I set my gun down, then opened the bag of cellphones, which rattled ominously. But when I set them out on the table I discovered to my immense joy that nothing worse had happened than the backs had popped off a couple of them. My coat, though, smelled like burnt oil and burnt bugbear (which was much worse). I wanted that stench gone, which meant I’d have to hang it in the garage until I could get it to the dry cleaners, so I started emptying the pockets. As I did, my fingers found something in the bottom of one of them.
“Well, shit,” I said, holding it up. “No wonder.”
The Amazons crowded in. “Is flash drive,” said Oxana.
“What’s more relevant is that this thumb drive came out of the Black Sun guy’s laptop,” I said. “I grabbed it when I was bailing out the other day. What with all the other stuff, I just forgot. I wonder what’s on it that made them send a bugbear after me? I must have really pissed them off. And where did they find the power or the skill to manage something like that in the first place?”
I stuck it into Caz’s computer, but the thing was encrypted up the yin-yang. We tried a bunch of predictable passwords, things like “Sonnenrad,” “Aryan,” “Fatherland,” but without luck. It occurred to me they might not be as stupid as people in the movies and the password might be “4Dkah2%9ja3mv5” or something. I opened myself a beer and thought about it for a moment, then went outside and walked until I had some bars on my phone.
“Clarence,” I said when he picked up. “I need you again. I’ve got a thumb drive from that bunch of neo-Nazis I keep having problems with. It’s related to the other thing. I need someone to get into it, but it’s got all this encryption shit I can’t deal with.”
He was silent for a long moment. “First of all, Bobby, I want you to start calling me ‘Harrison.’ It’s my Earth name and, as I keep telling you, I don’t like being called Clarence.”
“Okay, okay. Blackmailer. I’m sorry, Harrison, but I need your help. Can you come over?”
I could hear how pleased he was, and it made me want to put a wastebasket over his head and bang on it until he was less happy. “Thank you, Bobby. Now, as far as your thumb drive goes, I’m not really very good with that stuff.”
“Oh, shit, come on! You found that address ten times faster than I could have!”
“That’s different. That was just a records search. You want someone to break encryption.” He paused. “You know, that’s actually something Wendell used to do.”
“Wendell? As in your boyfriend?”
“He’s not really my boyfriend, Bobby. We’re seeing each other, but we’re not ready to make that kind of—”
“Don’t. Just . . . don’t. Tell me this—how did you meet him? Did he come up to you in a low tavern of some kind and say, ‘Hey, you’re really cute. I hear you work with Bobby Dollar—let’s hang out, you and me.’ Or anything similar?”
“No.” He was insulted. “If you have to know, I met him at a club, but I went up to him and asked him to dance.”
“If your relationship survived the dance floor, he’s either desperate or blind. Does he take a dog with you everywhere you go, even into restaurants?”
“You’re not funny, Bobby. And you’re the one who wants the favor, remember?”
I was getting desperate. Things were mounting up fast, and the number of questions still far outweighed the answers, especially adding the Black Sun Faction back into the problem. And on top of everything else, I no longer had a car. “Okay. I’ll give him a chance, but don’t bring him here. There’s a coffee shop on University Avenue, just on the Palo Alto side of the freeway. Can you find it? Bring Wendell, and we’ll talk. I have to walk, so make it twenty minutes, minimum.”
“Why are you walking?”
“Why are you talking? Twenty minutes. Wear a white carnation. The code phrase is: Gay Mafia Strong-arms Angel in Need.” I hung up before he could gloat.
• • •
Despite having to limp there on foot, I beat the pair by a few minutes, which gave me time to down the first cup of coffee I would need to make it through the evening. I don’t know how you’d feel, but having a very powerful angel laugh knowingly at me in the morning, then a squishy gelatinous mass with teeth try to kill me in the afternoon made for a wearying combination. What I really wanted to do was take a nap, because I was beginning to think that sleep might be a scarce commodity in the days ahead.
What can I say? The Highest knew what He was doing when He invented caffeine. Seriously, hats off to the Big Guy.
Wendell was just as fair-haired and handsome in person as he had been from my apartment window, with a mustache so neatly trimmed it almost didn’t look real. Even more depressing, he was a nice guy. Which didn’t prove he was trustworthy, of course. We shook hands. His grip was pretty impressive.
“I’ve heard a lot about you, Bobby,” he said.
“I have alibis for everything except the misdemeanors. I don’t worry about those.”
He laughed, which just pissed me off. I hate it when people I don’t want to like think I’m funny. I’m pretty much a cat that way. Scratch my stomach, and I’ll purr at you, but I’ll want to gut you with my claws even more than if you’d ignored me.
“No, really,” he said. “And not just from Harrison.”
I must have looked skeptical, because Clarence broke in. “Wendell used to be in Counterstrike!”
Now skepticism became something a little deeper. “You’re joking.”
“CU Nephelai,” Wendell said. “The Clouds. You were Lyrae. People still talk about you.”
The Clouds were one of the support groups for the frontline Counterstrike units like mine. We often took one of them with us to run special commo or mess with various kinds of machines. Somebody like that would be a goldmine for the kinds of things I might have to do in the days ahead—which meant it all seemed a little too perfect. Or was that just my paranoia engine running hot? Two different kinds of near-death experiences in one day can do that to a guy.
I quizzed him a bit, but everything Wendell said made sense. He knew the right people, the right things, even remembered the busted soda machine at Camp Zion that people called Saint Peter because it turned you away just when you thought you’d reached the Promised Land. That didn’t prove anything, of course. If I needed to, I could put together a spurious background in a day that would convince you I was a Secret Service agent or a children’s television host. Besides, I wasn’t worried that he’d been working in a CU; I was worried that he might still be working for our bosses, and I might be his current assignment.
“I don’t know if Clar . . . Harrison has explained to you, but simply hanging out with me is probably a capital offense these days. And what I’d be asking you to do is a lot worse than that. I don’t like other people getting in trouble because of my problems.”
Wendell gave me that sensible, clear-eyed look I was already beginning to resent. “Harrison told me a lot. Enough to know that I think you’re trying to do the right thing.”
I shook my head. “Easy to say now. Harder to say when our bosses toss you in the dumbwaiter and drop you into the burning basement for keeps. This is serious shit I’m in, and none of it is fun. Why should I trust a novice?” Why should I trust anyone was the real question, but I didn’t have much choice, I simply couldn’t do this without allies.
Wendell nodded. “I first figured out I was gay when I was at Zion,” he said. He looked at Clarence and smiled. “I kind of freaked out. I went to my loke . . . I mean my NCO.”
I almost smiled myself. “Don’t worry. I know what a CU loke is.”
“Right. Of course. Anyway, I went to see him, and I told him. I was fresh out of Heaven and I figured something had gone wrong with me. I didn’t know if I had been given a homosexual body or I’d messed up the new body with a homosexual soul, but obviously I wasn’t doing things right. He said, and I’m pretty
much quoting him, ‘Son, soldiers have been humping soldiers a long, long time. Hell, those ancient Greeks went into battle without any pants on, ring-a-dings swingin’ in the breeze! And any army grunt will tell you that most navies are as queer as dinner theater. Now me, I don’t care if you like ladies or gentlemen. Just remember, No means No. Be respectful of your fellow soldiers, because you all have to protect each other out there, and that means you gotta trust each other.’ That’s all he said.”
“Nice story,” I said after a moment. “But I’m not sure . . .”
“Hang on. Three months later, our loke refused to participate in an operation because there were hostages. Children. A demon had got into a guy, and he’d gone into a preschool with a machete and was threatening to start throwing bodies out. Raguel—that was my NCO—said let the regular mortal police handle it, because right now it was just ordinary crazy, but if we stepped in it might escalate into a Heaven-Hell thing. He thought the kids had a better chance if we let the cops handle it.”
“But you know the rules,” I said, as seriously as if I agreed with all of them myself. “You can’t choose which orders from Upstairs to obey. Our job is to protect souls, and as far as Heaven’s concerned, that was the important part. You don’t let a demon go once it’s broken cover on Earth.”
“Yeah, but I’ve been an advocate too, just like you, Bobby. I deal with souls, including a lot more children than I like. None of us wanted any dead kids, no matter how much confetti they were going to throw at them when they showed up in Heaven. But my loke got cashiered for that. I never saw him again. When I found out, I decided that what Heaven wanted wasn’t always right, and I’ve never seen anything since that convinced me otherwise. Scared the shit out of me at the time, but I don’t get surprised much anymore.”
Clarence reached over and squeezed his hand.
I honestly didn’t know what to do, whether to trust this guy or not. If Sam had answered the two or three messages I’d left him in an attempt to reconnect, I could have asked his opinion. Sam’s advice is almost always good—not that I follow it most of the time, but it’s nice to know why I’m about to fuck up. Without him, I was on my own. Of course, I wasn’t completely sure of Sam, either. Did it really even matter whether Wendell was on the up and up? If our bosses wanted to bust me, they already had enough evidence to bag me, wrap me, and send me straight to Hades. And if Wendell was working for Anaita, instead—well, that was different, but it might still be better to have him on the inside where I could keep an eye on him. This was assuming that if he was crooked, Clarence didn’t know. But maybe Clarence was in on it, too.
I swear, this is the kind of stuff I think about all the time. Because I have to. No wonder people say I don’t play well with the other kids.
“Fortune favors the brave,” had become my official motto lately. I was hoping the full version was something like, “Fortune favors the brave, the stupid, and the hopeless-but-at-least-entertaining,” because “brave” isn’t my best trick. But if I was going for broke (and that was pretty definitely what I was doing) there was no point holding back at the last moment. I mean, you can say, “Okay, I’ll run out in front of the motorcade and shoot the Pope, but only in the arm.” They’re still going to be picking Swiss Guard machine-gun bullets out of your corpse afterward.
“Give me a ride back to my place,” I told Clarence. “Wendell might as well meet the rest of the gang.”
So that was me—signed up and in for the long haul. Sergeant Dollar and His Howling LGBT Commandos against Heaven itself.
• • •
After Clarence had shown Wendell around and they’d both had a chance to catch their breath about the decor, I let Wendell have Caz’s computer to see if he could crack the Black Sun’s drive encryption. Meanwhile, I filled Clarence in on my last few hours. He was suitably agog.
“Anaita?” He said it almost in a whisper. “You’re joking. You went to her house?”
“Hey, I just brought my second crooked angel to our safehouse, Junior. I live dangerously.”
“Harrison, remember? And are you calling Wendell crooked? Hang on, are you calling me crooked?”
“One way or another, babe. You two are now officially either cheating Heaven or cheating me. Take your pick. Now help me examine these pictures from Anaita’s stately pleasure dome.”
It was slow going because we had to do it all on Oxana’s phone. She’d taken a couple of hundred pictures, and although the first dozen or so seemed to be pieces of expensive furniture, and Oxana herself could only explain that she’d thought they were interesting, we quickly got to Anaita’s visitors’ waiting room—not the place I’d been, but something a bit more official in another part of the house. The room was large and tasteful, but the walls were covered in photos, and Oxana, bless her shuriken-loving little heart, had taken close-ups of almost all of them. Unfortunately, the photographs seemed, if not useless, at least not immediately helpful. Most of them were staged publicity shots from various dinners and awards ceremonies or even less formal public situations, rich people’s parties and things like that. The number of faces I didn’t recognize outnumbered those I did, despite the fact that Anaita/Donya clearly knew a buttload of important and even famous people. She had a picture of herself with Jon Bon Jovi, for God’s sake. I mean, isn’t that about the weirdest thing you’ve ever heard? A goddess turned angel thousands of years old at the minimum, and she puts up a picture of herself with Bon Jovi? I supposed it was all part of her desire to create a human persona. Yes, I guess if you were a rich Iranian exile, you might well display pictures of yourself with rock stars and Ronald Reagan.
“What exactly are we looking for?” Clarence asked after a while.
“I don’t think she would keep the horn at her house,” I explained. “It just doesn’t make sense. The one place everyone would look.”
“But you said she had a private army of guards.”
“She does, but think about it. Who’s she hiding this from?”
“Everybody.” Clarence frowned. “I mean, everybody in Heaven.”
“Yeah, of course, which is why she wouldn’t keep it in Heaven. But who does she really need to keep it from?” He was still thinking. “Come on, Junior—who did it belong to in the first place?” I looked over at Wendell, but he was at least pretending not to be listening too closely.
Clarence nodded. “Eligor, of course.”
“Yep. And if there’s anyone who could get around guards—or under them, or even through them if he wanted, it’s Eligor. Hell, those fucking Black Sun chumps got a bugbear into my car with the windows closed! How hard could it be for one of the most powerful demons in Hell to get access to Anaita’s place? At the very least, she’d have to be constantly on guard. Some vacation from the stresses of Heaven that would make! And I got the distinct impression she likes pretending to be a mortal and lady of the manor.”
“So what are you looking for?”
“No, it’s what you’re looking for, Sunny Jim. Remember, you’re in this with me, right up to your collar buttons. I need you to figure out where all these pictures were taken, when, and who was there.”
“And what are you going to be doing, Bobby? Strapping on your pearl-handled six-shooters and calling out the Black Sun Brotherhood? High noon in the middle of Centennial Avenue?”
I kind of liked the idea, actually, but I shook my head. “No, I’ll deal with them later. I’m going to be making a systematic check on all of Donya Sepanta’s holdings. Because if she’s got another property, and she’s probably got more than a few, then that’s where I’m going to start looking for Mr. Eligor’s lost noggin-topper.” I thought I might get a little help out of Gustibus on that, since the private lives of Heaven’s biggest stars was his vocation, but I didn’t want to announce that to everybody here, which would only make them think I wasn’t going to be working as hard as they were.
“Mr.
Dollar?”
I never really have got used to being called “Mister.” If I knew my father, I’d probably be one of those guys who says, “No, Mr. Dollar’s my dad.” But of course, I don’t. “Yeah, Wendell?”
“I got it open—the neo-Nazi group’s files. It wasn’t that difficult, honestly, I mean, these guys aren’t pros or anything.”
“Hallelujah.” I picked up my beer and went over, Clarence following. The Amazons were still looking through the pictures on Oxana’s phone, oohing and aahing over the security arrangements as much as the expensive furnishings.
“I actually unlocked the drive a few minutes ago,” Wendell said, “but right away I saw this video file labeled Die Beschwörung that had its own encryption, and I just got that open. I really think you want to see this.”
“Why? Oh, please, it’s not Uruk the Aryan Beast doing the Pants-Off Dance-Off, is it?”
“I wish,” said Wendell. Even based on our short acquaintance, he seemed strangely grim. “Just look.” He clicked. The video started.
It was a dark room, that was all I could see at first. I was prepared for it to be another cult-murder, or maybe even the one I’d already seen. But something else was going on. “Oh, my sweet Lord,” I said as I began to understand. “These Black Sun people really are nuts.”
The Amazons and Clarence crowded in behind me to look over Wendell’s shoulder. “What do they do?” asked Halyna.
“Well, I might be mistaken,” I said as I watched the tiny, poorly-lit figures setting out their implements and readying their books. “But I’m pretty darn sure those crazy Nazi kids are trying to open a doorway to Hell.”