Devil's Advocate Read online

“He’ll probably be a zillionaire one of these days, though.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  They went upstairs and stopped at the end of the short hallway where their rooms were. A small window looked out on the street, and Melissa peered through it and grunted.

  “Did you see that on the way in?”

  Dana looked and saw a pair of workmen in the process of fixing a sign above the big double doors of the old church. Melissa parted the curtain to get a better look at what it said.

  “‘Church of the Pure Light,’” she read. “Sounds like some hippies are moving in. Cool.” She let the curtain fall. “Hey, want to come in my room and hang for a bit? We could bully Mom into letting us get Chinese delivered and watch some bad TV.”

  “I have homework.”

  “The beauty of bad TV is that you can do homework and not miss much. Besides, you look like you need some downtime. You’ve got weird bug eyes.”

  “Just tired.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Dana thought about it. “Well, maybe. Today’s been a nightmare. I guess I do kind of need to turn my head off for a while.”

  “Good,” said Melissa. “And because it was my idea, I get to pick the first show.”

  CHAPTER 13

  The Observation Room

  11:03 P.M.

  “He’s really in gear tonight,” said Malcolm Gerlach.

  The other man in the small room, a technician named Danny, said nothing but made a small sound of agreement. The room was dark, lit only by the pale glow from a dozen small color TV screens. Each screen showed a live video feed from a different part of town, and on the screens, small dramas were playing out. It was clear that none of the subjects knew they were being surveilled. That was part of the process. They had learned the hard way that direct observation often created psychological reactions that limited performance. Science required precision, and it required an atmosphere of sterility.

  They watched.

  On one screen, a boy of twelve sat on the floor of his bathroom, arms wrapped around his head, tears and snot smearing his face, chest heaving as he sobbed, feet hammering the floor in panic. In front of him was a wet hand towel. Every once in a while the boy raised his head and stared at it with such ferocity that it was like he was trying to punch it with his gaze.

  “Move,” he snarled, but there was a note of pleading in his voice. Of desperation and fear.

  The towel did not move.

  Most of the time.

  On another screen, a seventeen-year-old girl lay on her bed. She was dressed in thick snow pants, a parka, and lamb’s-wool mittens. Her body gave a sharp spasmodic twitch with every fifth heartbeat. The lights in the room were off, but the hidden camera was filtered for thermal imaging, and it caught the steamy plumes of each breath. A meter on the camera recorded the temperature. When the girl had put on the coat, it was sixty-nine degrees. Now the meter read twenty-one. There was another spasm and the meter dropped to twenty.

  On a third screen, a blond girl sat on the floor of her bedroom staring into a full-length wall mirror. She wore striped pajamas and had her hair in pigtails.

  The image in the mirror showed a little boy of exactly the same body mass, but his hair was black, his skin pale brown. When the girl smiled, he smiled. When she blinked, he blinked. When she bowed her head and wept, so did he.

  The men in the room exchanged a look. Yesterday it had been a Chinese girl in the mirror. Last week it had been an adult male with Russian features.

  On the fourth screen, a teenage boy sat at his desk doing calculus homework. He worked with a slide rule and a pocket calculator. Books and papers were spread all around him, and he was writing furiously.

  The camera was angled to show his eyes. They were totally black. No pupils, no irises, no sclera. Pure, bottomless black. He was not looking at the paper but instead stared straight ahead, looking at nothing. His pen moved quickly as he filled up page after page after page in a small, neat hand. Some of it was calculus—the experts in the Syndicate were positive of that much. The rest, though? It was probably math of some kind, but not any form of mathematics known to man. Every now and then strange symbols would appear in the middle of the numbers and formulae. Those symbols were known to all the experts in the organization, and had been ever since the first ship crashed at Roswell.

  On the fifth screen, two teenagers were making out on a rug beside an empty bed. They had their clothes on, but their wrangling was going in an obvious direction. They were so completely lost in their kissing and groping that neither of them noticed what was happening in the room. They never saw the pictures of the girl’s mother turn, shifting subtly on the shelves. They never saw the milky-white film form over the framed picture of Jesus on the wall. They never saw the crucifix glow as it heated and began to melt.

  They never saw any of that, but the camera recorded it all.

  Gerlach bent forward to study what was happening on the sixth screen.

  A teenage boy lay tossing and turning in the clutches of an unbreakable nightmare. His bedroom was empty except for five items. The bed on which he lay, a dresser that was patched with duct tape, an old chair, a heavy metal crucifix that had been bolted to the ceiling above the bed, and a folding knife with a locking blade. The boy turned and writhed inside the nightmare, speaking in some language unknown to the two men who watched. They had forwarded tapes of everything the boy said to the language experts working for the Syndicate. The preliminary reports from those experts were deeply disturbing. They believed that when he was caught up in a certain kind of dream, the boy spoke in whole sentences, but the components of those sentences were made of words from several sources. Only a few words had been translated, and they were from a dialect of the ancient Aramaic language. Not merely a dead language, but specifically the dialect spoken in the region of Galilee, which differed in significant ways from the more commonly used dialect spoken in Jerusalem. The Syndicate linguists believed that the dialect used by the sleeping boy was the specific version of Aramaic that would have been used by Jesus and his disciples.

  But there were only a few words spoken in that dialect. There were also words in the version of Greek known as Koine and in a very ancient version of Hebrew that contained elements of Phoenician.

  Words from those languages made up 5 percent of what the boy said. Of what he screamed. The rest were either nonsense words or from a language unknown to the scholars who worked for the Syndicate. Some of those words were so strange that it clearly hurt the boy to speak them. More than once he woke gagging on blood from his torn larynx and tongue. As if such words were never meant for a human throat and mouth to speak.

  Tonight, though, he kept repeating an Aramaic phrase the experts had decoded months ago. A phrase Danny and Gerlach knew by heart now, even if they did not understand its meaning or implication. The translation of that phrase was written on a strip of white surgical tape that had been pressed along the bottom of the sixth screen.

  SHE WILL CHANGE THE WORLD. HEAVEN WILL FALL.

  It might have been a phrase of no great importance, except for the fact that when he said those words, he was screaming with absolute terror.

  The image on the seventh screen was of a pretty fifteen-year-old red-haired girl dressed in very modest pajamas lying sprawled on a bed that was soaked with her sweat. She thrashed and turned as she slept, and now the sheets and thin blanket were knotted around her. Above her bed, colored lights flashed and popped like tiny fireworks, but they came from nowhere and vanished without leaving any trace. No one in the Syndicate understood a thing about those lights.

  “No…,” she said, moaning it out as a protracted wail. “Please … no…”

  Danny said, “Do any of them know what’s happening?”

  “Some of them do,” said Gerlach. “Most don’t. Why?”

  “Well, because they look like they’re in pain. How do we know this won’t kill them?”

  Gerlach and the other man exchanged a look.

&nb
sp; Neither said another word, though.

  CHAPTER 14

  Scully Residence

  April 3, 12:33 A.M.

  Sleep was no escape.

  None at all.

  Deep in the night, Dana seemed to wake within a dream, knowing that she was dreaming, but afraid that this was every bit as real as the waking world. She knew that she didn’t have the lexicon to even put any of this into words that would make sense. The walls between fantasy and reality were broken, crumbling, irrelevant.

  And that was terrifying.

  Wasn’t that what happened when the mind fractured? Wasn’t that the definition of being insane?

  The dream unfolded like a movie.

  She woke in her room, but she wasn’t dressed in her pajamas. Instead she wore a dark suit that was almost masculine. Navy-blue pants and jacket, white blouse, the look softened only by a thin golden necklace from which her tiny cross hung and the lack of a tie. Her hair was stiffer, shorter, styled in a severe way she would never wear. Shoes with chunky heels.

  The clothes were nothing she owned, but they fit her. She felt like she belonged in them. But when she stood up, there was something odd. A weight on her hip. Dana crossed to the mirror as she unbuttoned the jacket, and when she held the flap back, she saw the gun.

  The.

  Gun.

  A small automatic snugged into a leather holster clipped to her belt.

  “What…?” she murmured.

  Dana knew guns. Military brats always did. Her brothers and Dad took her and Melissa to the range in any town where they lived.

  “You can’t touch a gun unless you’re going to be smart about it, Starbuck,” her dad said the first time they’d gone to a gun range. That was what he called her: Starbuck. And he was Ahab. It started when they’d first read Moby-Dick together. A book she loved and Melissa hated. A book that created a connection with her father that Dana didn’t always feel. A connection that seemed to be interrupted way too often. Sometimes he was hard, distant, cold; and his coldness chilled her and pushed her away. But then he’d smile and there would be a secret twinkle there, as bright as the North Star, and he’d call her Starbuck and she’d call him Ahab and things would be okay.

  The gun in the holster was not a model she had ever seen. She looked at the reflection of the weapon but did not touch it.

  It’s not yours, said a voice inside her mind. Not yet.

  Then she noticed that her reflection was wrong. Different. The face looking back at her wore the same frown she felt on her mouth, but this face was older. A woman’s face, not a girl’s. Not much older, though. Ten years? A little less. Old enough, though, to show that the years had not been easy ones. There was a rigidity to the face, a glitter of doubt and submerged anger in the eyes.

  And fear.

  There was real fear there, too. Hidden, compressed, repressed, shoved down, pushed back. But there.

  “I’m afraid,” said her reflection. Her voice was different, too. Older, not as soft, more controlled.

  “Afraid of what?” Dana asked her reflection, speaking as if this were a different person.

  The reflection answered. “I’m afraid to believe.”

  Dana licked her lips. “Me too.”

  The reflection looked sad, as if that was the wrong answer. “What are you afraid of?”

  Dana said, “I’m afraid that God is speaking and no one is listening.”

  “I know,” said the other Dana. Motes of dust swam in the air on both sides of the mirror, moving in perfect synchronicity even though the two Danas were so different.

  The woman with her face leaned close and whispered, “He’s coming for you.”

  “What? Who?”

  The woman suddenly gasped and drew her gun. It was so fast, with an oiled grace that could only have been possible after years of practice. She hooked her fingers on the edge of her jacket, swept it back, released, used her thumb to pop the restraining strap, closed her fingers around the gnarled hard plastic grips, slid the weapon out, raised it, took it into a two-handed grip, held it steady with one finger laid along the trigger guard. And all so, so fast. A heartbeat and then the gun was up. Pointed at Dana … no, pointed past her.

  The gun barrel was a black eye, steady and deadly, but the face behind the gun was twisted into a mask of horror.

  “He’s here!”

  Dana spun around toward the darkness that suddenly filled her bedroom. For one heartbeat there was nothing to see.

  And then he stepped out of the shadows.

  A man.

  The angel of light.

  Devil or monster or ordinary man, she didn’t know which.

  Tall, painted a cold blue by the spill of moonlight that slanted through her window. Dressed in clothes so dark it was as if he wore garments made of shadows. Wings folded behind his broad back.

  But he had no face at all.

  His curly black hair framed a face with high cheekbones and a strong jaw, but where there should have been eyes, a nose, and a mouth, there was nothing. Not a mask, she was sure. Nothing.

  And yet she knew that he could see her. That he was smiling with the wrong kind of hungers. That he was completely aware of her—both the real her and the fantasy older version in the mirror.

  The angel raised his hands, and Dana could see that he was holding up things he wanted her to see.

  In his right hand he clutched several long, wickedly sharp iron nails.

  In his left he held a crude mallet made of hardwood and steel.

  The fingers of both hands were smeared with blood.

  “Run,” whispered the older Dana. “I’ll try to hold him here. Run … run!”

  Dana could not run. She couldn’t move. She could barely breathe.

  The wings behind the angel’s back suddenly rustled, and then they spread out, huge, broad, filling the room behind him. The moonlight showed them to her with crystal clarity. They were not the soft, beautiful feathered wings of an angel of heaven.

  They were the black, leathery, mottled wings of something from the pit of hell.

  Dana screamed herself awake.

  CHAPTER 15

  Craiger, Maryland

  3:58 A.M.

  The angel sat cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by thousands of pieces of broken mirror, each reflecting a different version of his face.

  Some of them showed him as the world saw him, and he disregarded them with nothing more than a smirk. He knew that people loved masks because the truth was too frightening for small and ordinary minds.

  Some of the mirror splinters showed the face of the angel. Not one face, but many faces, because an angel is different to everyone who sees it. It, not him. Angels are above gender, above sexual identity. They are above everything that defines a being as human. And he, by his own definition, was not.

  There were other faces in the shattered fragments. Faces of monsters, faces of great beauty, faces of stone and metal and wood. Faces of such abstract forms that only a deeply insightful eye could see them as faces at all.

  And then there was the one face that looked back at him from the largest of the shards. His true face. A face no one had ever seen or even glimpsed except when he revealed it to them.

  Usually, though, the people to whom he showed his true self were so busy screaming that they could not appreciate the majesty of who he was.

  He wondered if the girl would be able to see his true face when the time came. He hoped so.

  He wanted her to. Just as he wanted to bring her into the family, to share with her the secrets of the Red Age, of the grigori and nephilim. He was certain that she would embrace the truth once she heard it.

  A photograph of the girl rested on the floor next to that special fragment of mirror. The picture was in color, very sharp. In it the girl was standing in her bedroom, buttoning her pajama top. She had lovely red hair. It was as red as the hair of Judas the Betrayer. He reached out and ran his finger across her picture, pausing briefly at her soft young thro
at.

  Around him the shadows crouched at the edges of the candlelight.

  CHAPTER 16

  The Observation Room

  4:01 A.M.

  Danny, the technician, took off his headset and tossed it onto the console. He lit a cigarette, put his feet on the edge of the console and crossed his ankles, and blew a stream of blue smoke into the air. Gerlach sat at a table behind him, slowly stirring packets of sugar into a coffee cup. Eight empty packets lay on the table, and Gerlach reached for a ninth.

  “Some of them actually see him, right?” asked Danny.

  “Some,” said Gerlach.

  “Isn’t that a potential danger? I mean, it’s a small town.”

  Gerlach snorted. “That’s part of his skill set.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “He controls how they see him,” said the agent.

  “Oh … that’s…”

  “Creepy?” suggested Gerlach.

  “Or something like that,” admitted Danny. “Freaky. Weird. Out there. Not sure what kind of label fits.”

  The agent looked into the middle distance for a moment, then shook his head slowly. “Personally, man, I doubt there are labels for what we’re into. No one’s gone this far before.”

  “Not even the Russians? I heard some wild stuff,” said the tech.

  “The Russians are two years behind us,” said Gerlach. “Maybe four. By the time they catch up to where we are now, we’ll have broken through to the next level.”

  “What is the next level?”

  Gerlach glanced at him. “That’s above your pay grade.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry; just don’t be nosy.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And stop calling me sir. I hate that.”

  “Yes, sir … um, I mean, sure,” Danny said, then began turning off the video feeds. “Did you hear? They’re giving you a new driver today.”

  Gerlach nodded. “I know.”

  “Regular guy says he has food poisoning.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You believe him?”

  The agent tore open the ninth packet, poured it in, and went back to stirring. “Not everyone’s cut out for this job,” he said.