narrow sense, it’s all the same. If you exert influence over the world, you should strive to save everyone from its evils. To make a better one.” He gestured towards LaGuardia airport, teeming with the potential violence of a secular superpower. “That’s why I’m going down there. That’s why I’m risking my life, and it’s why I tell people to refuse evil tasks. I won’t just say these things. I’ll do them with everything I have. I’ll make things better.”
“The virtuous atheist,” the Zombie concluded, putting a capstone on the conversation. “He wrote a letter to Tweed about this stuff after the Fall of France. He wanted New York to help fight the Thule cult in Europe.”
“It only made Tweed crazier,” the Baron lamented.
“Schuler seems to believe,” the Zombie noted.
“And he’s also crazy,” d’Holbach finished. “Listen, Phyllis, you don’t have to believe what I believe. I just don’t think they’re gods.”
“Point taken, even if I think you’re crazy.” She held out a hand to him. He took it. His fingers were cold and clammy, but she was warm and dry.
“I’m almost certainly crazy,” he admitted.
“I don’t scare him,” the Zombie quipped. “Does that sound sane?”
Phyllis chuckled—her entire answer.
The Baron smiled. “Exactly.”
Phyllis shook his hand firmly. “Baron, I wish you had two years of my prestige.”
The Baron felt his sinuses open; his joints loosened a bit. The aches and pains dulled against a pleasant high. No matter how stale the prestige might be, earning years of it always felt great. He checked his watch again. “The Soviets can’t wait much longer. Let’s head down to the airport and get in position. We’ll stop Denisov’s car, if we can.”
The Zombie pointed towards the roads in front of the terminal. “Denisov should be willing to threaten Malik with his Apple. We just need to get close enough. He’ll stop the car.”
“They won’t shoot him?” Phyllis asked.
“No, he’s wearing the Lazy Woman. They’d have to shoot him 9 or 10 times.”
“Hit him with a cannon,” the Baron suggested.
The Zombie grinned. “He’d launch his Apple and wipe them out.”
The Baron scratched his scalp. “We’re talking about a serious incident though, the deaths of Soviet diplomats on American soil. They’ll want to avoid infighting, and throwing the Apple is practically a declaration of occult war.”
“Makes sense,” Phyllis said. “About my role. I’m going to prepare an escape hatch for you two. Some kind of secular excuse to leave the airfield, no matter what happens.”
The Baron buttoned up the front of his brown jacket. “Do you have a plan?”
“See those ambulances in the motor pool?” She pointed towards LaGuardia.
He traced her arm. “Where?”
“Western airfield. See that road just after the low berm surrounding the airport? That’s Runway Drive. Look at the left end of the main terminal, just by the road.”
The Baron could see a single ambulance peeking out from the edge, a Superior Cadillac hearse, painted red. “They’re parking behind the terminal?” he asked.
“I think the civvie vehicles are there. Busses, shuttles, whatever. Once you guys go in, I’m going to flag down a Guard unit, tell them I’m with the Astoria Volunteer Firefighters and need help getting my ambulance. I can unlock and hotwire it with prestige.”
“Do you have any firefighter ID?”
“Nope. That’s why I’m a volunteer. I’ll flash them some keys. When I unlock the doors and start the car, they’ll buy it.”
The Baron trusted Phyllis could make that work. “We’ll split up here then. Phyllis, keep watch however you can, but don’t approach until it’s clear. I’ll try playing dead after I’ve handed over the Cat. The Zombie can join me on the ground or cover me and then run out.”
“Don’t even consider losing,” Phyllis said, “and don’t die.”
Author’s Note:
We enter the final arc!
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