Devil's Advocate (The X-Files: Origins #2)(26)

Point Four …

Was there a Point Four? She had to wrestle her thoughts into order. Yes. Point Four was for five dead teenagers. Five of them. Five car accidents. Five lives snuffed out. Were they really five accidents or five murders? She had no idea. Part of her ached to find out, to grab Ethan and get every detail out of him. Part of her was absolutely terrified at the very thought. Fifty-fifty split.

Point Five?

She hoped there wasn’t one.

“Dana … Dana!”

She snapped her eyes open and realized that everyone else was standing, their yoga mats rolled. The instructor stood in front of her, offering a tolerant and slightly quizzical smile.

“During class I thought you couldn’t even concentrate, and then you go into a meditation so deep you don’t even hear your name when I called you four times. You really went deep, didn’t you?”

“Oh,” said Dana. “Deep. Right. Real deep.”

She got up, grabbed her mat, and hurried out.

Corinda was standing right outside the yoga room, her face grim, eyes filled with strange lights.

“I think we need to talk,” she said.

Dana paused. “Talk about what?”

“About your dreams,” she said. “About five murdered kids, and about the fact that the devil is visiting you.”





PART TWO

THE LARGER WORLD



The more perfect a person is on the outside, the more demons they have on the inside.

—Sigmund Freud





CHAPTER 26

Craiger, Maryland

4:08 P.M.

Agent Gerlach sat on the bottom step and looked at the thing in the room. Naked, painted in blood, grinning as if the world was a joke and only he understood the punch line.

Gerlach sighed heavily, feeling older than his thirty-one years. Feeling tired. He was very aware of the weight of the .45 Colt model 1911 he wore in a nylon shoulder holster. He even thought about how many of his problems might be solved by putting the barrel of that gun against the back of the maniac’s head and pulling the trigger.

Across the room from him, the madman sat cross-legged, naked, smeared with blood, eyes filled with strange lights. Between the killer and the agent lay hundreds of Polaroid photos that showed red ruined things that had once been teenagers. Gerlach had seen those bodies firsthand and he had done what was necessary. It was ugly work, and difficult, but there was a science to it. Car accidents were useful. All that crushing compression, all those sharp bits of glass, plastic, and metal flying around. No one could do the math to work out the ballistics of every piece of debris. You could hide almost anything except a bullet wound. There was a long history of car crashes that had solved problems for the Syndicate and so many other off-the-books agencies. Gerlach wasn’t sure he could even count the number of problems he’d made go away over the last few years. These deaths were different. The latest one had presented its own unique challenge of hiding a different set of injuries.

The photos on the floor told the real story, though. And here was the madman responsible, his body painted red, surrounded by enough evidence to lock him away for a hundred years.

“If you want me to apologize,” said the angel, “you’ll have a long, long wait.”

“No,” said Gerlach. “I wouldn’t wipe dog crap off my shoe with an apology, especially from you.”

“Do you want me to explain?”

“Nope. I know why you did it.”

“Why?” asked the angel.

Gerlach nudged the closest Polaroid with the toe of his shoe. It was a picture of a black girl screaming. “Because you’re a psychopath.”

“There is so much more to it than that.” The angel’s white teeth looked very white. Fractured lines of sunlight slanted down through what was left of the stained-glass window, painting his face with the image of Roman soldiers hammering nails through the wrist of Jesus. The glass was broken and so the soldiers appeared headless.

“No doubt,” said Gerlach, “but ask me if I care. Ask me if I spend a rusty minute of any day giving any thought toward the inner workings of your mind.”

The angel looked up at the cracked and peeling paint on the ceiling, at the exposed laths in the walls. At an elaborate spiderweb spun across the window, from which hung the empty husks of dead moths upon which the spider had fed. “Maybe you should,” said the angel.

“Maybe. But if so, I’ll worry about it tomorrow,” said Gerlach. “My problem today is whether you are going to hit your deadlines.”

“Deadlines,” echoed the angel, enjoying the taste of the word.

“We have a lot riding on this, compadre,” said Gerlach. “Do you even know how much money it’s taken to move all these families into this junkhole of a town? New construction, improved infrastructure, a rebuilt school system, not to mention providing jobs for everyone who isn’t part of the program. Day care, too. All of that costs money, and every day that we have to wait for you, we are burning off something north of one million dollars. Every single day.”

“Money belongs to the human world,” said the angel.

“Yeah, yeah, and you’re not human and by the light of the Red Age you’ll be revealed in all your glory as a nephilim. Right. I’ve heard it a hundred times. I understand how you see things. But let me say this—I don’t know what you are or how you’re becoming whatever it is you think you’re going to become. Angel, devil, mutant, sideshow freak, whatever. Doesn’t mean a thing to me. It’s a side effect. Whatever makes you what you are is a by-product of genetics taking a sharp left turn somewhere in your family history. Or, hey, maybe it is supernatural and you’re really turning into a demon from hell. I don’t know and, frankly, I don’t care. The only thing I care about is the program.”