

THAT NIETZSCHE THING

by

Christopher Blankley

Copyright © 2013 by Christopher Blankley

Smashwords Edition

other books by Christopher Blankley

The Cordwainer

The Bobbies of Bailiwick

The Bobbies of Bailiwick and the Captive Ocean

STEM

The Raft (The Case of the Barefoot Detective)

@zombpunk
Chapter 1

The girl was dead and no fooling.

Back in the day, I was a cop. It's important that you know that, or little of this crazy story will make any sense...no, scratch that, _none_ of this crazy story makes any sense, so you'll have to bear with me.

I was a cop, and the girl was most certainly dead.

How did Dickens put it? Dead as a doornail? Well, she was that and then some. _Dead_ dead. I saw my share of corpses working Homicide, so I knew dead. And she was the genuine article. Dead.

Got that? Good, because it'll get important, real quick.

I was a cop, but that didn't really mean all that much. I'm not going to pretend like I was a good cop. I wasn't a bad cop, as in a crooked cop. I was honest. Honest as I could be. What I mean is that I was nobody's idea of a smart cop. Not by a long shot.

Right when Geneing was at its height, cities like Seattle were so desperate for warm bodies in uniform they were handing out badges and guns to almost anyone. And it was steady work with a civil service salary. Nothing to sneeze at.

But it was mostly just cleaning up the corpses. Tagging and bagging. It wasn't like there was any reason to investigate anything, we always knew the identity of our killer before we ever found a body: Geneing. Nine times out of ten, somebody ended up dead, it was because of Geneing. It didn't matter if Genies ended up stabbing each other in a fight, or one stepped out into oncoming traffic. It was always Geneing that killed them. Different symptom, same disease.

You didn't have to be Sherlock Holmes.

So, it was mostly paperwork. I could do paperwork. And I didn't mind the blood. Lots of people got sick at the sight of the blood.

The girl's death stuck out queer because she'd truly been murdered. A real crime. Sure she was a Genie, and nobody was ruling that out as a cause of death. But somebody had actually gone to the trouble of killing this girl. A few somebodies by the look of the body.

A real murder was newsworthy. Even back then. Long before I was able to reach the crime scene, the TV trucks were already there. They were like sharks in the water for that sort of stuff. Anything that was a little sensational and could grab a few rating points. And the girl was sensational, alright. Just the stuff for the dinner hour news: young, pretty, dead and thrown in a dumpster. That's what they called pay dirt.

By the time I arrived, the uniforms had everything cordoned off the scene with their reams of yellow tape, and the news cameras were rolling beyond the perimeter.

I was the entirety of Homicide that evening. I'd have to go it alone. Just my luck to accidentally stumble on some real police work.

I remember buying myself some time, lighting up a Kools. TV always liked that shot, it was always guaranteed to get me on the news: Homicide detective looking stoically down at the victim, methodically tapping out a cigarette. Just like in the movies.

But for once, I wasn't doing it for the cameras, I actually needed a moment to collect myself. When I laid eyes on that girl, I had to take a second or two to choke back a throat full of bile. That girl was in a bad way, even for a Genie.

I'd learn the next day that she'd been kicked around, but good. Her neck was broke and her jaw crashed. She'd been worked over by some sort of giant animal or a group of guys with bats.

But at the scene, all I could see was the blood and the flesh in amongst the trash bags of the dumpster. She was naked and twisted all to hell. The sight made me regret my chosen profession a little. But it was my job to fish her out of there. And I had to do my job.

Like I said, I was cop, but that didn't really mean all that much. I just cleaned up messes. Mostly.

The next day, the coroner's report arrived along with a whole rash of shit from my captain. Turns out the girl was rich, or at least from a rich family with connections to the NeoCons in the other Washington.

The 24/7 news was showing their video in a tight loop with me lighting up and looking down into that dumpster. The Feds went ballistic. White House lit a fire under the FBI, which lit a fire under the chief, who lit a fire under my captain that ended up burning my ass.

If shit rolls downhill, I found myself in the lee of a valley, because I got my asshole reamed, but good. What kind of idiot was I? Standing over a dead body and smoking like that? Didn't I know who the dead girl was?

I didn't, and for once it actually mattered. Suddenly, for the first time in years, people were paying attention to how I did my job. I wasn't used to that.

The girl's name was Vivian Montavez. Her dad had been a senator once-upon-a-time, but what he was now was the guy who'd came up with the so-called Latin Strategy, the plan that had changed the NeoCons from a bunch of dumb-fuck, backbench, old-school-tie radicals into the dominant political movement in both local and federal politics.

Turns out old Edgar Montavez was the guy who'd brought the Hispanic vote into the NeoCon tent, whole and complete. And by the 2050s, the Hispanic vote was all that decided elections. That made old Edgar big. President Cassidy basically owed the guy his job.

Edgar Montavez's daughter showing up dead in dumpster on my watch was seriously bad news.

See, the NeoCons weren't much more than a single issue outfit: they were the party that said it was really ready to finally get serious about drugs in America. Not like the namby-pamby, hippie-dippy, dope-smoking Progs.

The NeoCons were going to get something done about Geneing, The Latinos heard this and turned out at the polls. After all, they were dying in droves, just like the rest of us. Black, white, brown, Christian, Jew, Geneing didn't give a shit. Immigration policy, voting rights, minimum wages laws be damned, the Latinos were ready for the government to crack down hard on the Gene pushers, or whoever was putting their kids in coffins. And they voted for whoever promised to get it done.

To have one of the NeoCons' own succumb to the plague, show up dead in dumpster, reeking of genetically-modified endocrines...that shit was bad.

So, I got down to business. I didn't have to be told to do it. Very quickly, any evidence that Vivian Montavez had died in that back alley got conveniently lost or stolen. I knew how to do my job. I knew how to sweep something like that under one big-ass, motherfucking rug. I knew how to play the game. I changed names on death certificates and falsified reports. Vivian Montavez vanished, replaced by just another Jane Doe. A Gene Genie. One of a million.

Whatever, it didn't really matter. The girl was dead, after all. Dead and no coming back. I doubted she'd care what name was on her toe-tag when she slid into the furnace. The senator would never claim her body. She was too hot to touch. She'd burn with the rest of them, the dozens upon dozens of corpses Homicide cleaned up weekly, incinerated en masse in the Morgue's regular Wednesday-night fry. All the better to hide the evidence. Once the body was gone, so was Vivian.

Or so I thought. But I'd miscalculated something. The agitating from DC kept shaking our quiet little tree, right up until the girl's body went missing. Then, holy hell broke loose.

And I sat right in the middle of it.

It's hard to say what exactly happened. No, scratch that, I know exactly what happened, but I'm not going to tell you at this point because you'd call me a fool. At the time, when the girl's body vanished from the Morgue, I had no more fucking idea what was happening than you do now.

Of course, the powers-that-be screamed conspiracy. The Progs had snatched the girl's corpse before we could incinerate the evidence. That didn't seem likely to me, but whatever, it was a working theory.

The Feds came down on the situation like a ton of bricks. The FBI found some pretext for having jurisdiction in the case, I can't remember what. Next thing we know, it's like Mogadishu in downtown Seattle. Black semi-trailers rolling in, and armed SWAT storming the Town Hall. We were suddenly a city under siege. They sent everybody but Seal Team Six. And I bet they had them on standby, sitting on a carrier off the coast.

The FBI brought in one of their new "Response Units." Nice name for an occupying army. They setup Ops right in front of the Town Hall, blocking off Sixth Avenue. The semi-trailers transformed like Voltron into a sprawling complex of communications, logistics and command. Everywhere men in dark suits were talking into headsets, as IT geeks tapped away at consoles. It was a thing of beauty to watch, like watching a well-executed, synchronized drill team go through its routine.

Everywhere, people were toting iron. Men in body armor, sporting FBI in big yellow letters, carrying assault rifles and submachine guns. If they planned to shoot dead everyone in Seattle and sort the corpses, they were ready. Otherwise I didn't see the need for all the guns. It made everyone tetchy, as you can imagine. But the NeoCons did nothing in half measures. To them, everything was a war.

This was when my life really started to get complicated. This was when I met Constantine.
Chapter 2

" _You_ are Detective Fonseca?" Special Agent Constantine said across the foldout table. He looked me up and down like I was something he'd scraped off his shoe.

Maybe I was; we sure contrasted: Constantine in his tailored black suit, me in corduroys and my vintage, fur-lined, leather bomber. I took my smokes out of my pocket and flipped open the lid of the box. Constantine proceeded to scowl in a fashion that told me, in no uncertain terms, that smoking was not allowed in his GI Joe Mobile Command Center.

"That's right," I replied, putting away my pack of Kools. I only wanted a smoke to have something to do with my hands. They felt like two slabs of pork hanging from my arms. I had no idea what to do with them.

"Sasha Isaac Fonseca?" Constantine rolled my name around in his mouth like he was chewing on marbles. "What sort of name is that?"

"Sephardic Jew," I said, not really thinking about who I was talking to. "Via North Africa and Mexico, pre-Porfiriato."

Oh fuck. That had done it. Now Constantine was giving me that look, the look like I was one of _them_. I wasn't totally sure exactly which "them" I was silently being accused of being, a kike or beaner. Did it matter? Ascension to power had not meant the NeoCons had lost their Social Conservative, Good Ol' Boy, Southern roots. If the special agent ranked anywhere in the NeoCon's New World Order, he'd be a true believer.

"But I was born in Cleveland, if that helps," I added, feeling the need to apologize for my lack of WASPness. I tried putting my hands in the pockets of my jacket, but that was no good. It was uncomfortable sitting in the chair like that, so I pulled them out. Man, I needed a cigarette.

"You were the LI on this case?" Constantine held up a printout that was undoubtedly the Montavez case.

"I guess." I played dumb.

"Female, twenty-three," he read. "No identification or distinguishing marks...a Jane Doe?"

"That's right." I scratched the stubble on my chin.

Constantine leaned back in his folding chair and looked me over. "A Jane Doe who up and walks out of the Morgue in the middle of the night. All on her own?"

I shrugged. "I wouldn't know anything about that."

"No, you wouldn't. But you're the lead investigator on a murder case without a body. Doesn't that interest you at all, Fonseca?"

"Sure," I said, sarcastically, "that's _real_ interesting."

Constantine didn't like my tone. "Aren't you, at least, a little curious as to what has happened to her?"

"No, not my department."

"Oh?" Constantine crossed his arms and gave me a self-satisfied smirk. "How's that?"

"I'm Homicide," I chuckled. "She's dead. She can't get murdered _twice_."

"Cut the bullshit, Fonseca. I know you falsified this report."

I said nothing.

"I know what DNA match Forensics got back on the body."

"Hey—" I started.

"You and I both know who the girl was," Constantine interrupted. "I'm not upset that you falsified this report. On the contrary, this was some quick thinking. If I had my way, we'd pin a goddamn medal on you. But, what I need to know, Fonseca, is who else did you tell about this girl before you got it in your head to change the names?"

"Nobody," I answered quickly. For once, I could tell the truth.

"As I said, cut the bullshit."

"No, seriously." I held up my hands in surrender. "The God's honest truth."

"Somebody knew where this body was, Detective. And who she really was."

"If they did, they didn't hear it from me."

"It would be very serious mistake to interfere with my investigation at this critical juncture," Constantine said formally. Me? Cut the bullshit? He needed to cut the bullshit. He was treating me like a perp. Hell, I'd used that line myself a thousand times. Did he think I was an idiot? What back-of-the-matchbook, FBI correspondence course had he just graduated from?

" _Your_ investigation?" I asked defensively. "Last I checked, Special Agent, I was still the LI on this girl's case." I tapped the sheet of paper before Constantine.

Constantine gave me a look like I'd just crapped on his loafers.

"The murder might be your case, Detective," Constantine said slowly, "but the theft of Vivian Montavez's body—"

"Then you do admit that the dead girl _was_ Vivian Montavez?" I leapt forward, interrupting.

Constantine swallowed his words. "The theft of the dead girl's body..."

I relaxed in my seat.

"Is a Federal matter."

I didn't want to call him out on it, but I seriously doubted there was any Federal Code against body-snatching. Maybe something from the 19th Century...but really? One stolen corpse was hardly a Federal case, even if she had been Vivian Montavez. "I'll find you the girl's body," I answered. "There was no need for you to..." I looked around at the bustling command center. "Invade..."

"You'll forgive me if I lack confidence in the local administration," Constantine smirked. "We can't rule out the possibility that local officials might be among the perpetrators. We're well aware that most here in this city are...sympathetic..."

"Sympathetic?" I laughed. "We're only missing one body here, Special Agent. This isn't exactly Al-Qaeda."

"Nevertheless..."

"Nevertheless, nothing. We can handle it."

"The Bureau has more then enough resources in country to hand this case," Constantine said, flatly.

In country? They were at war.

"Your assistance will not be required."

"You are in the City of Seattle," I said. "It is customary to liaison with—"

"It's not the City of Seattle, anymore," Constantine interrupted. "The Federal Courts have taken supervision of the city government. As officers of the court, the FBI now exerts executive control over this city."

I met Constantine's comment with silence. I was dumbstruck. "What?" was all I could manage.

"The City of Seattle is now a ward of the Federal Courts, Detective."

"You can't do that!" I exclaimed, a cigarette almost to my lips.

"That will be for the SCOTUS to decide. Next year, when they're in session. Until then, there is precedent. Title IV of the Civil Rights Act. Geneing and related drug criminality, being a disproportional menace, borne on the backs of minority communities. It is beholden on the Federal Government to intervene where local, entrenched institutions are unable to protect those most vulnerable." Constantine sounded like he was reading his speech from a note card. But he wasn't. They'd made him memorize it.

"This is an occupying army," I said in disbelief, looking around at the gathered throng of armed men.

"The Federal Courts will oversee the civil administration of this city until such a time as the Geneing menace has been combated."

"You've got to be kidding."

"No, Detective, I certainly am not."

"All to get Montavez's body back? You're insane."

"No," Constantine shook his head. "This has been a long time coming. President Cassidy won election on the platform of combating the Geneing epidemic head on. Look around you. This is what combat looks like."

"But...you can't...you can't _do this_ ," I said, panic gripping my insides. "The people won't stand for it."

"They will, and they'll thank us for it," Constantine said, raising to his feet. "This is what the people of Seattle voted for – what the people of America voted. Action. Not talk."

"You can't invade an American city," I said, hoping there was some legal truth to such a statement.

"We can, Detective," Constantine said, without a hint of mirth. "To save it from itself."

He was fucking insane. There was no other explanation.

"Thank you for your assistance, Detective Fonseca," Constantine continued, tapping the sheet of paper on the table. "But the murder of this Jane Doe, and the subsequent abduction of her body is now a Federal matter."

He was about to give me the bum's rush. I could feel it. I'd gotten it plenty in my day.

I was about to find myself out of a job.

But I still had one card to play.

"I suppose you know where she was living?" I said, matter-of-fact. They might. I had no idea what they might know from the Sen. Montavez end. It was possible he knew where the girl had been living. But I doubted it. And all the girl's personal effects, everything incriminating, from the dumpster...well, they'd sort of disappeared between the crime scene and the station. Into a garbage can on Second and Pike, to be precise.

"Well," Constantine hedged, "we are investigating..."

I had him. I had something he needed. I wasn't out of a job just yet.

"'Cause it's possible that there might be a few personal effects of the deceased that didn't quite make it into the chain of evidence..."

"If you're withholding information, Detective..." Constantine leaned forward across the table, fixing me with an accusing finger. "...I won't hesitate to prosecute you to the full extent of the law."

"You don't have to tell me how to do my job, Special Agent." I smiled, looking at the tip of his angry finger. "You've just got to let me do it."

Constantine looked at me. For the first time all day, he was speechless.

"I guess that makes us partners, then," I said with resignation, reaching for my smokes. If I was going to be stuck with this hick jack-ass, he was going to be stuck with a bad case of second-hand smoke.
Chapter 3

So, I had Constantine by the balls. At least until I'd shown him exactly where the girl had crashed before her death. That bought me maybe an hour or two. No more. But I was scrambling, clawing for anything to keep me afloat, any way to hang on to my job.

If Constantine was serious about the Feds turning Seattle into a Federal protectorate, then there wasn't be a snowball's chance in hell that the likes of me would be kept around. I wasn't political at all, but those on the force that weren't outright, card-carrying Progs, were at least soft on the issues the NeoCons always harped on about – Seattle itself was soft on the issues the NeoCons always harped on about. A haven for hippies, Genies and abortion-huggers.

Sure, the Federal takeover might not hold up in court, but that would take months to play out. As sure as I was standing, the NeoCons would certainly take the interim period to pack the city payroll with right-minded folks and make sure that all the positions of power had their prayer rugs correctly oriented toward DC. Constantine wouldn't lift a single support of his mobile command center until he was sure he had Seattle neatly in his pocket.

No, once Constantine was through, Seattle wouldn't be fit for a guy like me.

So, it was with my best interests at heart that I set out to string the whole Montavez case out for as long as possible.

I couldn't see there was any real mystery behind the murder and subsequent abduction. The body would show up. If the Progs had taken it, they'd sooner or later play their hand. If it was just some sort of sick joke...well, she'd wash up in the Sound in the morning. As I said, she was already dead. There wasn't really much more that could happen to her.

I'd gotten the girl's address out of a small notebook I'd found in a purse in the dumpster next to the body. Her wallet was gone, along with any money or phone, or any ID, but the battered notebook, with a bunch of torn out pages, had been tossed aside by her attacker as nothing more than trash.

All the remaining pages in the book were blank, but I did that old Hardy Boys trick where you shade in the impression left by the force of the pen writing on the sheet of paper above the top page left on the pad.

Of course, I didn't have to do it with any fucking piece of charcoal or lemon juice, or however they did it in the books. I had a high dpi scanner and software custom designed for the task. Fiddle with the chroma long enough and everything that'd been written on the pages earlier in the book showed up as shadowy outlines. There was always a lot of crazy overlap, as each successive page added its own contents to the resulting image, but usually you could make out something in the mess.

I could make out the street name, Galer, and the number of an apartment. I vaguely knew the apartment building, up on Queen Anne Hill. But what the girl had been writing over and over, on page after page in her little notebook, was what really caught my attention. It freaked me out enough that I decided to toss all the rest of the evidence away and falsify that report. If the chief had gotten a look at what I saw on that computer screen, he'd have told me to do the same without blinking an eye.

On my computer screen I saw Q after interlocking Q forming a crazy mosaic, covering every inch of the reconstructed handwriting. Hidden amongst the Q's I could just make out the street address – a note she'd perhaps handed to someone – but all the Q's, that was freaky. Q after Q after Q.

Okay, I should back-fill here, because you have no idea what I'm talking about. Probably because you're not supposed to know what I'm talking about. All of this stuff, the Gene Genies, Q, everything that happened, has successfully been expelled from the official records. It's like it's some sort of state secret. Though I don't know why. None of it really shows the Progs in a bad light. But then Progs never like anything that they can't control. Never have, never will. And none of this was under their control. Maybe that, to Progs, is showing them in a bad light. I don't know.

Anyway, you might have some memory of Geneing and what it was. And that it's been done away with. Sort of like the Black Plague – but of drugs. Something horrible that happened to other people long ago, but nothing anyone worries about anymore.

I guess that's not too far from the truth. Progs might not actually say it, but they hint that their social programs did away with it. Like the New Deal and the Depression. But don't believe it. I'm here to tell you what really happened. And the Progs didn't have a fucking thing to do with it. Social programs or not.

Geneing first hit the streets in the early 20's, selling itself as the ultimate designer drug. A drug you only had to take once and then, forever, you could get high whenever you wanted.

It wasn't really a drug, though. Not technically. Sure, it got you high, but not in the usual way. Geneing was a very targeted form of gene therapy that resequenced DNA to naturally produce opiates, or at least the neurotransmitters involved in opiate intoxication. One hit and you were high forever.

Okay, suppository it was tailored with verbal and non-verbal triggers that allowed you to turn the intoxication on or off – a smell, a sound, a safe word – but I sure as hell never heard of any Genies really using them. Once someone took that shit, they were perpetually stoned out of their minds. They never ran out of dope, never had withdrawal symptoms, never woke up the morning after.

Most didn't live long enough to have regrets. The constant flood of endorphins inevitably fried their cerebral cortex. But most simply died of thirst or starvation, lost in the bliss of their perpetual high.

But those that lived long enough to want to clean up their act, quickly discovered that there was no sobering up from Geneing. They'd willfully modified their most basic genetic code. The damage with irrevocable. There was no way to turn it off, even for the Genies who chose to willfully be sober. The trigger was always there, ready to open the floodgates of Elysium with a single thought. They had to live with the constant, torturing temptation ready to reclaim them. It took them all, eventually. Geneing wasn't just a drug, it was a terminal condition.

And all of this, it was rumored, was the work of one man. Some genetic scientist who'd developed the gene therapy and unleashed it on the world. Nobody knew who he was, or why he'd created Geneing, but many Genies spoke of him like he was the progenitor of a new race. A Moses-like character who'd finally freed humanity from the shackles of living.

In these circles, he came to be known as Q. I don't know if it was a "Star Trek" reference, or James Bond or something, but the title Q was soon taken up by the mainstream news. It entered the common consciousness.

I know it's all but forgotten now, but back then, Q became the whipping boy for pretty much all of society's ills. Who was behind the Geneing epidemic? Q. Who was responsible for the outbreak of rampant crime? Q. Who was causing instability in the Middle East? Q. Who'd caused the downfall of Western Civilization? Q. Why was the Government running a deficit? Q. Who kicked the dog? Q.

Calling him America's Most Wanted would be a major understatement. NeoCons, Progs, the Salvation Army, everyone wanted this guy dead. No one since bin Laden had such a big target pinned to his back.

And Vivian Montavez liked to draw curly Q's...

Of course, it didn't mean anything. If she'd liked to draw swastikas I wouldn't have thought she was in league with Hitler. But all those Q's and the girl killed so violently...and then for her body to turn up gone...

That was the kind of business nobody wanted to get mixed up in.

Certainly not a beat cop working toward his pension.
Chapter 4

The FBI was not short on transportation.

Where I, as befitting my position as a Seattle Homicide Detective, rolled in my personal, 25-year-old Honda Accord – for which the department paid me sixteen cents a mile – Special Agent Constantine led me to shiny new, black Dodge Charger, one of rank of perhaps two dozen identical cars parked under the Interstate.

He beeped the keyless entry and opened his substantial driver-side door. I looked down at the tinted glass of my door. It looked like a snapshot of billowing smoke.

"Wipe your feet before you get into my car," Constantine ordered as he climbed in behind the wheel. I tugged at the door handle and found it still locked. Constantine was yanking my chain. I wanted to tell him what I'd wipe all over his Night Rider muscle car, but I held my tongue. All I had to bargain with was the girl's address. Once we were there, I'd have to scramble to find something that would continue to make me useful to the Special Agent. I didn't need to start antagonizing him yet.

Still, what a fucking prick.

Constantine flicked the door locks, and I pulled open my door. Dropping into the leather bucket seat, I rolled down the smoked, glass window and reached into my pocket for my Zippo. As the Hemi V8 purred to life, I flicked my lighter open and lit the tip of the cigarette, still dangling from my lips.

Constantine reversed out of his spot, hit the brakes, shifted into first and turned to fix me with an annoyed glare. "You're a real piece of work, you know that?" he said, and the Charger growled as it leapt forward.

"What?" I shrugged, feigning ignorance. But, of course, I knew exactly what. I just can't let shit like that go. You know, let a dick be a dick. I guess it's part of what makes me so lovable.

Constantine pulled out from under the freeway and onto James, cutting across traffic against the light.

"Take Sixth north," I said. And the Charger rumbled before the Town Hall. Constantine took a right, pulling onto the one-way, and really let the engine roar to life.

Now that car could move.

"You don't like me, do you?" I said to Constantine as I blew smoke out of my open window.

"I know you too well to like you," Constantine seethed, not looking away from the road.

"You met me twenty minutes ago."

"I know your _type_ ," Constantine corrected. "Before this – before Seattle – I was in Oklahoma dealing with a teacher's strike." He turned to give me a dismissive glance. "I know your kind all too well."

I laughed, smoking my coffin nail. There were a lot of ways to take a comment like that, but I just let it slide off my back. "Good looking fellas, you mean?"

"Career make-job applicants. Professional, public sector human speed bumps. What half a century of taxes and cronyism has turned this country into."

"Come on, Special Agent, tell me what you really think."

"I think you're worse than a due-nothing layabout. People like you and the teachers back in OK are a far bigger social disease than the Genies. At least they're getting in nobody's way. You, on the other hand, take a salary and fill a slot that could be occupied by a perfectly proficient professional. But no, the people of this city get you. Fonseca, I'll tell you something for free: Cities like Seattle are being torn apart by a dead-eyed, zombie menace, but it's not the Genies."

Now I was starting to get offended. "Look, I do my best, but—"

"'Yeah, but,'" he interrupted. "It's always 'but' with your type. If only we had more money...if only we had more staff...no, the only but that's a problem with your sort is the one behind you: your lazy ass. Well, that's what we're here to change." Constantine looked around as he drove, up at the tower blocks of condos as downtown turn into Belltown. "Just like the country, this town needs a roots-to-branches reorganization. And that's what we're here to do."

I wasn't smiling anymore. This whole deal, the men with guns, wasn't just about Federal wardship of our incompetent city government. Special Agent Constantine was one of Cassidy's so-called Hot Kids. I'd read about them in papers. He was one of the small army of ideologically pure, young NeoCons the new President had recruited from the country's small liberal-arts Christian universities. They were something like a right-wing Peace Corps, to be parachuted into the worst banana republics the United States had to offer. They were nation building at home.

Rumor was, the halls of Brigham Young were now little more than a ghost town. A whole generation of young Mormons were putting their missions on hold to join up with the Cassidy Administration.

But Constantine didn't look that young. And he sported a badge and a gun. Still, that didn't mean he hadn't drunk the Kool-Aid.

"Take a left onto Denny, when you run out of road," I said. The Space Needle was looming about us. "You should be more grateful. Without me, you wouldn't have Montavez's address."

"I hope you're not laboring under some mistaken idea that you're making a good first impression," Constantine said, turning onto Denny.

"No," I admitted. I'd finished my smoke and tossed the filter out the window. I hit the control to raise the smoke-gray window. Maybe I was fooling myself into thinking I could keep my job. I had no sympathy for the Progs, but I certainly was no NeoCon. Shit, I hadn't even bothered to vote in the last election, that's how political I was.

"The Progs have run this country into the ground," Constantine went on. I doubted he cared if I was really listening. He was speaking for his own benefit. "Fifty years of deficit spending, fifty years of affirmative action, fifty years of promoting loyalty and political correctness over competence. Well, those days are now over. The country has the right man in charge, ready to make the tough decisions to turn this nation around."

"What the fuck is a _Neo-_ Conservative, anyway?" I interrupted. Hell, if I'd kicked the hornet's nest, I might as well kick it real good. "Isn't that like being the skinniest chick at a Weight Watchers?"

"Conservatism can't simply be a reactionary principle, Detective. To stand astride history screaming 'Stop!' does not win elections."

"Yeah, but isn't that why we have the Progs? You sure sound like nothing more than Progs in red ties. Can you name one unique policy you guys support that team blue doesn't?"

"I can name three," Constantine answered.

"Oh yeah?" I perked up. This should be good. I would have guested invading sovereign nations, but the Progs were pretty good at that, too.

"The tripod of Neo-Conservatism. The three C's?"

"The what?"

"Three C's," he said again.

I could only answer with a blank stare.

Constantine held up a single finger as he drove. "Competency," he said. "Competency is the first leg of the tripod on which our new America will stand. Competency has to be returned to our public institutions. Starting at the top. No more Presidents who can't lead, no more Congressmen who can't legislate. No more judges with no wish to judge. But the country will heal locally, too. Teachers must teach again, and police, police. That means you, Fonseca." He pointed at me with his single finger.

"And the first C leads to the second." Constantine added a finger to his count. "Community. _Why_ aren't teachers teaching and why ain't police policing? Because fifty years of Progressivism has destroyed the local communities. That's what must be rebuilt. Community is the second C. Without community, there's no pride, and without pride there's no competence.

"You're a lousy cop, Fonseca, because you don't care. Why should you? Who are these people you watch over? Family? Friends? No, we did away with that in our culture a long time ago. Long before Geneing began. Geneing is the symptom, Fonseca, not the disease. We can't eradicate Geneing because we don't have the community infrastructure to combat it. All we've got are cops like you. Cops who think it's just a job. They clock in, they clock out. That just isn't going to cut it anymore. You have to _care_ to be a cop, care what happens to the lives that you're watching over. And that's the final C."

Constantine gave me three fingers as he steered the Charger with his other hand.

"Compassion," he went on. "None of the other two mean a damn thing without compassion. That's Neo-Conservatism, Detective. Compassionate Conservatism. Those are the three C's, those are principles Cassidy is building his administration on – Competence, Community, Compassion." He ticked them off on his fingers again. "That's the recipe for a new nation, Fonseca. You'll see those words over the front door of the Town Hall before this week is out. We'll live and breathe them. All of us. Seattle will be the model. But, they can't simply be words."

"Turn on the Queen Anne," I said as the light turned green before us. I didn't have anything else to say. There wasn't much to say. Competence, Community, Compassion? Hardly Liberté, égalité, fraternité...more like Travail, Famille, Patrie...

Fitting, because Seattle was starting to feel a little Vichy...
Chapter 5

Vivian Montavez's flop was a four-story walk up in the shadow of one of Queen Anne Hill's large, digital television towers. It was a worn, old 1920s building, but looked well maintained. It didn't add up as the usual Genie flop, but I reserved judgment. Constantine parked the black Charger in the two-minute loading zone.

He climbed out of the car and pulled a large, black handgun from a holster under his jacket.

"Isn't any need for that," I said. "You'll freak out the locals."

Constantine ignored me, stepping up to the front doors of the building. They were unlocked, or rather the lock was broken. Constantine pulled one door open and stepped inside, keeping the automatic by his thigh.

I waddled on behind, fishing another Kools out of my pack.

Climbing four stories, Vivian's apartment was the one with the view of town. The hallways smelled of mildew and cooking food, and the muted sound of live music came from the lower floors. Constantine climbed the stairs with purpose, peering through the doorway at each landing, securing his six.

I stumbled on, lighting my smoke and taking a long drag. At floor four, we walked the full length of the corridor and came to the door of 4C. Constantine shuffled to the right of the door and raised his pistol to eye level, readying for the assault.

"On three," he said as I stood, uncomfortably. It worried me, what might happen if that big gun of his went off. "One, two, three!" he counted off and sprang forward, covering the door. But I did nothing. There was a potted plant by the door. Some sort of rubber plant. As I got closer, I realized it was plastic. It figured. There wasn't enough light in the hallway for anything to grow. Still, it was pretty bushy and I stuck a hand into its soil. It took me only two seconds to come up with a key.

I held it up and showed both sides to Constantine. I put it in the latch and opened the deadbolt.

Constantine pushed past, sweeping the small, one-bedroom apartment. He called "Clear!" from the bathroom, bedroom and kitchen. I reached for my belt, drew my .357 Rhino, and sauntered in.

Constantine's SWAT antics might have been silly, but he was right about one thing: I'd been through enough strange doors in my time to know it was best to do so with a gun in your hand.

A self-portrait welcomed me to Vivian Montavez's apartment, hanging in the small, rectangular hall. The portrait was of a laughing, gorgeous dark-haired woman, showing off a mouth of perfect teeth.

I was just able to recognize the subject in the painting as the dead girl I'd last seen on a slab in the Morgue. She was hauntingly beautiful, with large, black pearls for eyes that instantly consumed you.

If Vivian had painted the self-portrait, she was a pretty good artist. I mean, I didn't know a damn thing about art, but it was pretty nice. Sorta of a weird greeting to have in your own apartment, maybe. A little narcissistic. But hell, I sure liked looking at it.

Left there was door to a small kitchen. Old, maybe as old as the building, but it looked clean and lived in. A percolator was on the stove and a basket of fruit hung over a small breakfast table. Right was a bathroom, the smell of lavender distinctly in the air. I stepped past the portrait, though a bead curtain and joined Constantine in the living room. There was one more door that must have been to a bedroom.

The view from the window was pretty spectacular. The Space Needle stood directly before us, with the skyline of downtown beyond.

It was certainly no Genie flop.

It was warm, the radiator under one window still pumping out heat. A small flat screen stood in one corner, before a futon and a rickety looking chair. It wasn't fancy, maybe a little dirty, but it wasn't anything like the thousand Genie flops I'd seen in my days.

This wasn't the apartment of someone who didn't give a shit. It was...homey. At least, I felt instantly at home. As if I'd been in the room before.

There was well-used ashtray on the coffee table before the futon. I put out my cigarette as Constantine holstered his gun.

"This is it?" he said, somehow dissatisfied.

"This is it," I said. What did he want?

"We'll get the Forensics guys in," he said, pointing at the ashtray. "So, maybe you don't want to contaminate the crime scene too much."

Crime scene? "It's just the girl's apartment," I said. "There's no reason to believe she was killed here."

"It doesn't matter," Constantine dismissed. "We'll still have Forensics give it a sweep." He looked around, hands on hips, examining the small, cozy living room. The art on the walls was eclectic, like it'd been built up from thrift store shelves. There were a few nick-nacks and a whole wall of books. I could tell by watching Constantine's stance, he had no idea what he was doing.

I just wandered around, getting a feel for the place.

I don't know if it's how most cops do it, but I always tried to get in the head of my victim first. Accepted wisdom probably considered murder cases about the perpetrator – method, motive, opportunity and all that – but I never subscribed to that theory. Nine times out of ten, I'd always found, people get themselves killed for some reason. Murderers hardly ever hang out, hiding in bushes to leap out at random victims. More often than not, the corpse did _something_ that caused their life to collide with that of the murderer: pissed off the wrong asshole at the wrong time, humped the wrong guy's woman, or snorted the wrong dope. Facts about the victim were always a hell of a lot easier to uncover, too. Chiefly because they were conveniently dead and couldn't interfere with the investigation.

And if you could figure out what the victim _did_ , what positive action they took that inextricably sent them down the path to oblivion, you were a whole shit-can closer to figuring out who killed them.

Sometimes that small detail came along almost as an after though.

What had Vivian Montavez been into that'd gotten her beaten and thrown into a dumpster?

It just didn't add up.

Nice girl. Rich, powerful family. Artsy, beatnik apartment. Kitchen full of food, bathroom full of perfume. No, Vivian was no Genie. But according to the labs from the corpse, she'd tested positive to the genetic markers of Geneing. Her DNA was altered. Was she that weird border case of people who could actually handle the dope? Use the triggers to successfully turn it off? No, they didn't exist. All my time on the force, and I'd never met one. Sure, you'd find a husband and father who said he could turn it on and off when he wanted to, but dig a little deeper and you'd always find a rotten core. A life about to implode on itself. But I didn't smell anything rotten about Vivian's apartment. Just that slight scent of lavender from the bathroom.

Then I saw it on a side table. It took all my physically effort not to react for it and tipoff Constantine.

"Perhaps the Senator will want her personal effects," Constantine said across the room, he'd picked up a tchotchke off a table. "At least, we can give him that."

"You should get the number off the land line," I said, thinking quickly. I was making it up on the spot, but it was not a half-bad idea. "Run her calls. We should do a full canvas of anyone she'd had contact with."

Constantine turned to the classic handset hanging in the kitchen. He picked up the phone and looked at the number scrawled on the receiver. His momentary distraction was all I needed. I reached for the side table, scooped up the e-reader and slid it into the pocket of my bomber.

Constantine read aloud the phone number. I wrote it down on my notepad, tore out the page and handed it to him.

"We'll see what this turns up," Constantine said, looking at the slip of paper. "And what Forensics finds—" His phone interrupted him, ringing deep with his suit. At least, I thought his phone was lost somewhere in the pocket of his suit. He didn't reach for it, he simply tapped behind his ear. I didn't see any device.

He nodded and muttered in his own private conversation. "No, they have to file the complaint with the Circuit Judge on Tuesday..." he said to the air. "No, _Tuesday_. I know. I know Monday is a federal holiday. Why do you think we chose this weekend?" Constantine turned for the door, still talking on his phantom phone. "Well, then they're shit out of luck, aren't they? No, no, I'm done here, I'll be back at Command in fifteen minutes. Can you wait here until Forensics arrives? Fonseca? Detective?"

It slowly dawned on me that he was talking to me again. "Oh, what? Sure?" I stammered.

That was enough for Constantine. He turned and stepped out in the hall, continuing to berate the other end of his phone call. He was leaving me high and dry on the top of Queen Anne Hill, but I didn't mind. Frankly, I was glad to see the back of him.

I waited a full two minutes before I removed the e-reader from my pocket.

I sat down in the rickety chair, pulled Vivian's ashtray closer across the coffee table, and lit another smoke. I took a puff off the cigarette and relaxed into the chair.

I felt oddly at home, surrounded by the dead girl's things. Perhaps my "getting into the victim's head" shtick was working too well, but I couldn't remember ever feeling so comfortable in a strange place.

Perhaps that was why the e-reader had stood so sharply out of focus against the backdrop of the apartment. It just didn't fit. The wall of books, the thrift store art, the nick-nacks, all screamed of a woman interested in the tactile sensation of things. I'd never met Montavez other than touching her mutilated corpse just long enough to drag her out of a dumpster, but somehow I knew she wasn't the kind who read books on a tablet. The bookcase was so neatly organized, and its contents so obviously a work of love that the e-reader had to belong to someone else.

Perhaps the murderer? It was quite a leap of faith, but the e-reader in the apartment couldn't just be a coincidence. I smoked my Kools and flipped it on, hoping for pay dirt.

If I could solve the Montavez murder myself, recover her body, that would be quiet the slap in Constantine's face and his three C's. It was the kind of thing that might save a guy his civil service paycheck...

But the e-reader contained only one book. Its title made me cough.

Q. Just Q. My finger hesitated on the select button.

Could there be anything good inside this document? Anything I really wanted to learn?

I told myself not to be such a pussy and then hit select.

My disappointment was audible.

The document opened to show a screen full of scrambled text. Page after page of random characters and punctuations marks. It was encrypted. Fuck. I switched off the e-reader and returned it to the pocket of my bomber.

It'd been a long shot, anyway. Now I was well and truly up shit's creek without a paddle.

I smoked my cigarette and mused, looking at the view from the window.

I knew a guy at the university who might be able to decrypt the file. He had the computing power and the fan-boy interest in police work to put in the hours to help out a cop. But did it really matter? I thought, looking at the skyline of Seattle. If Seattle was now officially a Federal wardship, was any of this really my problem?

Maybe. I looked around at the apartment, at the comfortable but simple decorations and the small, kitchen table set for two. Maybe, for the first time in my life, I should care about something more than my next paycheck.

After all, people like Vivian Montavez deserved better.
Chapter 6

I awoke to two phones ringing at once.

One was my cell, chirping like a disposable little bird in my bomber. A sat up and dug around desperately for it, my half-awake brain somehow sure the call was critically important.

The source of the other ringing phone I couldn't quiet place. There was a moment of dislocation as I tried to remember where I'd fallen asleep.

I looked around, pausing in the search for my cell phone, to examine my surrounding: four walls and a heavy door, the skirting of the walls curved to allow easy sluicing. That's right, I'd found an empty drunk tank and bedded down for the night. The second ringing was from beyond the crack in the open door.

"Hello," I said wearily into my phone. The other phone continued to ring outside the jail cell.

"Funny, Sasha. _Really_ funny," the phone said. Was it? I didn't remember playing any jokes. Someone, somewhere answered the other phone. I was eternally grateful.

"What? O'Day?" I asked my handset.

"Yeah, really funny Sasha. I always appreciate the Seattle Police wasting time and computational resources like that."

Johnny O'Day. The Mick bastard. He was my guy at the university. The guy with the computers and the time to decode the e-reader I'd found in Montavez's apartment.

Yesterday, while waiting on the Fed's Forensic team, I'd done the regular footwork and interviewed the girl's neighbors. Nothing out of line there. She was quiet, well-behaved, no boyfriend, no loud parties. When the CSI guys showed up, I'd hopped a bus and paid a visit to O'Day. Uncharacteristically, I was in rush to return downtown to occupied Seattle and submit my report to the Special Agent. Maybe I figured a little brown-nosing couldn't hurt.

But for the life of me, I couldn't remember playing any joke.

"Did you decode that e-reader?" I asked. "Was it something stupid?"

"What?" O'Day replied. He faltered, now as confused as I was. "No, of course not. I _didn't_ decrypt your e-book, ass-hat."

"Then, why are you calling me?"

"Because—" O'Day exhaled. "Are you kidding me? Are you trying to tell me you have no idea?"

"No. What?"

"Wow, great work, Sherlock," he said sarcastically.

"Look, Day, you woke me up and now you're starting to piss me off. Do you want me to come over there and start checking your pill bottles against prescriptions? 'Cause I'm betting your Oxy count doesn't exactly add up."

"Relax, relax," O'Day said, defensively. "Jesus, Sasha, calm down. I thought this was some stupid joke, that's all. If you're saying it isn't, it isn't. Okay?"

"Okay," I took a breath. "Now, Day, slowly and in words of two syllables or less: Why haven't you decoded that e-reader?"

"'Cause it can't be decoded, Sasha. Everyone knows that. It's Dark's Novel."

"What's that?" I asked. "A dark novel?"

"No—"

A head popped around the open cell door. It was the Duty Officer. "Hey Fonseca, phone for you."

I put my hand over the mic of the cell. "What? Oh, thanks. Just a sec."

"It's one of those FBI douches."

"What? Constantine?"

"Yeah, that was it."

"Thanks, tell him I'll be right there."

"He didn't sound like the kind of guy you put on hold."

"Just..." I looked at my cell phone then at the Duty Officer. "Just tell him to cool the fuck off, okay?"

"Okay." The Duty Officer shrugged and disappeared from the doorway.

"O'Day? Are you still there?" I asked my phone.

"Yeah. Are you listening, Sasha?"

"No, what was that about a dark novel?"

"Not a dark novel," the irritation in Day's voice could have climbed out of the phone and slapped me. " _Dark's_ Novel. As in A.E. Dark. The novelist. Haven't you ever heard of him?"

Something in the back of my memory said _War of the Planets_ , but I wasn't about to swear to it.

"Didn't he start some weird cult? Like L. Ron Hubbard?" That I was more sure of.

"Rosicrucianism, right. But he didn't start it, he resurrected it. The Order of the Rose Cross dates back to Dark Ages—"

"Okay," I interrupted. I knew O'Day. If I let him fly off on a tangent, it'd take half an hour. "So, Dark wrote a novel, and it's encrypted on the girl's e-reader? Why is that funny?"

"It wasn't..." O'Day growled in frustration. "It wasn't encrypted on the e-reader. Well it _was_ , but wasn't. The novel _is_ encrypted, but not just on that e-reader. Do you get what I'm saying?"

"No," I said in all honesty, "what are you talking about, Day?"

"The novel was encrypted by Dark, himself. In 1964. Pre-microchip, do you understand? He did it all by hand. No one has ever been able to decrypt it. Nobody knows how he was able to do it. It'd have taken forever, even with all the super computing power we have today. It's the biggest fucking mystery in mathematics since Fermat's Last Theorem. Are you seriously telling me you've never heard of it?"

"What? No," I said. What the fuck was he talking about?

"And you, smart-ass, send it to me to decode for you," Day said, his voice dripping with irony.

"Okay, now I'm starting to get the joke," I said. But I wasn't. "So, nobody has ever read the thing?"

"Nope."

"How do you know it's even a book? Maybe Dark liked practical jokes. Maybe he thought it was all just some big wheeze."

"There's a whole school of thought that agrees with you, Sasha. But that hasn't dampened people's curiosity. Dark released the encrypted text in published form. He paid for a run of ten thousand copies himself. Do you know what that cost in 1964? If it was an elaborate hoax, he fronted a mighty lot of money for a joke only he could laugh at."

"Let me get this straight: Dark published a whole book no one could read?"

"Not at the time of publication, no. But Dark stated in interviews that when the technology existed to decode the book, humanity would be ready to read its contents."

"How humble." I laughed. "But we still can't decode it? Even ninety years later?"

"Nope. And it's not through a lack of trying. There are whole on-line communities dedicated to the novel. Websites, chat-rooms. Shit, you're telling me you've never heard about any of this?" I shrugged at my phone. Day went on. "The prevailing wisdom is that he made some mistake in his mathematics. He did the whole thing by _hand,_ remember. All the multiplication of primes, then typed out the encrypted text on an Underwood. If he made one tiny error in the whole process, one misplaced decimal point, hit one wrong key, then the whole thing would be..."

"Gibberish," I finished his sentence.

"Right, gibberish. That's the conclusion our best computer scientists have come to, that Dark's last novel has been lost. That all we have is a locked copy with no key."

"But I'm guessing Dark's Rosicrucian cult hasn't accepted that."

"Possibly. But they're all dead now. Defunct. The whole order, en masse, took the Geneing dope at the beginning of the epidemic. Before people really understood what the shit did. The Rosicrucians no long exist as an organization. Cult or otherwise."

"But the girl had the novel on an e-reader..." I said to the empty jail cell.

"What's that, Sasha?" O'Day asked over the phone.

"Nothing. Thanks for your help. I owe you a beer."

"No problem," O'Day said casually. "What about the e-reader?"

"Keep it," I said.

"Thanks. Well, then, talk to you later," O'Day said, finishing the call.

"Wait!" I called out. "What was the title of this guy's encrypted novel?"

"Well, that was encrypted, too," O'Day replied, "so no one knows..."

"So people just call it _Dark's Last Novel_?"

"Pretty much. But, in the encryption community, it's casually known as _Quelle_. You know, after the theoretical gospel of the Bible, the one Mathew and Luke both draw from. The one no one will actually ever get to read, because it's long since been lost to history. Get it?"

"Yeah, yeah. _Quelle_ , huh?"

"Yeah. Though, like whoever owned this e-reader of yours, that's usually shortened to just _Q._ "
Chapter 7

By the time I'd finished with my call with O'Day and emerged from the cell, Constantine had long since hung up on the Duty Officer. He'd left orders that I was to join him in front of the Town Hall, in his Cobra Commander Missile Headquarters, ASAP. I asked the Duty Officer if he'd really said ASAP. He had.

Dickwad.

I meandered up there, after taking my morning shower in the police union's locker room. It was my routine: sleeping the night in whatever drunk tank wasn't occupied and showering at the gym.

I hadn't had a steady apartment for, maybe, two years. I bunked down every month or two with whatever girl I could sweet talk into taking me in. But that never lasted long. I didn't make good company. Cops don't, coming and going at all hours. The drunk tanks were always there.

As long I stayed light on your feet, living rough wasn't too bad. The trick is to keep your personal possessions to a minimum. What I had, I kept in the trunk of the Accord.

The glamorous life of a Homicide detective. Just like _Law & Order,_ huh?

Anyway, I was late for Constantine's little party, and his operation was already underway. I climbed up the folding steps into the darkened trailer of his Command HQ. A whole brace of computer geeks were running ops for some Special Forces deal. Constantine was watching it all unfold on a large bank of monitors. The techs were muttering things like "Indigo seven, sitrep" and "Eyes on your six, Charlie Captain." It all looked pretty cool, like some video game. It took me a few seconds to realize it wasn't. That real men with guns were running around with deadly intent.

"What's this?" I asked, sliding up to Constantine, knocking a Kools from my pack.

"Tac-30 is serving a warrant, connected to the Montavez murder," Constantine said, not looking away from the monitors. SWAT officers were breaching a door and button-hooking through the entryway.

"Warrant? What warrant?" I asked, watching the action. The fire team woke up some poor old man and tossed him out of his bed, face first onto the floor.

"We got a flag on the phone records. A felony arms conviction. We're bring him in for questioning."

"You sent a tactical team to bring in one guy?"

"As I said, he has an arms conviction."

"How old is his sheet?" I asked.

Constantine just shrugged.

The Tactical Team had the old man cuffed and were pulling a black sack over his head.

"What judge did you get out of bed in the middle of the night to sign off on that?" I took my lighter out of my pocket and flicked it open.

"No smoking in here," Constantine said. I flicked my lighter closed, leaving the cigarette unlit. "No judge. We have broad-based FISA warrant covering or presence in Seattle."

"FISA?" I snorted. "He's no terrorist."

Constantine finally turned to look at me. The coldness of his glare told me he really didn't understand the distinction.

I'd seen enough. I turned, climbed back down out of the trailer and lit my smoke.

Constantine followed me out, joining me at the curb as I smoked away. "That was good work, yesterday," he began.

The compliment took me by surprise. "Work?"

"The report you submitted last night...the interviews with Montavez's neighbors..."

"Oh," I drew a breath through my cigarette. "Yeah, well, you know, standard procedure."

"Forensics came up blank. Only your suggestion to run the phone records has, so far, bore any fruit."

I looked back at the command trailer. I decided not to tell him what I thought of his fucking fruit. "Be careful, Special Agent," I said instead. "Any more compliments, and I might start to think I'm demonstrating competency."

Constantine ignored me. "We're heading out again," he commanded, straightening his tie.

"Got a black sack to throw over the head of another telemarketer?" I tossed the butt of my smoke into the gutter and squashed it under the toe of my boot.

"No, Tac-30 can handle those warrants." He reached into his suit pocket and removed a small tablet. He quickly pulled up some information. "What we have is a lead on Q," he said casually.

I coughed, spluttered, then began to choke. Was he kidding me? Did he know about the e-reader? When I'd cleared my throat, I looked him over, curiously. No, he was serious. He wasn't trying to get a reaction out of me.

"Q? Like Q, the mysterious mastermind behind the whole Gening epidemic?" I feigned shock. I did a pretty good job of it, if I do say so myself.

"That's the one."

"What does he have to do with the Montavez murder?"

"I haven't a clue," Constantine said, sighing in a fashion that let me know he really didn't care. "But we scrubbed Vivian's email exchanges with her family. She stated on more than one occasion, in correspondences with her brother, that she was in Seattle to track down Q. There's very little else, however, to go one. Except she made a single transaction with her father's credit card for $1264 at a book store here." He showed me an address on the tablet. I knew the place, it was a used bookstore by the university. "Otherwise, she was self-sufficient. Curious that she'd make such a large purchase with no other history of spending her father's money. We should run the lead down."

"We?" I asked, prodding the bear.

"You know this location, correct?" He showed me the tablet again. "I bet you've even met the proprietor..."

"I have."

"Then the interview will go smoother with you present."

"You need my help?" I said. I wasn't going to let it go. Not after his speech yesterday.

Constantine just looked at me with an angry stare.

"You need a cop," I answered for myself. And it was true. That was what Constantine needed. Where did that fit into his three C's?

I still hadn't let it go as we sped north on the Interstate in the black, roaring Charger.

"I'm just saying that you can't swoop in and, day one, be better cops and firemen and teachers and social workers and council members and mayors than the people who've done those jobs for years."

Constantine took the exit for the university. "You honestly think we can do worse?" he said.

I don't know why we were debating it. I just couldn't stop poking the bear. Truth be told, Constantine's existence irritated me. I might not have had any serious political convictions, but I knew what I didn't like. And I didn't like politicians getting into my shit. NeoCon or Prog.

"Look around, look at this town," he said as we pulled to a stop to merge on to the surface streets, he gestured at the town around him. Forty-fifth at the Interstate was not exactly Seattle at its best, but he had a fair point. "Incompetence has run this city into the ground. You're paralyzed by a bureaucracy you can't alter or get rid of. It would take a forest fire to burn out the dead wood." The light changed, Constantine rolled forward.

"And you're the match, huh?" I reached for my pack of Kools. I rolled down my window as the car rolled to a halt again at the light crossing Roosevelt.

A greasy Genie stood on the corner, holding a cardboard sign, begging for change. "Spare a buck," he said through the open window. His face was a halo of beard and unkempt hair. He had the glazed-over eyes of something seriously Geneing. The pinhole irises, surrounded by milky white. I dismissed him with a wave as I took a cigarette from my pack, but Constantine leaned over to the open window.

"Here you go," he said, snatching my Kools from my hand and handing them out to the Genie.

"Oh, thank you, God Bless," the bum said as the light turned green. Constantine pulled away and the Genie continued to call after us in gratitude.

I was beside myself. My smokes! "What the fuck?" was all I could say. "Those were my smokes."

"Be happy, you helped out a poor soul," Constantine said as he drove.

"Yeah, but they were _my_ smokes," I repeated.

"Would you rather have given him a dollar? What would he have spent that on?"

"I don't know, food?"

"No," Constantine gave me a condescending laugh. "Cigarettes. Why not give him the cigarettes directly?"

"Because _I_ wanted to smoke them?" I said, totally consumed with disgust.

"Smoking is bad for your health. You should quit, Detective."

"But it's okay for him to smoke? _My_ cigarettes?" I looked back. Perhaps if we swung around...

"He's far beyond any concerns about his health. You are not. You are redeemable. It's the compassionate thing to save you from dying a slow death. That Genie will be long dead before the effects of cigarettes consume him. It's compassionate to give him cigarettes if they lessen his suffering."

"And you get to decide this?"

"It's the greatest good for the greatest number of people, Detective."

"But, now I have no cigarettes," I said slowly, fuming. "You can see how that totally, fucking sucks, can't you?"

"You think like a Prog," Constantine said, turning right onto University Way and pulling to the curb. "What did your hero say? From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs? You have both the ability and the need to stop smoking, Fonseca. Just as this town has the ability and the need to reform itself. What you both need is a hard kick in the ass to send you in the right direction. That's me." Constantine killed his engine and opened his door. "I'm not a match, Detective, I'm a boot."

#

The old bookstore was as musty and forgotten as it vast collection of leather-bound books. In the age of e-readers and digital content, bookstores like _Quintessence Books_ were quickly on their way to joining places like the malt shop and the drive-in movie theater in the shitter of history.

What few books stores remained stayed in business mostly dealing in rare books and collectibles. Shit that had value, not because of what was written inside the damn things, but because of some book collecting fetish. By the looks of the bookshelf back at Montavez's apart, _Quintessence Books_ was just the sort of place she'd frequent. Row after row of dusty, old volumes, smelling of leather and history. A veritable playground of smells and tactile sensations.

Not my kind of join. Still, it had a sort of retro charm, I guess. Like the girl's apartment. There was _something_ about books that was inescapable.

Constantine was showing his badge and his tablet to the old dear behind the counter, inquiring about the $1200 transaction, as I busied myself looking at the stacks. I didn't want to scare the old girl, one cop was enough at a time, but I slowly meandered over into earshot.

"...I can look up the transaction in the database, if it would help," she was saying to Constantine. She was maybe sixty, with white hair and glasses.

"If you don't mind, it would be of great assistance," Constantine handed over the tablet. The woman tapped at her keyboard, slowly keying in a multi-digit number into her computer off the portable screen. Eventually, something on the store's computer met with her approval and her face lit up, eager to help.

"Here it is, yes, March 23rd. $643, $1264 after taxes."

"What was the transaction _for_?" Constantine prodded.

"Oh," she was flustered, looking through her bifocals at the small screen. "A first edition of _Dark's Last Novel_."

I gasped in shock. Constantine gave me a look.

" _Dark's Last Novel_?" Constantine asked, confused. "Isn't that in some sort of code?"

"Yes, this was a first edition, from Dark's personal printing."

"$1264 for a book you can't even read?" Constantine shook his head.

"It has quite a high collector's value, sir," the woman said. "Very few copies have survived since the 1960's."

"What?" I interrupted. "Why?"

"Well, the Rosicrucians, of course," the woman said like it was common knowledge.

"Dark's own people? They buy them all up or something?"

"Yes," she nodded, smiling. "Bought them all and destroyed them."

"The Rosicrucians?" Constantine asked.

"Yes."

"Why would they destroy their own founder's book?" I added.

The woman shrugged that particular kind of shrug that universally indicated that all human life was unpredictable. "As I understand, there was putsch with the ranks of the Rosicrucians sometime last century. An iconoclastic wing challenged the orthodox hierarchy. Destroying Dark's novels was all part of their purge."

"Seriously?" I asked in disbelief.

The book store clerk shrugged again.

"Why would Vivian Montavez spend twelve-hundred bucks on a book?" Constantine hadn't gotten past that detail.

"You said she emailed her brother that she was in Seattle looking for Q, correct?" I said.

"Yes, but—"

"But there you go," I gestured to the woman, indicating she should explain.

"Ah yes," she said rapidly, picking up my thread. "The title of _Dark's Last Novel_ is unknown. Encoded, like the rest of the text. But it is referred to by many as _Quelle,_ German for the Source, or the Well. It is often abbreviated as Q."

It took a moment for that information to drip down through Constantine's NeoCon filter.

"She wasn't in Seattle looking for Q, the person," I said, now realizing our trip had been a waste. "She was here in Seattle to buy a lousy book."

#

"I don't get it," Constantine said. We were back out on the sidewalk, in front of the Bookstore. "Is Q a guy or a book?"

"Both, I said, wishing I still had my Kools. "Neither. It's just a label hung on an unknown. Same etymology, different context. Get it? Quelle? Source? Q?"

"Then Montavez wasn't in Seattle looking for Q the Genetic Engineer, but Q, some frigging science fiction novel? All of which were burned by some Branch Davidian cult sixty years ago?"

"Mmm." I was searching the sidewalk for the half a cigarette I'd discarded before stepping into the bookstore. I found it, still smoldering in the gutter and picked up the nub. I dusted it off and got a few last puffs out of it. "So much for a grand conspiracy," I said, finishing off my smoke.

"That can't be it," Constantine said, looking back at the store. "That just can't be all there is to it..."

"Maybe, maybe not, but we're not going to learn anything else back in there." I tossed the butt back into the gutter and stubbed it out. "Q or no Q, the girl is still dead, and her body is still missing."

Constantine grunted, not caring at all for my answer.
Chapter 8

I don't know if Special Agent Constantine was growing to like me or if it was just a reward for a job well done, but he spared me the bus ride and gave me a lift back to the Town Hall in the dark, black Charger.

Sure, he wasn't my chauffeur, but I wasn't his dancing monkey, either. He drove, and I let the Montavez case bounce around in my head. I think I'd done a good job sufficiently confusing Q the book and Q the person in Constantine's mind, but I wasn't confused myself.

I then knew what had gotten Vivian Montavez killed.

The second I'd heard the old women tell Constantine the reason for the $1200 charge, it'd hit me. Etymology be damned, there was some connection between the Rosicrucians, their guru's last, encrypted novel, Geneing and the elusive, possibly mythical, Q.

Vivian Montavez had known this, and now I knew. I just hoped to God that Constantine didn't.

The girl had been in Seattle to find Q – the source – of all these mysteries. A sly move, since taken as a whole, they were really just a single mystery all tangled up and confused.

I'd successfully climbed into her head. I was feeling closer to Vivian Montavez than I really should have. I knew why she was dead, but was still hazy on who done it. But that answer would come in time, I knew, as I dug deeper. For now, I tried not to tip my hand to Constantine and his Feds.

I wanted to catch Montavez's killer myself and laud it over Constantine and his three C's. Fuck him and fuck his little occupation.

That would teach him to give away my smokes to some bum.

He was right about one thing, though. Constantine. He was a boot. A boot standing on the neck of people of Seattle. He'd get his soon enough.

Constantine drove back at the door of his Command Center and scurried inside to continue his systematic erosion of America's civil liberties. I got the Accord out of the garage and headed back up to Queen Anne.

I wanted to take another look over the girl's apartment and specifically look at her bookshelf for that $1200 copy of Q.

Partly I wanted to find the book as evidence, but mostly I wanted to get my hands on it before some other cop figured out how much it was worth. That sort of thing didn't last long in evidence lockers. Not in my town.

The key was still in the fake, plastic rubber plant. The apartment appeared untouched. Whatever else you could say about the Feds, their Forensic guys were top-notch. They'd turned the place over for prints and DNA and returned everything to its original place. It was like they'd never even been there.

Once again, I felt instantly home the moment I turned the key in the latch.

I'd picked up another pack of Kools at the corner store, and I dropped myself heavily down on the futon as I tapped them out on the back of my hand. I twisted and scanned the vast bookshelf of titles and thought that perhaps a cup of coffee might fortify me in my search.

I climbed to my feet and went into the kitchen, still packing my Kools tight in the pack. The percolator was on the stove where Vivian must have left it, and I found the ground coffee in the spice cabinet. Two minutes later, the coffee was gurgling, and I returned to the living room.

Q, Q, Q...I scanned the lines of books. But, of course, simply Q was not going to be on the book's spine. It'd be gibberish. Letters all in a jumble. O'Day had once bored me to tears over beer explaining how encryption worked. There wasn't even a one-to-one relationship in the number of characters in a text, I remember him saying. Something about salt. A ten-word title might take four or twenty characters to type out in code. But it didn't matter, one quickly scan of the spines turned up no nonsense letters. Some French, many Spanish, but no gibberish.

I did find an old, dog-eared copy of _Where the Wild Things Are_ on a lower shelf. I smiled and pulled it out, studying the front cover. It was a favorite of mine as child. I could remember my mother reading it to me before bed. "Wild Thing!" she'd boom, and I would reply "I'll eat you up!" That was long before I could read the words on the page. Maybe that was something else Vivian and I had in common, other than Q and a pack-a-day smoking habit.

I returned the book to its place on its shelf and went back to the kitchen to check on the coffee.

Was I really there in Montavez's apartment to do police work? Maybe yes and maybe no. I had nothing else to go on but the physical contents of that apartment. If there was any clue as to who had killed Vivian, it was going to be in there in that apartment, with her things.

But I had to admit that I was inextricably drawn to the place. After living rough for so long – bed hopping with whatever women I could get and sleeping the rest of the time in the drunk tanks – it was alluring to find somewhere that I felt at home. The furnishing, the odors, the taste of that coffee, all seemed oddly comforting to me.

It must have triggered some long-forgotten memory in me, something from my childhood, like Max in his wolf suit. I've heard of smells and tastes doing that for people. Not that I could remember living in an apartment like Montavez's, either with my folks or without.

My father had been an attorney in Cleveland and my mother a homemaker. I remember the big house out in the suburbs. The apartment was all so...urban. I didn't live in a town until I'd come to Seattle to work in my uncle's restaurant, and then I'd been twenty-two. He was the one who'd hooked me up with the police gig. His campaign contributions to the last mayor had earned him some favors. And back then I'd been living with Annetta, in that house in Green Lake...

I took my cup of coffee back to the futon and sat down. I lit a Kools and took a long drag, looking around. What was it about this place?

I let my mind wander, staring at the dark TV. I was daydreaming of crazed Rosicrucians, burning books in some Neo-Nuremberg style, Nazi flag waving rally, when snatches of the _War_ _of the Planets_ movie popped into head. I'd only seen it once, as a kid, but I remembered being particularly terrified of the mouthless, eyeless killer drones used by the invading Galronts. How they'd left their human victims slowly dissolving into a pile of goo. The comparison to Geneing was inescapable.

Dark and Geneing. What was the connection there?

Q? I was convinced that Dark's book and the shadowy, underworld figure were somehow connected. It just couldn't be a coincidence. And I knew Vivian had believed the same thing before her death. She bought that first edition from the bookstore, but she'd really been looking for the man, as Constantine had suspected. Did it detail his identity in some fashion? Could she decode it? If she had a copy of it on an e-reader, why did she need a physical copy? And where was it?

I had lots of questions and not many answers.

I shook myself and reached for the TV remote. Sitting there in the empty, quiet apartment thinking about spooky, low budget aliens was giving me the heebie jeebies. I turned the television on for some noise.

It was showing a breaking news broadcast. A demonstration downtown. The Mayor was leading a protest against the Federal Wardship. Good for him, I said to myself. He was screaming into a gathered collection of press microphones as protesters waved makeshift signs behind him. He was red-faced, bellowing into the cameras, denouncing the President and the illegal actions of his administration. The crowd churned behind him, seething with collective rage. By the looks of things, it wasn't going to stay a peaceful protest for long. I'd watched crowds working themselves up into a riot before, and they'd looked a hell of a lot like the one on TV.

My phone rang. I was slow to answer it. Riot duty was the last thing on my mind.

"Detective Fonseca?" It was Dispatch. Shit.

"Yep," I said, taking a gulp of my coffee.

There was a long, silent pause on the phone, like the dispatcher was trying hard to phrase something correctly.

"Hello?" I asked the phone.

"Detective, we have a four fifty-one call, originating from the University of Washington Campus..."

Four fifty-one? What the hell was that? Not a homicide, I knew that. "Four fifty-one?" I asked.

"Yes sir, an arson."

"Arson? Was somebody killed?"

"No sir, that is not my understanding," the dispatcher sighed.

"Then call CBRNE, those are their calls."

"Yes Detective, but...err..." the dispatcher hedged.

"There are no other detectives on duty, are there?" I realized, resting my head on my freehand.

"I'm afraid not, sir. Only your card is listed as on active duty."

I was it. I was the entirety of the Seattle Police Department. "Did you inform our new Federal Overloads?"

"Yes sir."

"And?"

"And now I'm calling you, Detective."

"Okay, okay," I exhaled. Did I have a choice? "Give me the address."

She read of an address on campus. I instantly recognized it.

It was O'Day's lab.
Chapter 9

The lab was burned up pretty good. Someone had poured gasoline on the server racks and put a match to them. The Halon system had put the fire out fast, but there was a whole lot of melted plastic and the acrid smell of fried circuits in the air.

I looked over the scene with as critical eye as I could manage. I didn't know a damn thing about arson investigations. But this one seemed pretty clear-cut. The gas can was still laying where it'd been discarded in the corner of the room. Case closed.

I found O'Day outside, sitting on the tailgate of the EMT's truck, breathing through an oxygen mask. He was black with soot, and his clothes looked singed. Damn fool must have tried to run into the fire to save his servers.

"You okay, Day?" I asked as I approached. The campus quad was awash with the dancing lights of fire trucks. "What the hell happened?"

We lifted the mask from his face and wheezed in a breath. "Fucking Genies," he gasped. "A whole mob of them."

"Genies did this?" I looked back at the server room. The firefighters were rolling up their hoses. It wasn't like Genies to do anything wantonly destructive. Most were far too whacked out to every consider orchestrating any sort of attack.

"Yes, I'm telling you," O'Day said, returning the mask to his face. "Fucking Genies!" he screamed through the breather. "Crazy as shit! Just burst into the place and started smashing shit! I got out through the back door, but when they set my racks on fire..."

"Bad?" I asked, nodding in sympathy.

O'Day lowered the mask. "Bad? There's three million bucks of equipment in there, Sasha, that they tried to torch!"

"They take anything? Give you any idea what you did to piss them off?"

"Yes," O'Day said, calming himself. He took a few breaths off the mask then continued. "They came in, screaming that they wanted the book, calling me a foul blasphemer, that sort of thing. When they found that e-reader of yours, that's when they started trashing the place. Thanks again, Sasha."

"Shit, Day, I'm sorry."

"You know who those assholes were, don't you?" O'Day said, giving himself a coughing fit.

"That's not possible," I shook my head.

"Where did you get that e-reader, Sasha?" he asked, recovering from his hacking. "Nobody's seen or heard from the Rosicrucians for over twenty years, and then ten minutes after helping you out, they show up on my door and try to burn down my lab! Shit, Sasha, what was really on that e-reader?"

"You tell me?" I said, defensively. "You said it was just a copy of Q."

"It was," O'Day agreed, putting his mask back over his face. "It was..." he mumbled, then removed his mask. "Now, they're trying to destroy every _digital_ copy of _Dark's Last Novel_? They're going to be pretty busy."

"No," I scratch at my stubbly chin. "I found it at a murder scene. The Rosicrucians were covering their tracks. There must have been a way to track the e-reader back to them. Or, at least, they thought there was. Can you do that?"

"You can now," O'Day said. "Before they stole it, I factory reset the device. Logged it in to my account. The lowjack will lead you right to them."

I laughed. "Good job, O'Day. You'll make a good cop, yet."

"Thanks," O'Day said with no mirth. "But I've had enough excitement for the time being." He shook his head. "Why did they have to burn my lab?"

"Must have thought you were trying to decode Q. They couldn't stand for that."

"God, I hope the disk arrays survived the Halon..."

"Thanks for everything," I said, squeezing O'Day's shoulder. "Sorry for the mess. Let me know when you have their location on the lowjack, okay?"

"Will do," O'Day said, grumpily. "And Sasha?"

"Yeah?"

"Next time you need something decoded," O'Day gave me a weak smile. "Call the NSA."
Chapter 10

I wasn't back at the Town Hall before O'Day emailed me the address. But then, I wasn't getting back into Town Hall anytime soon, as Occupied Seattle was well on its way to full WTO lock down. The Feds were forming skirmishing lines, all clad in riot gear, as an angry mob taunted them across Westlake Square.

The Feds looked undermanned, and I could see why. Looking at the mob, I recognized many of my old comrades, police officers and city workers, toting hunks of concrete and taunting the riot cops. They weren't in uniform, but it was obvious. They were the ringleaders. The Seattle establishment had turned out for a little street justice.

I was of half a mind to step up to the line and join right in, but with the Montavez case just about to break wide open, I had no time to help out. It disgusted me to admit it, but I needed Constantine and his TAC-30 unit to Special Ops their way into the address O'Day had just sent me, before the Rosicrucians figured out that they'd just stolen back an e-reader with its lowjack broadcasting back to the mother ship.

An official was addressing the crowd through a megaphone as I pushed forward through the gathered mass of humanity. People were screaming, brandishing bats and makeshift clubs. They were ready for a fight, alright. The Feds were dangerously outnumbered.

I broke through the crowd and advanced on the Fed's line. Riot cops yelled from behind gas masks for me to get back, but I raised my hands, with my badge showing in the right. I just kept yelling "Constantine" over and over, until the wall of riot shield parted and let me slip through. A bottle exploded an inch to my right as I slipped through the Fed's phalanx. I ducked as the broken glass sprayed me. Fuckers. Guess I was marked down as a collaborator now. I was going to have to watch myself.

I found Constantine in his command trailer, frantically yelling orders to his ops team at their consoles. I'd only seen the mob in Westlake Square, but from the monitors I could see he was dealing with similar gatherings in Pioneer, Hing Hay and Steinbrueck. The masses had the Feds boxed in. No wonder Constantine looked scared.

"Get a reserve detachment to Yestler and Fifth, right now!" Constantine bellowed as I climbed into his trailer. He had his jacket off and his tie loosened. He looked frazzled.

"You ordered the reserve to Pike and—" a bearded geek began to dispute.

"Fuck! I don't care!" Constantine growled. "Just find me more men! And form a skirmish line at Yestler, okay?"

"We have movement, east down—" another voice said.

"They're coming at Alpha Twenty's flank!" Constantine thrust an angry finger at an overhead, thermal map. He must have had drones in the air, giving him a live feed. "Order Alpha—" Constantine began. Then decided there wasn't time. He ripped the headset off the seated technician and hollered into the microphone himself. "Alpha Twenty, wheel to your nine! Approaching hostiles! I repeat—"

But the battle had already begun. The riot police on Pike were caught off guard as a mass of red blobs on the thermal screen swarmed over a mass of blue blobs with ID tags.

"Shit!" Constantine threw the headset back at the shocked ops tech. "Pull twenty men of Westlake to reinforce Pike. Where's the ORV?" Constantine turned to look at a tactical map.

"Tough day?" I said from my dark corner.

Constantine gave me a quick glance and returned to his map. "I don't have time for you Fonseca."

"I've got a hot lead on Montavez," I said, stepping up next to Constantine and attempting to figure out what about the map he was so interested in.

"Not now," Constantine dismissed. Then, to his Ops, "Move Mobile One to...University! University and Third."

"Wilco," the bearded geek said, straightening his headset on his ears.

"I just need a fire team to breach an address," I continued, undeterred.

"I have no spare men right now, Detective," Constantine replied with irritation. "Everyone is in the field."

"I can see that." I smiled. The red blobs on the thermal map seemed to have the upper hand. "But these could be the guys who have Montavez's body."

"It will have to wait," Constantine said.

"Wait?" I exclaimed. "Wait? These guys took a big risk coming out of hiding to cover their tracks. They messed up, and they know it. These are our murderers. We're talking minutes here, Special Agent. Once they drop out of sight again, there'll be nothing bringing them back up into the daylight. All I have is an address..." I held up my phone in front of Constantine, with the address in its screen, "...and a rapidly shirking window of opportunity."

Constantine sighed. "I simply can't spare the men, Fonseca. I have aggressives only blocks away. If they overwhelm Command..."

"Well, you'll have to spare someone," I said, returning my phone to my pocket. "Constantine," I whispered, trying not to share my concerns with the entire command trailer. "Isn't the Montavez murder your whole justification for this? If her killers get away...are you going to be able to rationalize anything you've done here? To your superiors? To the courts?" Constantine paused in his frantic attempt to run his defense. I'd hit a nerve. "Returned back East with nothing to show for all this expense, all the arrests, all the broken teeth...they're going to pin all of this on somebody...but return with Vivian Montavez's body...return her to her grieving mother...then all of this is going to be seen in a very different light, Special Agent. Think about it."

Constantine straightened to his full height. He turned to face me as he sucked in his gut. "Alright, we'll check it out."

"Good." I smiled.

"But just you and me," Constantine reached for his jacket. "We'll keep this quiet. If it's a dead-end, then we've only wasted an hour."

"What?" I hedged. He'd missed my point. "But just the two of us—"

"Come on, Detective." Constantine didn't wait to hear my protests. He was already climbing out of the command trailer.

"I mean, you have guys for this—"

But Constantine was already gone. I was left in the dark on the Feds HQ, as agents and Ops tried desperately to coordinate their defense. The crowds were closing in on Occupied Seattle.

The wolves were howling at the door.

"Wild Thing! I'll eat you up!" I could almost hear the crowd yelling.
Chapter 11

Constantine handed me his heavy, black handgun. It was larger than any kind of pistol I'd even used. It was monstrously large in my hand yet felt remarkably light. I hefted it and tested its sights.

"It's a centimeter gun," Constantine explained as he was digging in the truck of his Charger. We were three block for the address O'Day had sent me. It was dark and the streets were empty. Those that weren't rioting downtown were locked up tight in their homes. We had the city to ourselves.

"Centimeter?" I raised a curious eyebrow.

"Ten millimeter, caseless ammunition," he continued. I turned the gun over looking for the magazine. Where did the bullets go? Constantine reached out and flipped open a hatch. "Twenty-two rounds, ablative magazine. Doesn't violate assault weapon legislation because technically it doesn't have a magazine at all. The bullets are held together by epoxy. The breech strips off one round at a time."

"You're kidding me?" I laughed, poking the solid block of clear plastic inside the handle of the gun.

"Nope." Constantine pulled a bulletproof vest over his suit jacket. When he was armored, he armed himself with a futuristic looking machine gun. "The centimeter round is an intermediate-powered cartridge, delivering almost 1.8 kilojoules of muzzle energy. That's more than the old .223 Remington. That amount of firepower allows ammunition uniformity between sidearm and assault rifle." He held up the black gun. It also didn't have a detachable magazine, just a well to feed in bullets. He picked up a couple of the over-sized candy bars of a glued bullets and fed each in turn into the weapon. He cycled the bolt and seated the rifle in his shoulder.

"You Hot Kids get all the cool toys," I said, looking at the black handgun. It was a lot more firepower than my little Rhino. But I wished I had one of his bulletproof vests.

"We didn't come to Seattle unprepared," he said, starting up the street toward are target address.

I followed. "Not unprepared for a fight but you didn't expect the sort of resistance you're getting downtown, did you?" I cocked a thumb back toward the city.

A few doors away from the dilapidated house that O'Day's lowjack had led us to, Constantine paused to check his rifle. I tried to wrap my hands comfortably around the hilt of the handgun, but it felt too large in my grip.

"We've already identified the ringleaders," Constantine spoke up, breaking the silence. "We know that members of the old city regime are behind the violence. When we've subdued the protest; they will be dealt with."

"Dealt with?" I said in disgust. "Do you hear yourself? First the Progs, then the Genies, now the Seattle old guard. You're sure making enemies fast."

"You've got to break some eggs, Fonseca, if you want to make an omelet."

"Yeah, but people have to want to eat an omelet, Special Agent," I replied.

But Constantine missed my quip. He was already on his feet scurrying toward the dark, abandoned house. I trotted to keep up, staying low and silent. It was no time to fool around. For once, Constantine's tactical preparedness was perfectly warranted.

Genies were dangerous when cornered. They might lull you in with the false pretense of hippie, dopey acquiescence. But like all addicts, their mood could change on a dime. One minute, you were dealing with a spaced-out junkie then next a snarling maniac trying to rip out your throat. And the Genies we were after, the one's who'd burned O'Day's lab and potentially murdered Montavez, had already show a propensity for violence. No, I'd stay behind Constantine's rifle and keep his centimeter gun leveled. There was no telling what we'd find inside the Rosicrucian's flop.

Constantine shimmied up to the right of the front door and gave me the go signal. I stepped back, put my boot into the door, and kicked it wide open. Constantine was already moving, slicing the pie to the right. I followed on his heels, gun at the low ready, and went left.

Through the door there was a hall, with stairs to the second floor. To the right was a living room, to the left a dining room. The place was mess, a jumbled collection of garbage and broken furniture.

Standard Genie flop, I said to myself as sweeping the dining room for targets. There was an exit at the rear, with the kitchen beyond, but it was clear. I turned on my heels and joined Constantine in the living room. I covered him as he advanced across the room, to the far door. My focus was on the opposite corner of the living room, when I heard a sound to my left: that unmistakable _click clack_ of a shotgun being pumped.

The Genie was standing on the landing of the stairs, black pump scatter gun in his hands. I staggered back and tried to raise my gun. My feet came away underneath me. Good thing, too, because the Genie took a hip shot at where my head should have been.

The shotgun made a deafening bark and plaster exploded above my head. I hit the floor, weapon still raised, and fired wildly up the stairs.

The centimeter gun was large, and it coughed forth with an impressive muzzle flash, but the recoil was remarkably mild. My first shot hit a banister, the second, the ceiling. My third shot, however, caught the Genie in the left shoulder, just as he was shucking his scatter gun. He flailed in pain, losing hold of his weapon, and staggered toward the stairs, just as Constantine came into the hall. The Genie was falling as Constantine's rifle opened up. The Genie was dead by the time he hit the hallway's floor.

Constantine gave me a look of disdain as I pulled myself to my feet, but he had no time to lecture me. From the doorway across the living room, another Genie began to fire a pistol. The windows beside the front door shattered as I raised the black centimeter gun and returned fire. Constantine turned, and let forth with a burst of automatic fire. The Genie in the doorway dove for cover.

The Special Agent gave me the sign to go left, through the dining room and around. He advanced across the living room, rifle raised.

I moved quickly, leaping over the detritus of the dining room and around into the kitchen. As I cleared the door jamb of the back hall, Constantine began to fire. I could see the Genie, on his knees at the back door to the living room, plaster from Constantine's rounds raining down above him. When Constantine paused in his attack and the Genie sprang up to return fire, I raised my pistol and fired. My first round hit home, and the Genie fell like a rag doll onto his side.

"Clear!" I yelled, and Constantine came cautiously through the bullet-ridden rear door of the living room. He kicked the dead Genie with the toe of his loafer.

I was standing in the center of the kitchen, like a fool, watching Constantine clear a back bedroom and washroom, when a burst of automatic fire came up out of the basement though a closed door. I was spared any of the lead as it tore into the ceiling, but a hail of splinters sent me diving for linoleum.

"Motherfuckers!" a voice screamed out, counterpointing between bursts of machine gun fire. Constantine came into the kitchen and took cover behind the refrigerator. I stayed, sprawled out on the tile, fearing that one of the splinters in my cheek was a gunshot.

When I realized I wasn't about to die, I started to climb to my feet. But Constantine give me the hold sign.

The shooting stopped and there was silence. I waited, poised on my haunches, as Constantine slung his rifle. He reached for the basement door and counted down on the fingers of his spare hand.

When he reached zero, I sprang to my feet as he threw open the door.

Sure enough, door at the foot of the steps, a shirtless, scraggly-haired Genie was wrestling with the magazine of an AK. I popped off a few shots, hitting the concrete around his feet. Just as his fire had been high, mine was low, shooting down their stairs. One bullet must have ricocheted off the floor, however, as he suddenly flipped onto his face, his leg kicked from underneath him.

He fell right into my line of fire, two rounds thumping red warts into his back. He lay still as the centimeter holes began to well with blood.

"Fuck!" I cursed, realizing that the slide of my black gun had locked back. I went automatically into a reload drill, but the gun had no magazine release switch or magazine to release. Helpless, I put the gun down on the kitchen counter beside me and grabbed hold of the granite myself.

Fuck, I'd never killed anyone before. Not in ten years on the job. And there I was, in thirty seconds, I'd plugged three people. Genies, sure, but people. I felt sick, my head began to spin as the adrenaline started to wear off. I needed to sit down.

Constantine descended the basement stairs slowly. He was gone for maybe a minute before he returned with his rifle over his shoulder.

"Clear?" I asked, standing at the sink. If I was going to puke, I wanted to do it there.

"Clear," Constantine replied. But the look on his face said a lot more.

"What's wrong?" I asked, swallowing hard.

"Maybe you should take a look..." Constantine said, pointing back at the basement. "I think we've found Vivian's book."
Chapter 12

We sure as shit had found Montavez's missing print copy of _Dark's Last Novel_. It was down in the basement, on a sort of makeshift altar, before a painted, plywood rose cross. It was safe and secure, undamaged, along with the e-reader stolen from O'Day's lab.

But I hardly paid the book a second glance. The whole scene was pretty freaky-deaky. On top of all shooting, to then find a satanic shrine in the basement was more than my nerves could take.

But it was the graffiti on the walls was what really sent a shiver down my spine. Now I knew what had turned Constantine's complexion so pale.

Sure, there were Q's and crosses, and unintelligible tags. But, over and over, in positions of prominence, C's were repeated in groups of three. C, C, C just like Constantine three NeoCon C's. But these didn't stand for Competence, Community and Compassion here. No, below the rose cross, they were spelled out: Corpus, Cruor, Civitas.

It was pretty freaky shit. I didn't know what any of it meant, but I was already starting to make guesses.

It had Constantine shitting bricks. After I'd scooped up the book and put the e-reader into my pocket, I went back upstairs and found Constantine talking into his in-ear phone. He was pulling resources off riot control to come handle the crime scene. Now, after seeing the basement, it was worthy of his precious manpower.

"Did you clear the second floor?" I asked, when Constantine hung up his call.

He nodded, wordlessly.

"Any sign..."

He shook his head. Well, it had always been a long shot. But just because they hadn't stolen Montavez's body from the Morgue, didn't mean they hadn't killed her.

"I have a team en-route," Constantine said to me calmly. "I think, for both of our sakes, it would be advantageous for you not to be here when they arrive."

"What is that shit?" I asked, nodding at the bullet-ridden basement door. "Down there?"

"I don't know," Constantine solemnly shook his head.

"Did you see those three C's—"

"Yes," Constantine cut me off. "Yes."

"It can't be—" I began and stopped myself.

Constantine looked at his watch. "Time is running out, Fonseca. Unless you're eager to spend the next few months on administrative leave."

"But—"

"Every round here was fired from my weapons," Constantine scooped his pistol up off the kitchen counter and returned it to his holster. "There's no reason for you to stay."

He was sure in a rush to get rid of me. But I wasn't going to argue. I had no desire to sit before an Officer Involved Shooting Panel and try to explain why I was in that house. Or justify shooting the three Genies.

I picked up the book and started for the back door.

"Leave the book, Fonseca," Constantine commanded.

I stopped in my tracks. Now that was odd. "What good is it to you?" I asked, honestly.

"It's evidence, Detective," Constantine replied. "It can't be removed from the crime scene."

That was bullshit. Total bullshit. But what good was the book to Constantine? Then I remembered what was in the basement. What the fuck was going on?

I put the book back down on the kitchen counter. It took a concerted effort on my part not to reach for my bomber pocket. The e-reader was in there. Constantine didn't know – had never known – about that.

"Thank you, Detective," Constantine said. He turned away and tapped at the back of his ear. He was making another call.

I took the hint and slipped out of the back door.

The streets were still quiet. I was on foot. There'd be no buses or taxis out tonight. The rioting downtown had shut the city down. I might have been able to flag an emergency vehicle and ride along back to Occupied Seattle, but I wasn't heading in that direction. After the gunfight, after the creepy Rosicrucian shrine, I wanted to get to Vivian Montavez's apartment. I wanted to close the door and hide away from the world, and I knew no better place to do it.

Let the riot rage on and the Crime Scene Investigators do their best. I'd had enough of the City of Seattle for one day.

I only wanted to get back home.
Chapter 13

The key was still in the rubber plant. The cold coffee was still on the stove. Everything was as I'd left it. Except for the flashing of emergency lights from the center of the city, the evening beyond the windows of Vivian's apartment looked peaceful. I struggled out of my bomber and dropped my body heavily onto the futon. I turned on the TV only to be bombarded by news of the continuing riot. I turned off the TV and wondered if there was any food in Vivian's fridge.

There was. Bread and hummus and cold cuts. I made a sandwich and dug an errant beer out of the crisper. Returning to the living room, I sat back down on the couch and listened to the silence. It would be chaos, down in the streets of Seattle, but up here on the hill, all was quiet. I took my Rhino off my belt, and with a shaking hand put it on the coffee table before me. I dug into my sandwich.

Three C's...It was so insane that there couldn't be any truth to it. But such a crazy, paranoid, conspiracy theory brought so many elements of the Montavez case into focus. And it was the only half-sensible explanation for everything that was going on downtown.

The old woman in the bookstore had mention there'd been a schism in the Rosicrucian's ranks, into an iconoclastic faction and an orthodox wing who'd stayed loyal to the teachings of A.E. Dark. Then they'd all vanished, according to O'Day, consumed by the Geneing epidemic.

An epidemic somehow connected to Dark, though as of yet, I had no idea exactly how.

Q, Q...it all came down to Q. Constantine had said the Vivian was in Seattle looking for Q. Both the book and the man. But finding the book, or rather decrypting the book that was hiding in plain sight, was finding the man. The text of Q must contain some clue to the identity of the man, Q. But what could a book, written ninety years ago, tell about a man living today? Unless he was very, very old. Ancient in fact.

No, that was dead end.

But the three C's...that was no coincidence. I didn't believe in coincidences. Not anymore. A catchy turn of phrase. Competence, Community, Comparison. Corpus...what was the rest of it? I'd already forgotten. I should have written it down.

Corpus means body, I knew enough Latin to know that. So, it wasn't a direct translation. But the repetition of three C's and Constantine's reaction to the basement of the flop. And him insisting on keeping the book.

It all fed into my crazy theory.

Okay, the Genies in that house, the one's who'd left the e-reader in Montavez's apartment then torched O'Day's lab to get it back, were certainly the Rosicrucian's O'Day spoke of. The ones who'd take the Geneing very early in the epidemic. They must be the orthodox wing. They'd taken Vivian's original copy of Q and literally worshiped it. On the off-chance that O'Day was attempting to decode the novel, they'd burned his computers. Any attempt to actually read _Dark's Last Novel_ was sacrilege to them.

But what if they were only half the story? Only one faction had become Genie's en-masse. What if the iconoclastic wing had remained sane? What if the iconoclastic wing had gone legit...

Vivian Montavez was the daughter of a high-ranking NeoCon politician. There was no evidence of bad blood in the family. But here she was, on the other side of the country, on a quest. A quest her father, at least financially, approved of...

Q? Book or man? Did it matter? The iconoclastic Rosicrucians weren't interested in burning copies of Dark's novel but tearing them apart to attempt to decode them? Pre-computers, how else would you have done it? That'd have been a profanity to the orthodox wing. They'd have inevitability come to blows. The book was sacred, after all. Soon, just attempting to decode the novel would have become a blasphemy.

And Vivian was certainly attempting to decode Q. Had she succeeded? Was that why she was dead? Was she somehow connected to the iconoclastic faction of the Rosicrucians? Was her father, the senator, connected to those Rosicrucians?

Was the whole NeoCon Party connected to these Rosicrucians?

Fuck me.

Three C's...not a direct translation from the Latin, but certainly a repetition of theme. A respectful reinterpretation of first principles?

No, it was too crazy to even conceive.

The whole United States of America in the grasp of an apocalyptic cult? President Cassidy? The whole NeoCon movement? The Hot Kids, the youth of America?

Now my imagination was just running away from me.

It was bullshit. Nothing I could ever prove in a million lifetimes. All I had was three letters scribbled on a wall, and that, I very much suspected, would quickly vanish once Constantine's investigators arrived.

But ideas like that had an uncomfortable habit of sticking in the craw. It was the first, vaguely rational explanation for the Fed's Wardship of Seattle and their total overreaction to the Montavez case. If the girl had found evidence that Q, the man, was in Seattle...and the Geneing Rosicrucians had gotten to her before she'd told anyone...

I reached for my bomber and took the e-reader from my pocket.

She'd decoded it somehow. She must have. _Dark's Last Novel_. Q. She'd bought the original copy...why? To trade it with the Rosicrucians? For what?...for something that had let her decode the novel. But they'd figured out what she was attempting to do and stuffed her in that dumpster. But she'd decoded the novel first, and the copy on the e-reader was the only one she'd had.

She'd decoded it on this. Somehow.

I stared at the e-reader. If O'Day couldn't decode it, what did I think I could do? But, had O'Day even tried? He'd just recognized the file and thought it was all a joke.

Still, I knew nothing about cryptography, and I had no access to computing resources. Even O'Day's equipment was probably still off-line. The Rosicrucians had done their job well. I had nothing. Just the e-reader and some crazy idea that our government was firmly in the hands of a satanic cult.

But none of that would matter if I knew the decrypt key. Everything O'Day had been talking about, all ninety years of cryptanalysis, had been attempts to brute force the encryption. They'd tried every known key hoping to stumble on the right one. But Vivian Montavez had found the key itself. Or deduced it from the evidence she'd collected. You didn't need computers, or a specialized understanding of cryptography if you had the key. You just punched in it and _bam!_ Like an ATM. Any douche, even me, could do that.

I had to get back into Vivian's head, figure out what she'd figured out about Dark. She'd done my trick, gotten inside Dark's head. Dark was just another dead body, after all, dead for ninety years. Not murdered perhaps, but it didn't matter. For Vivian, Dark was also in the enviable position that he couldn't interfere with her investigation.

I tapped at the e-reader until I got to the decrypt menu. The ebook version of _Dark's Last Novel_ shipped with a decode routine. The whole enticement to buy the book was that, maybe, you'd be the one to figure out how to decrypt it. If the eggheads had done their work right and correctly identified the custom cipher Dark had used, then all a reader needed to do was type in the correct code.

It was easy as that.

Vivian had done it. She'd found Q. But what did the daughter of a powerful, NeoCon/Rosicrucian senator know that the entirety of the Internet had missed?

What had she traded that blessed copy of Dark's Q to the Genie Rosicrucian's for? If I knew that, I'd already have the book decrypted. I looked around the room; it couldn't be something physical. Nothing in the apartment looked out-of-place. Except...

I held up the e-reader and looked it over. This? I'd instantly pegged this as the only odd item in the room the first moment I'd stepped into Montavez's apartment. It had never jived with the rest of the décor.

This? I turned the e-reader over in my hands. She'd traded the Genies a twelve-hundred buck copy of _Dark's Last Novel_ for a five buck e-reader? It made no sense. Unless it had data on it that she'd erased...no, she hadn't expected to get killed. She'd no time to erase anything. She hadn't been trying to hide her tracks.

No, she hadn't traded the book for the e-reader.

She'd traded for something else. Something ephemeral. The key to decode Q? But that was a blasphemy to the Rosicrucians – at least the Genie kind. They'd never give up that information, even if they'd had it. Which they didn't, because if they did, the iconoclastic Rosicrucians would have stolen the knowledge long ago and decoded the book and none of this was have ever happened...

Ack! I was thinking in circles. I was screwing myself into the ground. I took a wild stab at the decrypt key: _Corpus_ , I typed. The e-reader's little speaker beeped a long, sad whammy. I tried _Dark_ then _Galronts_. Two more whammies.

Of course, it wouldn't be a dictionary work, or anything connected to Galronts. Otherwise the brute force attacks, or the million Internet geeks guessing at a million consoles would have hit on it. I tapped the paperweight e-reader on my knuckles and tried to think. What did Vivian know that a hundred thousand cryptographers didn't?

Geneing. The answer ambushed me out of nowhere. Vivian Montavez had made some unique discovery linking Geneing and A.E. Dark. Following her trail, I'd done the same. Q, used to denote the progenitor of the Geneing epidemic, the most hated man in America, was somehow linked to Q, _Dark's Last Novel_.

I'd initially thought that Vivian was attempting to decode Q in order to find Q the man, but there was a serious possibility that the opposite was true. What if she'd been seeking out Q, the man, to decode Q, the novel? What if there was something about Q's genetic drug/virus that served as a key to Dark's unbreakable encryption?

I leapt to my feet and reached for my bomber. The autopsy report for Vivian was folded up in my inside pocket. She'd died a Genie, the testing indicated, but she'd obviously not lived like one. The apartment I was sitting in was solid evidence. So, she must have taken the Geneing dope just before her death? Why? Why throw her life away like that? If she hadn't been murdered, the Geneing would have quickly killed her. Unless...

I flipped through the pages, to the genetic report on Montavez's DNA. Normally, I only ever glanced at the last line, the one that said, positive or negative. But now I looked over the scientific gobbledygook before it. The talk of genetic markers and redundant strands.

What if there was not just a simple correlation between Geneing and _Dark's Last Novel_ , what if Geneing _was_ the key to _Dark's Last Novel_?

Literally.

Hidden somewhere in the genetic code that the virus modified...the stream of G's, A's, C's and T's that designated Geneings marker...it certainly looked like a block in encrypted text...

But it was impossible! Did they even know about DNA in 1964? They certainly didn't have gene therapy. And the first known case of Geneing would have been sixty years in the future. But nevertheless. What had Dark said? When the technology existed to decode the book, humanity would be ready to read what was in it? Maybe he hadn't meant computing power to brute forcing the encryption, but the decoding of the human genome to the point where we could decode a redundant genetic strand.

It was impossible! Insane. As insane as the idea that our government was controlled by a cabal of Rosicrucian cultists. But like that idea, once this one got into my head, I couldn't get it out. I began to key in the genetic marker into the e-reader, but it was far too long.

I needed a computer.

I stormed out of the apartment and down to where I'd parked the Accord, on a side street, before the riots had begun. It was safer up there on Queen Anne, away from the rampant property destruction. And my whole life was in the trunk. I dug around, found my old iBook and sprinted back up the stairs, back into Vivian's apartment.

Fumbling with the power cord, I booted the laptop and reached for my phone in my bomber. As the desktop loaded on the computer, I dialed O'Day's number.

"What?" he answered the phone. Sometimes I think my life would be a lot smoother without caller ID.

"Hey Day, how's the lab?" I asked. I logged onto the SPD VPN and brought up the digital copy of Vivian's autopsy report. That I could cut and paste.

"How do you fucking think? They poured gasoline on my servers and set them alight! Fuck you, Sasha, for getting me involved in whatever you're investigating..."

I highlighted the string of characters that was the genetic marker for Geneing and pasted it into an email.

"I'm calling to get you even deeper involved, O'Day." I hit send on the email. "I'm sending you a text string I want decoded.

"Oh no!" O'Day protested. "Not a fucking chance!"

"Even if it decrypts _Dark's Last Novel_?" I teased.

O'Day was silent.

He was silent so long I figured he'd hung up. "Hello?" I asked the line.

"I'm still here," O'Day's voice came back. Flat and unemotional.

"Just look at the email and tell me if it's something that can be decoded."

More silence. I let O'Day work.

"That looks like a DNA string," O'Day came back. "That's not a code."

"No, but—"

"There just isn't enough variation in the text for a strong cipher. G, A, T, C. You can't hide a message in that string."

"How can that be?" I asked. "Don't computers only use two characters? Zero and one? Isn't the whole of human knowledge encoded into two characters? Here you have four."

"Hmm, well..." O'Day replied.

I'd done it, I'd stumped O'Day. He hated that. He was the kind of guy who had to have an answer for everything. There'd be no stopping him now until he could tell me exactly why I was full of shit. "I once attended a symposium, and one of the speakers postulated that since the nucleotides of DNA only form two unique bonds – Guanine with Cytosine and Adenine with Thymine, never Guanine with Adenine or Thymine, and never Adenine or Thymine with Cytosine – then DNA was, for all purposes binary."

"Come again?" I said. He'd lost me at Guanine.

"That it's not G-A-T-C but G and A, and T and C. If we designate the G-A pair as one and the T-C as zero then we get..." O'Day went silent.

"What do we get?" I finally asked. Was he working on something? Had a Rosicrucian come along and cracked him across the back of the head? "O'Day? Are you still there?"

"I'm still here," he muttered. "Let me pass the result through a Feistel key schedule...fuck!" O'Day was so surprised that he dropped his phone. I could hear it clatter to the floor.

"O'Day? O'Day?" I screamed into my phone. I climbed to my feet and ran a frustrated hand through my hair. Come on O'Day, pick the fucking phone back up... "Day? What did it decode to? Day? Are you okay?"

"Yeah, yeah," O'Day voice came back, distant and echoing. His voice returned to full-throated normalcy as he returned his phone to his ear. "It just took me by surprise, that's all."

"What did?" Tell me you idiot! "What did the code decode to say?"

"I...I don't really know," O'Day said solemnly.

"What is it?"

"Cain-300"

"Cain-300" I asked, confused. "Cain? As in the bible, Cain? As in Cain and Abel? As in Mark of Cain?" Then a cold shiver hit me, right down the middle of my spine.

"C-A-I-N, as in son of Adam and Eve," O'Day confirmed. "Dash, three-hundred."

"That's crazy, but..." I reached for the e-reader.

"Where'd you get that DNA string from, anyway?" O'Day asked.

"You'd call me crazy if I told you," I answered. I typed out C-A-I-N-3-0-0 into the e-reader's decode window and received an audible whammy in return.

"What was that noise?"

"That e-reader you had. I was trying the text on Dark's novel."

"No," O'Day said with irritation. "You're not thinking like A.E. Dark. This is a guy who encrypted the title of his book – _the title._ Think about that? The decrypt key to the book isn't going to be plain text. It, itself, will invariably be encoded..."

"What? Are you speaking English?"

"If we take the un-decoded text from the DNA string, it fits perfectly as a fifty-six bit key for a DES cipher..."

"Yes?" I prodded, impatiently. "Yes?"

"...pad it out to sixty-four bits and invert it. Then when we XOR the result..."

"What?" I screamed at my phone.

"Oh fuck," O'Day exclaimed. "Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck!"

"What?!"

"I'm getting text!" O'Day laughed. "I'm fucking getting English text!"

"Don't fuck with me, O'Day. Because I couldn't take it."

"No, no!" O'Day screamed. "Here, I'll send the key to your e-reader. It should start to see what I'm seeing."

I looked at the e-reader in my hand. The decode dialog filled with string of text, then closed itself. There was an interminable pause as an hourglass appeared on the screen. Please God, I said to myself, no whammies, no whammies, no whammies.

Then it started to decode.

Right there before my eyes, _Dark's Last Novel_ started to spit out page after page of clear text. I'd done it! O'Day had done it! The novel was decoding! I couldn't believe my eyes.

"Motherfucker," I said. There was little else to say.

"Yeah, totally," O'Day agreed, then repeated solemnly. "Motherfucker."

I read the title page of the book, perhaps the first eyes to do so in over ninety years. The real title of _Dark's Last Nove_ l came as no surprise. Perhaps I'd already guessed it in the back of my mind. But there it was in black and white before me: _The Source_. Of course. What other title could the book have ever had?

"Well, thanks for your help O'Day," I said. But thanks didn't really didn't cover it.

"Are you going to tell me where you got that DNA string?" O'Day asked, still chuckling to himself.

"Maybe someday," I answered. "Over a beer. But for right now..."

"I know, I know. Police business."

"Right. Well...talk to you later, alright?" I said, eager to dive into Dark's book. "I've got some reading to do."

"Yeah, me too," O'Day agreed. Then, almost as an after through, asked, "You want any credit in this? I mean, decoding _Dark's Last Novel_..."

"Hell no!" I answered quickly. "I don't know anything about jack shit, okay?"

"Right. Right."

"You enjoy yourself," I said. "But watch out for crazed Rosicrucians. They're going to be pissed."

O'Day laughed. "I will."
Chapter 14

The first important thing to know about _Dark's Last Novel_ is that it wasn't a novel at all. It was, in truth, a journal of his wartime years, spent as a correspondent for the _Stars and Stripes_ and other papers. Everyone assumed it was a novel, because that was how Dark had presented it. But it was no work of fiction. Or perhaps, not intentionally a work of fiction.

The first one hundred and fifty or sixty pages of it I'll skip over. While it's an interesting chronicle of his wartime experience, including trips to both the Europe and Pacific theaters, those sections of the book really have nothing to do with Vivan Montavez's murder, the Rosicrucians, or Q.

The book gets interesting right around page one-hundred and sixty-eight, when he's state-side after the war, covering the declassified parts of the Manhattan Project, post Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for the _Chicago Tribune_.

He's no science fiction writer yet. Not at this point. He hasn't published even a single story, but his writings on the scientific aspects of the Manhattan Project are starting to get his creative juices flowing. The journal contains some interesting observations that are plainly seeds of ideas that would appear later in his books, like _War of the Planets._ This is some pretty far-fetched stuff, like nuclear small arms and the effects of prolonged radiation exposure on the human body.

But his writing on the Manhattan Project swiftly begins to look tame compared to the sections of the journal that obviously led Dark to encrypt his book in its unusual fashion. These sections start with a midnight knocking on his motel room door. It's his Army public relations handler, a Lieutenant Owen. He manhandles Dark into his clothes and hurries him into a waiting Jeep. As they're speeding off into the desert, the Lieutenant starts to explain – well, I don't need to paraphrase. You can read Dark's words for yourself:

#

The Jeep careened down the narrow highway at an ungodly speed. Its substandard, government-issued headlights were insufficient to illuminate the road before us. One errant tumbleweed, one slow-moving Gila monster in the road and we'd all be on our way to perdition. I told the Corporal behind the wheel repeatedly to slow down, but he was deaf to my protests. Perhaps my words were drowned out by Lieutenant Owen's ceaseless stream of prattle, and the screaming of the desert wind in our ears.

"The General requested you specifically, Albert," Lieutenant Owen screamed back at me as the Jeep teetered and totted back and forth across the two lane highway.

"I have no idea what could be so important that he had to get me up in the middle of the night!" I hollered back.

Owen shrugged, his epaulets bobbing.

"I am not of the habit of being at the General's beck and call," I added, but Owen had returned his attention to the road. The driver swerved to avoid something and the Jeep momentarily picked itself up onto its two left wheels. I hung tight to the seat-back before me, fearing greatly for my life.

"But the General said you'll be the only one able to make head or tail of what he's got!" Owen yelled back. "Says it's right up your alley! You like spacemen stories right? Flash Gordon?"

My mother always told me that no good ever came from drinking whiskey. Here was definite proof. One evening, the General and I had split a bottle of Wild Turkey. After a pint, I'd started in on my theories of genetic variation and the possible applicability to radiation resistance. After a quart, I was painting with a decided broader brush, filling the General's ear with the possibilities of extraterrestrial intelligence, vis-a-vis the military's preparedness for an alien invasion.

Obviously, I'd made an impression.

While I did not expect the General to have engineered a race of nuclear supermen, or that the earth was teetering at the precipice of an alien attack, the reference to Flash Gordon caught my attention.

With the neighboring desert still aglow with the nuclear fallout of the Manhattan Project, a myriad of interesting mutations could easily have appeared in the surrounding flora and fauna. My imagination leapt at the idea of, perhaps, a new, undiscovered species of fern. Or perhaps a two-headed goat.

My imagination could hardly conceive of what I was actually about to see.

The Jeep swung off the highway and onto a dirt track. Even in the dark, I was able to get a rudimentary hold of my bearings. We were somewhere beyond the edge of the airfield, at the extreme limit of 1728's northern border. (Sasha: 1728 was the PO Box Number for the Los Alamos Facility in Santa Fe. Dark uses it throughout his book as a code name for the lab.) We were well out onto the mesa here, as far from the dormitory facilities as humanly possible. I was vaguely aware of a cluster of mechanical workshops below my plane as I had flown in to 1728, but I'd never thought to explore so far from the main laboratories, even if my access had allowed it.

Hurtling toward the perimeter's razor wire fence, I could see a gate flanked by machine gun nests. Beyond, lights in the workshops flickered in the pitch black of the desert. I could easily have been on the dark side of the moon, for all the civilization I could see.

The Jeep skidded to a half in the brackish sand before the chain link gate. An MP with a Grease Gun looked over our identification papers. He gave my press pass a good, long look. The men behind the machine guns looked nervous, and their Brownings were pointing directly at us.

Presently, the MP seemed satisfied, and he waved our Jeep through the gate. The driver exercised no less caution driving within the compound than he'd shown on the public highway. Thirty seconds after clearing the front gate, Owen and myself were before a nondescript prefabricated workshop, with blacked-out windows. Two more MP's with Grease Guns guarded its door. They looked cold in the desert night air. Cold or nervous.

"Did the General drag me out of bed this evening because he has Ming the Merciless locked up in a tool shed?" I quipped to Owen as I stepped down out of the Jeep. Owen didn't even crack a smile as he knocked the dust of the desert off his uniform. "But if you have Superman, in there, locked up with kryptonite chains, I should warn you, I will inform Beetle Bailey." When the Lieutenant fixed me with a po-faced stare, I started to worry about exactly what they did had locked up in the workshop.

"Now, Albert, I don't need to remind you that what you see in there is of the utmost confidence," Owen said, pointing at the door.

"I know," I dismissed. "As always, I write nothing that isn't approved by the censors."

"No," Owen corrected, gravely. "You don't understand: Nothing you see here can even reach the censors, alright? This whole operation is strictly off the books."

I raised an eyebrow. Now I was painfully curious about what they had inside. "You have my word," I said, giving Owen the Cub Scout salute.

Owen nodded. "Good. Then come on."

The workshop contained nothing by a blinding, white-hot light. At least, as I stepped through the door, that was all I could see. I blinked and covered my face, but the shift from dark desert to burning glare blistered my eyeballs. I could hear a voice speaking to me, but I couldn't tear my attention away from the light to listen. As my eyes began to adjust, the voice began to resolve to the familiar, gruff monotone of General Groves.

"Dark, good that you could make it," he barked. Every word that the General uttered sounded like an order, if it was or it wasn't.

"What's that light?" I asked, blinking at the swirling red blob before my eyes.

"You'll see," the General said, cryptically.

"Turn it off," I asked, holding my hand before my face.

"Can't. Too dangerous. You'll see."

I blinked, attempting to make the blob before my eyes resolve into the head of General Groves.

"It's very late for games like this, General," I said, turning from the light. My eyes were adjusting, I could make out the silhouettes of drill presses and lathes. A standard machine shop. I looked back and could just make out the source of the bright, scalding light. A brace of large, focused spotlights, like those used in motion picture production.

They sat at the four corners of a quadrangle, beaming down on an inert, raggedy figure, slumped in a wooden chair at the epicenter of the lamp's heat. The man's hands were chained behind him, and his head of wild, unkempt locks hung down, obscuring his face. The need for such brilliant illumination on such a wretched sight escaped me.

"What? Who?" I looked at the General in incomprehension. "What's going on? Who is this man?"

The General signaled with his right hand and a lab-coated technician appeared out of the shadows and handed him a clipboard. As my eyes continued to compensate for the contrast of light and darkness, I could see more lab-coats skulking in the shadows. There seemed to be quite a few of them, actually, operating various devices, some of it very high technology for a simple machine shop.

The General looked at the clipboard and read, "Private First Class Michael Elton." And he handed the clipboard back to the technician.

"I'm sorry? He's one of ours?" I asked in confusion. My first instinct had been that the wretched man, shackled to the chair was some sort of POW.

"Perhaps," the General growled. From his uniform he removed a pouch of tobacco and began to fill his cheek. "The dog tags check out. But the face doesn't match the file."

"And impostor then?" I took a step forward, looking closer at the man in the chair. The lights were so bright, and his condition was so wizened. His skin appeared to be literally cooking in the bright lights, small whiffs of smoke rising up off of his hunched shoulders. The lights were hot, but...

"I wouldn't get any closer if I was you," the General warned around his mouth full of chew. "The lights keep him docile, but don't let it fool you, he'd still dangerous."

"Dangerous?" I scampered back. "Contagious?"

"Perhaps," the General said, wearily. "We just don't know. That's why I called for you, Dark."

"What? Why? I'm no doctor."

"No," General Groves pointed at the mess of dirty hair and flesh slumped in the chair. "And he doesn't need one. He has no pulse."

"Pulse?" I said in shock.

"Right."

"No heartbeat?"

"Nope. None."

"He's dead."

"Sure enough."

"Then, how is he dangerous?"

"Dead, maybe. But nobody's told him that."

"What?" I asked the General in incomprehension. I moved a little closer to the hunched figure, sure there was nothing to fear from a dead body. I'd seen my share. I was at Dachau when the Allies liberated it. But as my shadow fell across the prisoner, he stirred in his chair, perhaps sensing my presence.

"He's not dead!" I screamed, leaping back.

"I tell you, he's got no pulse!" the General dismissed. "His skin is as cold as ice."

"But...he's still...alive?"

"And dangerous," the General corrected. "Without these lights, he'd break those chains and kill us all."

"That's...that's not possible."

"Yet, here he is. My question to you, Dark," the General stepped in the light, letting the burning white glare form a halo around his peaked cap. "Is what the hell is he?"

"I just don't—" I stammered, "I can't understand..." In the bright lights, I'd begun to turn pale and perspire. The General had brought me outside for a cigarette. We stood in the frigid desert night, as my shaking fingers reflexively brought the burning ember to my lips. "Is this because of..." I gestured south toward the Trinity site.

"No," Graves said, spitting tobacco into the dirt. "This was dumped on our doorstep. Nobody else knew what to do with him. And 1728 is supposed to be expanding its scientific portfolio..."

"But there's nothing scientific about the walking dead!" My voice echoed in the desert night.

"Calm down, Dark," the General ordered. "If you've got nothing to contribute, you can head back to your hotel."

"No, no," I shook my head, rapidly smoking the last of my cigarette. I stomped it out in the sand and quickly lit another one. "I'm sorry, it's just the shock, that's all." Slowly, my journalistic instincts were returning to me. "What's his story? If he's not a nuclear superman, what is he?"

"As I said, Dark, we just don't know," the General said, looking off into the night.

"Well, where did the Army find him? How was he captured?"

"You ever hear of the island of Tori-shima?"

"Tori-shima? No."

"No, nobody has," the General sighed. "This was before Fat Man and Little Boy. We were pushing closer to the coast of Japan, still looking for airfields. Of course, back then, Tokyo was still the target for Little Boy. Tori-shima is only three hundred miles from the Ginza.

"The 11th Airborne parachuted in. We were expecting heavy resistance, after what the leathernecks had found on Iwo Jima. And here we were right in the Tojo's backyard. We expected hell on earth. But the defenses we found had already been picked clean. Bunkers, antiaircraft guns, artillery. It was all there, just waiting. Ten thousand shells and a million rounds of ammunition, but no Tojos. Not a single one. The whole Goddamn island was abandoned. Or so we thought.

"The Paratroopers find signs of a firefight, empty clips, bullet holes. But no bodies. Whatever had cleared out the defenders had done it hit fast and clean. No mess. The 11th was left with nothing to do. No enemy. Someone had done their job for them. Tori-shima was taken without firing a shot.

"But who'd cleared out all the Nips? They sure as shit hadn't retreated of their own volition. Not this close to the shores of Japan. Mutiny, perhaps? Was this a sign that the Tojo's grip on the rank and file was beginning to slip? No, it turned out to be nothing so neat and clean. As the paratroopers pushed deeper into the island, the found what had taken care of all the Tojos."

"That...thing?" I asked, lighting another cigarette.

The General nodded. "They found an old well, covered over with sheet steel, chained up and padlocked. On top of that, the Nips had piled boulders, big enough that it required a dozen men with block and tackle to move them. Whatever Tojos had survived the attack, had locked something big...dangerous...down in that well.

"But all the GIs found was that character," Groves pointed back toward the workshop's door, "cowing in the dark. Dog tags read PFC Michael Elton. They figured him for some sort of POW. Maybe from the Philippines. Bataan. He was half-crazy, rambling nonsense. Then the second they pull him out into the daylight, his flesh catches fire, like someone had put a match to him. Queerest thing. They put him out but they figure he's dead. No pulse. Nothing. Then it's into a body bag and back onto the medical frigate, as the 11th moves on, pushing closer into Japan."

"But he wasn't dead," I said, already knowing the answer.

"No," the General said calmly. "In the night, the frigate goes missing. Takes three days for the spotter planes to track it down, adrift in amongst the Izu's. Can't be reached by radio, no answer to semaphores or Morse. Rescue crew goes aboard and find a ghost ship. Not a soul aboard."

I nodded. "Except one."

"Exactly. Cowering down in the bilge. One bedraggled, insane PFC..."

"I take it he's not, in actuality, Private First Class Elton," I asked as the General and I stepped back into the workshop.

"No, Elton was MIA at Midway. How this...thing...got his dog tags, and how he ended up on Tori-shima, we have no idea."

"Did you ask it?" I queried. "Does it...speak?"

"Oh yes. English. Spanish. French. Japanese. Any language you choose, when it's lucid. But all he says is that his real name is Cain. When he's conscious, however, he's dangerous. Very dangerous. We've already lost six men. Only the lights keep him in check. Sunlight burns him. These are ultraviolet. Too little, and he'll tear your head off. Too much and it fries him to a crisp. But at just the right levels..."

"Why don't you just destroy it?" I asked, looking at the smoldering corpse in disgust. "If it's so dangerous?"

The General gave me a look that I couldn't quiet read, then stepped into the circle of light. From his holster, he removed his .45 and proceeded to put three bullets into the bound figure.

I recoiled in shock, horrified that the General would act on my suggestion so literally. But as Groves returned his weapon to its holster, I noticed the slumped figure had hardly wavered from the impact of the shots. The bullet holes in his flesh appeared to rapidly heal over, until twenty seconds after being shot, there was no sign that the man had even been injured.

"Dear God!" I exclaimed as the General stepped out of the light.

"Except for direct sunlight, PFC Elton there is almost totally invulnerable to physical attack. His strength is easily that of twenty men. Whatever else that the PFC is, he is most certainly a formidable weapon. The brass have taken note. The White House has set up a new committee. Designation MJ-12. They're calling the shots on this one. They're looking for anything that might give us a leg up on the Pinkos. They sent him here for us to study before he's destroyed. They want to know if we might be able to reproduce the technology that created him."

"Technology?" I looked into the circle of burning light. "But he's not a machine. He's a monster."

"Mmm," the General agreed. "But monsters have their uses."
Chapter 15

I'll skip ahead here. There are pages and pages of Dark recruiting a scientific team and setting up the laboratory specifically to study the subject they'd codenamed Cain.

It's pretty dreary stuff. Lots of details. Needless to say, the whole operation was strictly off-book with the Army, but the mysterious executive committee, MJ-12 is able to provide Groves and Dark with all the recourses they need.

Dark had no scientific experience himself, but he's acting as a sort of ideas man for the General. Groves, for his part, cherry picks the best minds out of the post-war medical and biological communities.

It all adds up to something about the size of a Manhattan Project, Part Two. Both Groves and Dark are convinced that Cain represents a new type of weapon, their atomic super solider, one that can dominate whatever future fallout-soaked battlefield America finds itself fighting on.

They're desperate to weaponize their prisoner in some fashion. They hope to somehow harness his strength and agility without replicating the sun allergy or the loss of life functions. With a whole platoon of soldiers like Cain, they know that the U.S. Army would be unstoppable. It reads like something lifted straight out of one of Dark's pulp sci-fi novels. Novels he hadn't yet written.

Soon, they were making staggering advances, inventing much of the science as they go along: DNA, genomeic sequencing, endogenous retrovirus polymorphism. They're breaking ground on a lot of what we now know as molecular biology. Cain represents, above all else, a genetic mystery. A mystery the General and Dark are eager to solve.

Cain's thirst for blood comes late to their understanding. Keeping him in a constant torpor as they are, they remain ignorant to the exact reasons behind his murderous tendencies. But as time passes, and the PFC's health seemed to worsen, the scientist team are forced to examine how their patient is able to stay alive at all. The longer they deny Cain blood, the more human he seems to become. His ultraviolet sensitivity diminishes, as does his apparent superhuman strength.

They are even able to detected slight life signs in his inert body.

Paradoxically, the lack of blood doesn't kill Cain but causes him to appear more alive.

Not once in the book does Dark ever use the word "vampire." Maybe he was in denial about what 1728 really had on its hands, but the 'V' word almost leaps off every page of his book. Blood, sunlight...they do everything but test for an allergy to garlic. Dark's commentary might read like some dime horror novel, but Dark writes with such banal attention of everyday detail that it's hard to think of it as anything but a faithful documentation of fact.

But I'm editorializing. What I think of _Dark's Last Novel_ is beside the point. I'll skip ahead to where the book once again intersects with the Montavez case. Right about when the relationship between Dark and Groves starts to break down.

They'd had some success separating the details of Cain's genome from that of a normal human being's. They'd tagged the genetic divinations with markers and then synthesized a retrovirus that replicates the strings in a healthy genome.

But their animal test subjects fail to manifest any of the characteristics they were hoping for. Instead of increased strength and endurance, the genetically modified chimpanzees demonstrate a punch-drunk, sloppy blissfulness.

Sound familiar? Yeah, that's what I thought as I read it. And Dark explicitly makes the connection as he's talking with the General:

#

...growing increasing concerned with the General's overall attitude to the Cain Project. When the results from the last batch of test subjects arrived and were even less encouraging that the early lots, I was seriously starting to question the scientific merit of what we were attempting to achieve.

We seemed to be inextricably escaping the orbit of nation defense and straying into the murkier water of eugenic curiosity.

Far be it for me to question Grove's motives, but his reaction to the daily results coming in from the laboratories was beginning to disturb me. That our retrovirus was showing no signs of replicating Cain's unique abilities but was instead showing pronounced narcotic effects, indicated to me that the line of experimentation was reaching a dead-end.

But the General, somehow, saw the result as encouraging.

What exactly was the Army's definition of success here? My concern grew with each new round of experiments.

It was batch three hundred that finally put me over the edge.

I stormed into the General's office with every intention of getting some answers. He was on a call when I pushed past his secretary, steam billowing from my ears.

"I'll need to call you back," Groves said to the handset as I paced before his large, oak desk. "Yes. Yes. Fifteen minutes." He hung up the phone. "This better be important, Dark," he said to me.

"It is." I slammed the folder containing the results of batch test 300 down onto his ink blotter.

The General, with his casual, military air, did not react. "Are these the latest test results?" he asked, without touching the manila envelope.

"Yes. I assume you've seen them?"

"I have," the General confirmed.

"Then, do you want to explain them to me?"

"Dark," he said, in a condescending tone. "It is not my job to explain test results to you..."

"That's not what I meant!" I hollered, throwing up my arms. "You and I both signed off on an experimentation regiment, last week. We agreed that we were excluding any more modifications to the alpha twenty-three nucleotide chain. That the results we were seeing there were not encouraging. Do you remember?"

"I do," the General said calmly.

"Then, what is this?" I poked the folder before Groves. "Thirty percent divination in the alpha twenty-three chain? Are you going to tell me this was an accident?"

"No," Grove said without emotion, reaching for the tobacco pouch that sat next to the 300 test results.

"Well then?" I said, exasperated.

"Dark," the General began, filling his cheek with a slug of chew. "I think, in all the minutia, you might have forgotten our mission here."

"I most certainly have not," I replied, offended. "The alpha twenty-three nucleotide chain has produced nothing but narcotic symptoms in the animal test subjects. Symptoms we've been unable to counteract. We've had to extirpate two-hundred chimpanzees to date."

"No, Dark," the General shook his head. "See? This is exactly what I mean. Have you forgotten that we embarked on this scientific exercise with the express goal of weaponizing the Cain subject?"

"Yes, of course, but...but you can't mean..." I said in horror.

"It's the first fruitful line of experimentation we've discovered so far."

"But...weaponize 300? That's unfathomable. That's no tool of the battlefield. But a...but a..."

"Biological weapon. The MJ-12 boys are calling it that."

I baulked in disgust. "You can't be serious?"

"1728 is under pressure to show results, Dark. Lot three-hundred is the first tangible evidence we have that we're actually accomplished something here."

"But Cain possesses such remarkable abilities," I said, shifting from disgust to despair. "To say 300 is a result...it's nothing but a horrific side effect."

"Nevertheless."

"Nevertheless? I just can't, in good conscience—"

"Your conscience has nothing to do with it, Dark," the General interrupted. "This is not your decision."

"But what if it got loose? What if _they_ got their hands on it?" I leaned forward across Grove's desk, almost pleading.

"It won't," he replied, handing my folder back to me.

"It won't? It won't?" I wagged a finger out of the window. "Like _that_ would always be under our control?" I was point off toward the Trinity bomb test site.

"That's different," Groves muttered.

"How is that different? You know the rumors. That the Russians already have a program underway. Even if they can't develop the technology themselves, once they examine what we've achieved. They're not fools."

"Our understanding of genetic science is in its infancy, Dark. You know that better than anyone. It might take years to fully understand and utilize what Cain is capable of. Batch 300 is showing results now. All of this requires funding, Dark. Funding that must be justified. That might not be of any concern to yours, but it is mine. Do you want to see 1728 shut down? Before we've had a chance to complete our work?"

"No," I had to admit. "But neither do I want to be remembered by history as one of its great monsters. We started this project, General, to protect this country. How can you, in good conscience, say that Lot 300 is anything but a plague?"

"The decision has been made, Albert. MJ-12 has spoken." The General let the finality of his statement hang in the air between us.

"I don't accept that. I can't accept that," I said.

"You will have to," the General said and climbed from his seat.
Chapter 16

So, there you have it: Dark's big secret. The reason he'd encrypted his journal. He was complicit in Geneings inception, during a clandestine government project to weaponize the blood of a vampire.

Crazy stuff. Fantastic, even. But the evidence was all there. The very existence of Geneing to begin with. And the lot and batch number of Dark's experiment encoded in the genetic marker still being used as the litmus test for Gene Genies a century later. That I was even reading Dark's book at all was proof that what it contained was accurate. Encoding it in the way Dark had done served as its own verification.

This was what Vivian Montavez had died trying to uncover.

Dark's Journal goes on to detail his attempts to derail Groves through official channels. He even asks for and receives an audience with the Vice President of the United States, only to discover that Barkley is chairing the MJ-12 committee himself.

Of course, Dark is characteristically unable to let the situation lie. More than anything else, Dark is totally convinced of his own moral certitude. He soon takes it upon himself to sabotage the whole of the Cain Project, including the results of batch 300, fearing that the technology in the hands of America's enemies would be too great a risk for the country to bear.

Dark was humble like that.

He goes full-on commando. Sneaking into the labs at night and destroying all the samples of 300. He then absconds with Cain himself, boxing up the corpse and, with the assistance of the solders assigned to guard the test subject, loads the coffin into a waiting truck and driving off the base.

So little did anyone expect Dark's betrayal, that he was able to totally blindside them.

But they managed to blindside him, too.

With the blood-drained corpse of its single subject gone, the Cain Project comes to an end. But years later, the continued existence of 300 is proven to Dark's satisfaction when he notes in newspaper report strikingly familiar symptoms manifesting amongst North Korean rear echelon officers. MJ-12 had finally weaponized 300 and used it on the battlefields of Korea.

Oddly, military or government officials made no move to punish Dark for his disloyalty. Perhaps his rapid success as a science fiction author quickly made he too high a profile a subject to move against. The journal contains nothing about the rest of Dark's life.

How exactly Dark disposed of Cain's body or his involvement with the Rosicrucians, is left undetailed in the journal. But he does hint in the last entry of the journal that he did not destroy the vampire. In fact, quite the opposite. Dark begs the reader from the future – so wise and adroit that he was able to decode _Dark's Last Novel_ – to use all his advanced understanding of genetics to find Cain's body and discover an antidote to 300.

Somehow, I think Dark expected someone more impressive than Detective Sasha Fonseca to be the first to decode his journal.

But I'd found what I needed to know. Find PFC Michael Elton, and I would find Cain. And finding Cain would mean the end to the Geneing epidemic.

Cain was the source.

Cain was Q.

The blood of Q, the person, unlocked Q, the book, which in turned gave the name of Q, the person.

Dark had a wicked sense of humor like that.

Vivian Montavez had been looking for Q. The search had gotten her killed. I was no closer to finding the identity of Vivian's killer. But did it matter anymore? With an opportunity before me to end the whole Geneing epidemic, did one single murder still matter?

But it was all so absurd. A vampire, alive in 2050? Dark must have kept Cain in his state of torpidity...a grave, perhaps? Was I looking for the headstone of Michael Elton, PFC?

The second I finished the final page of _Dark's Last Novel_ , I reached for my phone. Of course, I got nothing but voice mail downtown. If there was anyone left employed in the records department, they'd be out on the streets, throwing rocks at Constantine's Tac-30.

I put down my phone and drummed my fingers on the carapace of the iBook, trying to remember the URL for the county death records. Then I realized there was no reason to believe that Michael Elton was in the King County area, other than Montavez's presence here. I'd need to take my query federal...

I was never able to run my search. I slowly became aware of a cool breeze on my face, blowing in from the Vivian's bedroom. A window was open, but I'd been in the apartment almost the whole evening, reading Dark's journal, and it was the first time I had noticed the air stirring.

I climbed to my feet and slipped my Rhino out of the holster beside the ereader. I throated the little, plastic gun in my fist as I moved cautiously toward the bedroom door. The window in the bedroom hadn't been open ten minutes before, I was certain. But we were four stories off the road, with no fire escape.

A shadow moved in the darkened bedroom. I raised my pistol before me.

"Don't move!" I called out. "Seattle Police!"

"Don't shoot, copper," a female voice echoed out of the bedroom. "You got me," it said as a sultry shadow, hands raised stepped out before the door.

"Move closer – slowly," I ordered, not lowering my snub-nosed revolver. "Into the light."

"I'm unarmed," the woman said, stepping through the bedroom doorway into the dancing light of the single lamp. She was small and beautiful, dark-haired and made up for the evening. Her dress was low cut and long, a tiny handbag swung from her left hand. She looked like she was on her way home from a cocktail party. Perhaps, in 1953.

"What are you doing here?" I barked, lowering my pistol. Whoever she was she was certainly not a threat. "How'd you get in?"

"What am I doing here?" the woman asked, flipping her hair back to fix me with her large, auburn eyes. "What are _you_ doing here? You're in my apartment."

"I've been here all evening. You've been hiding in there all night?"

The girl smirked. "No, sweetie. Can I put my hands down now?" She was still standing with her long, thin arms up beside her dark hair. I nodded and picked up the Rhino's holster off the table.

Then her comment hit me, "What did you say? This is your apartment?"

"That right," she said, moving slowly forward on high heels. She pointed at my pack of Kools on the coffee table. "Mind if I bum one?" She didn't wait for a reply, taking a cigarette out of the pack.

"You lived here with Vivian Montavez?" I asked. There'd never been mention of a roommate. There was only one bed.

"Something like that," she said, putting the cigarette to her lips. "Got a light?"

I fished out my Zippo, flicking it open. As I watched the beautiful girl light the tip of her smoke, the resemblance dawned on me. The self-portrait by the front door...

"Ugh," she spat in distaste. "Menthol."

"But you're..." I said, still holding the burning lighter out before me.

"As I said, copper, you're the one in _my_ apartment."

"But, but," I stammered, realizing the Zippo was still lit and flipping it closed. "You're dead. Dead, and no fooling."

"Looks good on me, huh?" Vivian smiled.

"No, I mean, I pulled you out of a dumpster. You were dead. You _are_ dead."

"Don't burst a nut worrying about it, honey. There isn't time." Vivian reached down and picked the e-reader up off the coffee table. She tapped the _previous_ button a few times and fixed me with a smoldering stare. "You decoded it. Q. It was you, wasn't it?"

"Yes," I acknowledged. "Well, my friend with the computers. I followed the trail you left. Found the decryption key in your DNA."

Her smoldering stare wavered for a millisecond. A look of confusion momentarily crossed her big, beautiful eyes, then vanished as quickly as it had appeared. She returned the e-reader to the table. "It's already all over the Internet. It's a firestorm. There isn't much time."

"You never decoded it, did you?" I guess I'd already figured that out. All this time, I'd assumed I was playing catch up with Vivian. But perhaps I'd done her one better. "What is this? Some kind of ruse? Whose body was that in the dumpster? Did you switch the DNA samples or something?"

"No honey," Vivian said, taking a draw of her cigarette. "It's no trick. That was me in the dumpster. If you've read this..." She pointed at the e-reader. "...I'm sure you're close to piecing together what happened. You look like a smart fella."

She had been truly dead. I was sure of that. But now, here she stood. Then that would mean...

I reached for my Rhino. Her hand moved faster that I could see. She caught my wrist before I could grab hold of my gun. We arm-wrestled like that for a second, but she was inhumanly strong.

She squeezed. My wrist began to crack.

"Let go!" I screamed. "Fuck!"

She forced me down to my knees. With one hand she had me bested. Beaten.

"You know that Nietzsche thing?" she asked, looking down on me with menace. She could snapped my arm with the slightest flick of her wrist and she was savoring the power. "About what doesn't kill you makes you stronger? Well, he had that all turned around..."

She twisted my arm a last few degrees, and I howled in pain. Then she let me go, pushing me to the ground.

Fuck. It felt like she'd broken my arm. But she'd made her point.

"You can't be alive," I panted. "It's just not possible."

"I've got no time to explain," she said, finishing the last of her cigarette and snuffing it out in the ashtray. "They'll be here any second."

"Who?" I pulled myself painfully back up onto the futon, holding my arm. "Who will be here any second?"

"Your FBI buddies," Vivian said, smiling a vindictive smile. "They already have your friend. O'Day? Now they're coming for you. Despite the unrest downtown, I guess they could spare their SWAT team to deal with you. You've made a whole lot of big, powerful enemies today, honey. Decoding that book and then just releasing it on the Internet like that."

"I didn't release anything," I said.

"No, but your friend did. And he ratted you out. They're outside, right now. The whole fucking FBI. Any second now they're going to burst in here and throw a bag over your head. I can't even imagine what sort of hole-in-the-ground they have in Guantanamo for an enemy of the state like you, but you can tell me one last thing before you vanish: Where's Q?"

"Who?" I feigned stupidity.

"Don't get smart," she said, stepping toward me. "Or I'll break the other arm."

I flinched in terror. "Read the book!" I hollered.

"If I could wait that long, I wouldn't be asking!" she screamed at me. "Tell me, Fonseca, where is Cain?"

"Go to hell!" I screamed back.

She didn't get a chance to respond. On cue, the door to Vivian's apartment blew in. Constantine's Tac-30 unit came storming in, centimeter guns raised. One second, Vivian was standing over me, the next she had vanished. Back out through the window in the bedroom, I could only assume. Four stories off the ground.

I didn't resist. The tactical guys rolled me over and quickly slipped my wrists into a zip tie. My arm throbbed, but it would do no good complaining. A second later, the lights went out, as a black bag came down over my head.

After that it was just bumping and jostling. Radios crackling and feet stomping. There was a car, or maybe a van, then the cold of a steel floor through the fabric of the hood.

Then just the sound of road noise.
Chapter 17

When the hood came off, I was looking at four walls of concrete.

I was intimately familiar of the Town Hall's interview rooms, though this was the first time I'd been handcuffed to one their tables.

Constantine sat across from me, flanked by two dark suited cohorts. He idly tapped an unopened pack of Kools on the table before him, twisting them in his fingers. I looked at them, then at Constantine, then back at the cigarettes.

"You've been busy this evening, Detective Fonseca," Constantine started, speaking slowly and in a low tone.

Shit! Was he going to give me a cigarette or not? Ten seconds into the interrogation, and already it had escalated to the level of cruel and unusual punishment.

"I don't know what you think you've got on me," I replied, watching the Kools circle, hypnotically. "But I've had a quiet night in, reading a book."

"How about interception and distribution of Top Secret documents, to begin with?" Constantine smiled.

"That's crazy," I snorted.

"And activities pursuant to the undermining of and interference with, the security of the United States of America?"

"Now I'm a terrorist?" I exclaimed.

"You said it, Fonseca, not me."

"This is bullshit!"

"Breach of security protocols? Unauthorized access to military encryption technology? And that's just the Federal crimes. Want to start on dereliction of duty? Tampering with evidence? Failure to inform a superior officer of an ongoing investigation?"

"What investigation?"

"What were you doing in that girl's apartment, Fonseca?" Constantine asked.

"Go to hell," I replied.

"We've got your friend O'Day in the next room. He's cooperating fully. He gave up where you were hiding out. The lowjack. Says he had no idea how you got your hands on the decrypt key for Dark's novel. Said you wouldn't tell him. Care to let me in on the secret?"

"Does it matter?" I shrugged. "The novel is decoded. Everyone can read it now."

"And you realize it details a highly top-secret, military operation?"

"I do now."

"And it never occurred to you to ask _why_ Dark encoded the novel?" Constantine leaned forward across the interrogation table. "That perhaps it would have been in the country's best interests to let the experts process the decoded text before you published it on the Internet?"

"I didn't know anything about that," I lied. "That wasn't my idea."

"Now the shit has really hit the fan, Detective."

"Have you read the book?" I asked, shifting uncomfortably against my restraints.

"We're examining it now," Constantine said, guardedly.

"Well, when you get around to reading it, you'll know it's all bullshit. It's a horror novel. And not one of Dark's best. Vampires and shit. It doesn't detail jack."

Constantine didn't react. He just watched me across the table.

"Unless you're telling me there really are such things as vampires..." I teased.

Still no reaction from Constantine.

"Come on, let me go," I held up my shackled hands. "We've both got a lot more important things to do than fuck around here."

"Like what?" Constantine said.

"Find Montavez's murderer for one." I sighed. "Remember that?"

"Didn't you decode the book to find that out, Detective?"

"Yeah, maybe," I hedged.

"But yet, no new leads in a century-old text?" It was his turn to tease.

"Well, no..."

"Perhaps you thought that if you found Q, he would lead you to the girl's murderer?" Constantine asked, studying my face for a reaction. "Did the book tell you who Q is?"

I stayed silent.

"Anything?"

This was fucked up. Who was this Constantine guy, anyway? "As I said, it's bullshit. Fiction."

"Perhaps. But Montavez was attempting to decode it. That's why she bought that original copy. Whoever killed her, killed her to stop her decoding the book. That's right, isn't it, Detective?"

"Sure." I shrugged.

"So, I'll ask again: Who is Q?"

"Read the fucking book," I said, giving Constantine the same answer I'd given Vivian.

"There isn't time," Constantine said calmly. "And you've read it, right Detective? You were up all night reading it? Why don't you just tell me?"

That was it, I could see it now. They were both looking for the same thing. Montavez had come to Seattle to find Q, and so had Constantine. All along, he'd known that was the reason she'd been killed. But now it was a race. Who could find Q first?

Did Constantine know she was really still alive? Or dead? Or undead? Whatever. I couldn't put it past him. He'd come here with an awful lot of guns to enforce a Federal Wardship.

I had to pick a side. NeoCons or bloodsuckers? I didn't like either of my options. But it seemed prudent not to count myself prematurely amongst the damned. But Constantine was going to have to give me something in return.

"What was going on that Genie basement?" I asked. "That shit didn't terrify you as much as it should have."

"The name, Fonesca?" Constantine prodded.

"Answer my question first."

"The Rosicrucians." Constantine's glanced shifted between his two compatriots. "The FBI have been investigating their activities."

"No," I shook my head. "Don't try and softball me. Vivian Montavez wasn't an agent. But she knew a whole hell of a lot about these Rosicrucians than was common knowledge. She gave, or traded, that original copy of Q to them. That means they were sufficiently friendly to be giving each other gifts. What's Montavez's part in all this?"

"Detective Fonesca—"

"If you want to see my cards, Special Agent, I'm going to have to take a peek at yours. I can sit here in silence for the next few hours and let the rest of humanity – all rapidly skimming through Dark's novel for any clues – learn Q's identity, or I can give you the name that will get you to Q first. What's it going to be?"

Constantine considered his options. Luckily, he didn't have any. "There might be...some _familiarity_ with Rosicrucian ideas among some within the Neo-Conservative movement."

" _Familiarity?_ " I said in disbelief. "You're fucking kidding me, right?"

"It's hardly dogma."

"No," I remembered. "You're a neophite aren't you? All you Hot Kids. You're new to the game. But the old guard...what's wrong? Don't they invite you to the meetings?"

The FBI agent to Constantine's left replied for Constantine. He had the look about him of some sort of political officer. He was thin and dark and wore a bluetooth in his ear. "It is true that certain prominent members of the Neo-Conservative movement have affiliations separate and apart from their political views."

"Like the Montavez's? Like the senator? And Vivian?" There was no reply, so a soldiered on. "You're the iconoclasts, aren't you? The separatist faction. The Rosicrucians who didn't take the Geneing."

The NeoCon political officer sighed. "Not separatist, no." The fact of the matter seemed important to him. "Dark always intended that his novel should be decoded. But his true message got lost along the way."

"Then the Rosicrucians _were_ created by Dark. To hide the secret of Q."

"No, the Rosicrucians are much older than Dark. He was a lifelong Mason. An 18th Degree, Scottish Rite. A Knight of the Rose Croix. He understood the Mason's singular ability to keep secrets. Pass them down through the generations. The secret of Q he entrusted to this 18th Degree."

"But Dark stole Cain away from 1728 to stop them weaponizing Q. Why didn't he just destroy him?"

"Because he was a patriot," Constantine spoke up.

"And a utopianist," the political officer added. "He believed there'd be a day when Q would be needed again by this country."

"Corpus, Cruor, Civitas." Now I understood. "The body, the blood, the state."

"Exactly," the agent paused and glanced at the ceiling, seeming to say a small prayer as I repeated his liturgy.

"And Competence, Community, Compassion?" I added. "C, C, C? Editorial revisions for the rank and file? A watered down faith for the uninitiated?"

No one answered.

"C, C, C," I repeated. "Competence, Community, Compassion. But C is also the Roman numeral for one-hundred. C, C, C. Three-hundred. Batch 300. The Geneing retrovirus, its marker encoded in its DNA. Dark never meant it as a sacrament, he meant it as a clue..."

"Detective?" Constantine asked, missing my point.

"But Geneing?" I ignored him. "Surely, even you Neocon wackos didn't _mean_ for that to get out..."

"No," the officer said adamantly. "We had nothing to do with that."

"Yet, who else knew about 300?"

"We didn't—" the Agent started, then stopped. Then began again. "In the 1980s, when Rosicrucians got into positions of command, once they against had access to the Top Secret documentation on MJ-12's off-book projects. They learned that Dark had not managed to destroy all the samples of 300 the day he absconded with Cain's body. There were off-site samples. The Army tried to weaponize it during the Korean War, but only met with limited success."

"Dark mentioned that in his book."

"Yes?" the Agent seemed surprised. "Well, the samples continued to exist...in a laboratory on Plum Island...an element existed within the Rosicrucian ranks – an element that still exists – that held with the belief that the search for Q was not a physical one, but a spiritual one. Three-hundred was the metaphysical means by which one could discover Q."

"Rosicrucians willingly took the retrovirus?"

"Yes. And once one subject was infected, his blood served as a carrier for the retrovirus. The outbreak started slow. We quarantined those who'd been infected. But as internecine tensions grew, as some Rosicrucians pushed hard for the decoding Dark's novel..."

"You couldn't put the genie back in the bottle. The Gene Genie, to be exact."

"The only solution was to decode Dark's novel. That would lead us to Q – to Cain. He is the source, he would be the cure. Dark foretold it."

"But the virus doesn't just make you a Genie, does it?" I tried to point an accusing finger at the unnamed agent, but I was still shackled to the table.

"No," he said solemnly. "There are other...side effects."

"Vivian Montavez's body wasn't stolen from the Morgue," I said, looking directly at Constantine. "She got up and walked out."

"Yes," Constantine wouldn't look me in the eye.

"Vampires are real."

No one answered.

"But hundreds of thousands of people in American have been killed by Geneing. Why aren't we up to our necks in vampires?"

"Introduce the retrovirus to the system of healthy human being, and it has a narcotic, hypnotic effect. Introduce the retrovirus in the minutes after death..."

"What?" I recoiled in disgust. The image of Vivian Montavez in that dumpster. Her body had been so badly beaten. But she hadn't been murdered. She'd paid the Rosicrucians to do that to her. So she could become...

"They become like him. Q. Cain. The ultraviolet sensitivity, the enhanced strength, the thirst for blood."

"Fucking vampires," Constantine said.

"Yes. Fucking vampires," the Political Officer agreed.

"She's out there, and she's one of those things!" I panicked, fighting against my cuffs. "She was in the apartment before you came in. She's after Q. Uncuff me!"

The FBI agents exchanged concerned glances.

"The name, Fonseca," Constantine said. "We had an agreement."

"Michael Elton," I said, no long concerned with secrecy. "Michael-fucking-Elton. I was about to run a search against death certificates, burial records, when you arrested me."

"Let's hope we're not too late," Constantine said sliding the pack of Kools across the table. With his hands free, he tapped at his hidden ear phone.

"In his condition, I doubt Cain is in a hurry to go anywhere," I said, starting to unwrap the cellophane around the cigarettes, my hands still cuffed.
Chapter 18

They found a record of a Michael Elton, registered at a convalescent home there in Seattle. It didn't take their Fed's computer five minutes to burp out the name, once they knew who they were looking for.

Escaping Occupied Seattle, however, proved to be more complicated than finding PFC Elton's address.

Constantine uncuffed me, giving me back my badge and my gun as I smoked a cigarette in the interview room. I followed him back up to street level and struggled back into my bomber.

The riot still raged outside in the streets of the city, leaving the town looking like a disaster zone. The Feds were keeping the protesters back, but at the cost of almost the total commitment of their manpower. It was only a few hours before dawn, and they hoped first light would bring a break in the fighting.

The protesters had battled all night, hoping that the President would intervene, roll back the occupation and allow for a cooling off period. But no such order had come. If word had reached the President about Q, and the big guy's allegiances really lay where I suspected they did, then no such order would ever come. The Feds were committed. The Rosicrucians were committed.

There were no more shiny, black Chargers left to transport the Special Agent and myself around. They'd all been burned by the rioters. Instead, we waited within the Command HQ's perimeter, in amongst the broken glass and bricks, for an armored vehicle to get us out of the combat zone. The sound of fighting could be heard streets away.

"When we find Q," I said to Constantine, kicking a chuck of concrete with my boot. "Are you packing up and going home? That was the reason you were here, correct? All that about rescuing Seattle from itself. That was all bullshit, right?"

"No, Detective," Constantine answered, wearily. "Nothing has changed. "If Cain has a cure for the Geneing plague, all well and good, but there is still a lot of hard work to be accomplished. If you think this lawless has, in any way, weakened our resolve—"

"No, I didn't believe that for a moment." I shrugged. "I can see now what you are capable of."

A tall van, with its windows covered in grates, turned from James and pulled up before us. The side door slid open and a riot officer waved for us to climb in.

Constantine leaned down to climb in. I hesitated.

"It doesn't look good, you know," I said, still on the sidewalk.

"What's that?"

"All of this. To the rest of the country."

"They'll forget," Constantine said, taking a seat in the van. "If we find a cure."

"Which Cassidy will happily take credit for?"

"I would assume."

"But no mention of what started this all? Who's fault it all is?"

"Why dredge up the past, Detective?"

I stepped up to the van and climbed in beside Constantine, sitting down on the long, hard bench that ran the length of one side.

"Because the past has a habit of coming back to haunt us?" I suggested as the officer swung the side door closed.

#

The van didn't make it three blocks. Fourth Avenue just north of Town Hall was still a running battle. We came in behind the Fed's battle line and were quickly hit by a hail of bricks and stones thrown by protesters. The driver shunted forward, but there was no pushing through the throng.

Teargas grenades exploded around us as riot police, sporting batons, charged at the crowd. Everywhere, people were yelling, screaming, coughing and running. Bats and sticks smashed against the iron grates over the windows as protesters violently rocked the van. They surrounded us. There was no moving forward and no moving back.

We'd certainly make a wrong turn.

Constantine removed his centimeter gun from his holster, wrapping both hands around its grip. It didn't exactly feel like a situation we could shoot our way out of, but I fished around for my Rhino.

It was in my hand when the van shook with an earsplitting thunderclap. It sounded something like an explosion, but far deeper and shaking the very earth below us.

The echoing boom caused the riot beyond the van to stumble, then finally grid to a halt. Protesters and police alike stood dumbstruck in the street. They looked to the sky for any sign of thunder and lighting. But it was a clear night. The stars shimmered in the sky.

Slowly, the fading explosion was replaced by the sound of screeching.

A swarm engulfed the crowd from all directions at once. A fog of flapping, shrieking bats filled the air. Rioters screamed and police swung their batons at the sky, but the beating wings were everywhere and nowhere all at once. Creatures impacted against the windows of the van as people fled for their lives away from the intersection.

When the street was finally empty, the bats began to slowly disperse. Like a fog lifting.

"What the hell was that?" Constantine asked, straining to see out through the grates over the van's windows. "Drive."

The driver put the van into gear and began to pull north, up Fourth.

We hardly made it twenty yards before two figures seemed to materialize before us. They stood among the detritus of the riot, a man and a woman. I instantly recognized the girl, but the man was unfamiliar to me. He was a giant, towering over the small woman. Almost as wide as two men.

"Turn around!" I called out, climbing to my feet for a better view.

The woman and the man were walking slowly toward us. She still wore her evening dress and heels. The man wore a long, black coat.

The van rolled forward.

"Stop! Turn around!" I screamed at the driver. Belatedly, he hit the brakes. But the rubble in the street made it impossible to turn about.

"Who the hell are—" Constantine managed, before the male figure of the pair before us suddenly vanished. He left the woman alone walking menacingly closer to the van.

How can walking be menacing? Trust me.

Something large landed on the roof of the van. I didn't need an invitation. I was already on my feet, and I reached for the side door. I threw it open and leapt clear into the rubble.

Sure enough, the large man was standing on top of the van. If he'd jumped from where the woman in the evening dress stood, he'd have easily flown two hundred yards.

I didn't stop to contemplate what was going on. I turned my back on the scene and sprinted up University Street. But ten steps and something large landed before me. Hitting it was like running into a brick wall.

From the ground, I sat up to see Constantine stepping out of the van. The girl was coming around the hood as Constantine leveled his centimeter gun. _Pop, pop, pop,_ he fired. But the girl didn't flinch. With each round she seemed to derez a little, like every particle of her body was shifting out-of-the-way to let the bullets past.

When she was within reach of Constantine, she hopped into the air and kung-fu kicked him with a black pump.

Constantine hit the concrete.

The girl turned toward me.

It was Vivian. Even with her black locks falling over her face, I knew it was her. Same dress, same sultry curves. She strode up to where I lay in the debris and looked down at me.

My Rhino was still in my hand, but I didn't dare use it.

"We didn't finish our conversation," she said down to me. I looked up at her in terror. "The book? The name? Q?"

"I know where he is," I blathered. "I can take you there."

"Good," Vivian said. Then to the walking brick wall, "Get him on his feet."

A great mitt of a hand came down and lifted me bodily up off the road.

"Watch out!" I screamed.

Vivian had her back turned, but I could see the riot cop climbing out of the van with one of the FBI's centimeter assault rifles in his hand.

One second, Vivian was there, then next she'd vanished. The brick wall seemed to envelop me. The machine gun barked, and I could hear the bullets impacting into something solid. But the gargantuan man had me wrapped in his arms.

When he let me go, I looked up to see the riot cop laying crumpled on the ground. Vivian stood above him with his severed right arm in her hand.

"Come on, let's get out of here," she said, tossing the arm aside.
Chapter 19

They didn't take my gun, either. Vivian introduced the colossus as Tebor. They threw me into the backseat of a Cadillac they found parked a few blocks away from Fourth and University.

Tebor smashed the glass with his bare fist to open the doors. He tore the casing off the steering column once he'd pulled his massive bulk in behind the wheel. A few seconds of fooling with wires and the engine turned over.

The back of his large, black overcoat was a punched out pattern of bullet holes. But there was no blood. Not a drop.

Yeah, they let me keep my gun. There was no reason to take it away. I put it away in its holster under my bomber.

"Where are we going?" Vivian asked, sliding into the front seat.

I was prostrate in the back. Terrified hardly began to describe my condition. "The Hearthstone. On Green Lake."

"You know it?" she asked Tebor.

He nodded, put the Cadillac in gear, and pulled away from the curb.

I remained silent as the car drove pass the burned-out storefronts of downtown. I ventured to rise to a sitting position, but doing so evoked a growl from the driver.

"He doesn't like you," Vivian said from the front, tilting her head slightly to speak back at me. Even the side of her face was breathtaking. Her lips ruby-red. Her eyelashes long and fluttering.

"Does he speak?" I asked, defensively.

"Some. But he understands plenty."

"Why doesn't he like me?"

"You killed some of his friends," Vivian answered with a detached air. "Back at the flop. Those Genies were Tebor's followers."

"I decoded Dark's novel for him," I said, as watching the riot raging outside the windows of the Cadillac. Somehow, the Caddy was gliding effortlessly through the chaos. Until the police van. "Isn't that worth something?"

Tebor growled.

"He still doesn't like you."

"I'm sorry." I tried.

"He thinks we should just eat you and get it over with."

"Eat me?" I said with guarded concern. It sounded like dark humor, but it also sounded terrifyingly possible.

"Don't worry," Vivian laughed. "I told him he can eat you later."

"Later?"

"Once we've found Q."

Very reassuring.

"The FBI know," I volunteered. "About Michael Elton."

"It doesn't matter," Vivian dismissed. "Tebor's people can keep them bottled up downtown for a little longer."

"Tebor's people? Then the riot?"

"You'd be shocked how many Gene Genies are able to hold down day jobs," she said. "With the government."

"You're Rosicrucians? In City Hall?"

"The Mayor," Vivian turned to give me a sly smile. "And three Council Members."

"Fuck," I couldn't believe it. "Then all of this..."

"Mmm," Vivian agreed, predicting my observation. "Welcome to beginning of a Rosicrucian Civil War."

"The Progs?"

Vivian nodded.

"The orthodox?"

"At key, senior positions."

"And the NeoCons?"

"Yes, the NeoCons..." Vivian spat.

"You used to be one of them."

"My _father_ is one of them," she said, angrily. "We never saw eye-to-eye."

"But you were attempting to decode Dark's novel when you were killed. I thought the iconoclasts were trying to do that."

"Everyone has been trying to decode Dark's novel, Detective. For a hundred years, it's been a race. What separates the Rosicrucian factions is not decoding the novel, but how to deal with Q once we find him."

"Constantine says he's looking for a cure. For Geneing."

Vivian laughed. "They're looking for a cure, alright. By destroying Cain. They believe that will cure the Genies."

"But you don't want that," I said. "You want to be more like him. That's why you gave that copy of Q to the Rosicrucians. So they'd bring you to Tebor, here." I could remember Vivian's injuries clearly. Her twisted, murdered body. At the time, I'd said it would have taken a group of guys to do that to her. A group of guys or one giant. "He's the one who killed you, wasn't he? Smashed in your skull?"

"And gave me life again. Eternal life."

"But why?"

"To find Q."

"Cain?"

"He will bring about a new beginning. A new world. Every Genie will welcome him; he is the salve to their fevered nightmare. Only he can deliver their salvation. All those who bear the Mark of Cain are his children, of him and because of him. They will live and follow Q. Now and forever."

All his children? Every Genie? That would mean an army of millions.

"Once Cain is resurrected," Vivian continued with reverence. "This country will be resurrected, too."

#

I didn't like the sound of that. Vampires, Genie armies, national resurrection...history didn't have many good things to say about people who made grand exclamations of palingenetic fantasy. Such dreams never turned out well for people like me. And Vivian and her Rosicrucians and their little cult of undead Übermensch...I had no love for Constantine, President Cassidy and their ilk, but at least they were _human_.

So, it's finally come down to that: I was choosing my friends on the stringent criteria of having a pulse. I'd hit some sort of rock-bottom. If only I'd known how much worse it could get.

Tebor parked the stolen Caddy in the circular drive of the nursing home and the three of us strode through its automatic glass doors. I could see the beginnings of dawn on the horizon. If Vivian and the monster-man had the same sun allergy as Dark described in his book, then they were quickly running out of time.

Didn't vampires have to be in their coffins before dawn? The idea made me smirk. Then, a cold shock of the realization hit me: Either I would be dead before sunrise or they would be. If they went to ground with me still breathing...well, it would only take one call to Constantine and a few hours of sunlight to track them back to their warren...

No, if Q was here in the building, they were done with me. I was as good as dead.

Tebor would finally get his wish to eat me.

The night nurse at the front desk gave us a sleepy glance up from her e-reader, then did a double-take at the sight of three of us: Vivian, dressed for the opera, me all scruffy and in desperate need of a shower, and Tebor, a walking mountain of flesh and fur.

I got the feeling the nurse saw had seen a lot of strange people in her job, but we really were something special.

"Visiting hours start at 10 a.m.," she said, turned her attention back to her e-reader.

"We're here to see a Michael Elton," Vivian said, putting an elbow on the front desk.

"As I said, visiting hours—" the nurse began again.

"We're here to see Mr. Elton," Vivian repeated, more forcefully. "Does he live here?"

The night nurse was just about to tell Vivian where she could shove it, when I stepped forward and flashed my badge.

"Detective Fonseca," I said. "This is police business. Do you have a resident by the name of Michael Elton?"

The night nurse looked between Vivan and Tebor. If we were cops, she was Peter Rabbit. But she looked at the badge again and decided the quickest way to get rid of us was by playing along.

"Sure, I know Mr. Elton," she said. "He's one of our oldest residents."

Tebor made a low growl, literally baring his fangs and looking over to Vivian. The nurse tried to smile but couldn't quite pull it off.

"How old?" I asked. I had to stay ahead of the whole situation. Take command. If I lagged, it would mean I'd be breakfast. And probably everyone else in the building who still breathed in and out.

"Oh, I..." the nurse faltered. "Well, you know, I'm not really sure," she said, conversationally. "He's a somnolence case. Zero responsiveness. But he is a dear."

"Do you know how long he's lived here? When was he admitted?"

The nurse shrugged. "He was here when I took the job..." The night nurse made a face as she realized, perhaps for the first time, how peculiar that fact was.

"When was that?" Vivian asked, smiling at me.

"Well, I've worked at the Hearthstone for fifteen years..."

"How long has this building been here?" I asked, looking around at the lobby.

"Since the 1940s," the nurse answered. "I'm sorry, is Mr. Elton in some sort of trouble?"

"No, no trouble, but we will need to see him," I said, returning my badge to the inside pocket of my bomber.

The nurse tittered. "I'm afraid all our residents are still sleeping, Detective. There's no admittance. Can't this wait until official visiting hours?"

I looked through the front doors of the lobby, out at the first red tinge of dawn. "No, I'm sorry, my investigation just can't wait," I said truthfully.

"But...Mr. Elton suffers from the advanced stages of Alzheimer's. If you're expecting him to be talkative..."

"No, we just need to see him," I said, stepping away from the desk. "What room?" Vivian and Tebor were already walking to the elevators.

"1728," the nurse said. The number caused me to pause in my step. "But, Detective..."

"Don't worry," I called back to the nurse as the elevators doors chimed open. "We'll be in and out in a flash."

#

Room 1728. Of course, Dark had to have his last laugh. How long did he search for a nursing home with enough floors to have accommodate his small pun? Or perhaps he'd constructed the whole building just to hide the torpid corpse of Q? After reading his last novel, I would put nothing past old A.E. Dark. The hubris, the gall of the man, to decide right from wrong and to play so fast and loose with the fate of mankind.

How many had died because of Dark? All those Gene Genies, dying of thirst and hunger. How many would die once Vivian and Tebor followed through with their plan? All because of Dark. If he'd destroyed Q all those years ago, instead of hiding him away and leaving a trail of breadcrumbs to this very door, it would all be over. But here we were. What game had he been playing at? If he so feared 300, and what the blood of Cain was capable of, why did he not destroy it at the very source?

Perhaps, because he couldn't. I now knew that now. How 300 had escaped quarantine, and began its spread as the Geneing menace...how Dark knew so intimately that 300 was a poison...

He'd taken the Geneing himself. When, I don't know, but it had to be early on. Dark had been the first Gene Genie. And no Gene Genie could do anything to harm Q. For his blood ran in their veins. As Vivian had said, all Genies were Cain's children, of him and because of him.

Dark had not hidden Q away to save mankind from Geneing. He'd hidden him away to save Cain from mankind. When the world was ready, the followers of Dark would decrypt the Last Novel, find Q and raise him from his eternal slumber. Then, all of mankind would live and follow Q.

From that day on and forever.
Chapter 20

Vivian Montavez unceremoniously opened the door to room 1728. For someone literally seeking out her god, she went about her task with strikingly irreverence. She sauntered in the room and exhaled in audible disgust at the banal decor of Michael Elton's room. She hardly noticed the dessicated, inert body in the raised hospital bed.

"Not everything you hoped?" I said as I moved into the small room. The curtains were open; PFC Elton had a view of the lake. I could see dawn breaking over the tree line. It could only be minutes away. If I could just delay Vivian and Tebor a little longer. They'd be trapped in this room.

"I'd assumed Dark had hidden Q away somewhere...nondescript. But this is...disrespectful."

"Hardly the Hall of the Slain, huh?" I said, walking over to Elton's slumbering body. He was old, ancient. Harmless. But certainly well cared for. His face was clean-shaved, and his hair was brushed. He wore neat, pressed pajamas. The Hearthstone was an honest establishment. Whatever monthly check that arrived from Dark's estate had not been squandered.

I leaned in close and put my ear to the old man's mouth. He was softly breathing. Asleep. "Breathing but unconscious," I said. "This is Q?"

"This is Q," Vivian answered, moving up beside the bed. She looked down at the withered man and touched his wrinkled face. She opened one of his eyelids with her manicured nails and looked into the vacant eye. "Lack of blood isn't fatal," she said. "It causes recidivism. Paralysis."

"Sounds unpleasant."

"You have no idea," Vivian continued. "In this state, he's not asleep, not like you'd understand."

"Then..." I hedged.

"He's aware of everything that's happening."

"All this time? But he's been here for over a century."

"Exactly," Vivian stepped away from old man, turning to look out the window. "Imagine the agony? But it's just a blink of the eye to him. He remembers every moment of every day of his existence. Every second, back to the year one."

"Exactly how old is he?"

"As old as the world."

"But he can't be—" I started but stopped myself.

"He is...Cain."

" _The_ Cain? From the Bible? Brother of Abel?" I laughed. "That's ridiculous."

"He's Q. The Source. Not just of Geneing but of all mankind. The first human born. Cast out of Eden for murdering his brother, cursed to wander the earth for eternity. The Mark of Cain is in his blood. The Geneing virus."

"But...that's just a story. Superstition."

"It's not superstition. The proof is right in front of you."

I laughed. There was nothing else to do. It was all so crazy.

"We're running out of time," Vivian turned back to the bed. "The sun is almost up."

Daybreak was only seconds away. I needed to stall for time. I almost had them all, Cain included, right where I wanted them.

"Why a drug, though?" I asked. It was the last piece of the puzzle. The one thing Dark's novel hasn't explained. "Why does Cain's blood make people euphoric?"

"It's a glimpse of Eden," Vivian said, wistfully. She pulled back the sheets off the bed, revealing the full extent of PFC Elton's decrepit frame. "Of the bliss Adam and Eve felt before the Fall. Through Cain, we shall all return to the Garden. Through Cain, all that has come after will be swept away."

"Then the NeoCons are right, he is going to destroy the world?"

"Not destroy. Rebuild heaven on Earth."

"Chock full of Genies? And their vampire masters?"

Vivian looked away from Q's unconscious body to fixed me with a glare. "You'll understand soon. Everything will become clear." She nodded past me to Tebor.

"I'm never going to understand why you'd consciously decide to become an abomination—" I started, but Tebor's large hands landing on my shoulders cut short my diatribe.

I struggled, but it was no good.

The dawn was breaking outside the window. I was so close.

"Enough philosophy, Detective," Vivian said, reaching into her purse. "I'm afraid we require of you a small sacrifice."

"Sacrifice?" I said in alarm. If I could twist my elbow just a little, I'd be able to reach my Rhino...

Vivian pulled a large, chef's knife out of her purse. "Yes, sacrifice. As in blood," she said, showing me the blade.

I had it! My .357 in two fingers. I jangled it free and miraculously caught it fully in my palm. I couldn't raise my arms, but I twisted, shoving the snub nose of the gun into Tebor's gut. The shot rang out, muffled, but still loud enough to split my ears. I don't believe I had caused Tebor any pain, but the shot surprised the beast-man enough that he let go with a single hand.

It was enough. I whirled around, sweeping past Vivian and leveling the pistol at Cain. I had one chance. In his torpid state, Cain was almost fully human. Vulnerable to bullets. If he died here in the Hearthstone, they all died, as the vampire legends said. Kill the head vampire and all of his children would be destroyed. Vivian, Tebor, all the vampires...all the Genies, I realized as I lowered my gun. They were the children of Cain, too. With one bullet, I could put an end to the entire Geneing epidemic. The world would be saved. I began to squeeze the trigger of my Rhino.

Vivian slashed up and away with her knife. She caught me square on the wrist with her blade, cutting deep and drawing the edge across my tendons and arteries. The gun slipped from my hand as a torrent of blood gushed from my wrist. I screamed, but I could hear no sound. The pain. So much pain.

Tebor's free hand reached out and grabbed my severed wrist. He kept it held out before me, over the inert form of PFC Elton. The blood drained quickly from my body, dripping down on to the old man's cracked lips. Presently, a withered tongue emerged to taste the blood. Then the old man's eyes opened, filled with a hungry fire.

I can't remember Q moving a muscle, but instantly he was sitting erect, burying needle sharp fangs into my bloody wrist.

After that, the feeling washed over me. I can hardly explain it. A warm, all-consuming state of total bliss. It was the Geneing, I had presence of mind to realize that. But nothing else. The bite had infected me.

Then I was falling. Nothing but clouds and weightlessness. All the world was nothing to me. I was free. I was whole, total, as safe as in my mother's womb. That was Geneing. Bliss. Total and unmitigated rapture. I never wanted it to end. There was no reason that it should end. I should have died like all the other Genies, staving and thirsty in a squalid flop.

But it did end. For Q was not yet done with me. Q would not let me die.
Chapter 21

"...He sailed off through night and day, and in and out of weeks, and almost over a year, to where the wild things are," a voice recited, as the world resolved back into consciousness. I awoke to a young, handsome face looking down at me with loving concern.

I didn't recognize the man, but I knew he meant me no harm. Though I'd never seen his face before, I was instantly filled with the knowledge that I loved him and that I would sacrifice my life for him without hesitation.

He was Cain. He was Q. He was my god. He was the father, and I was his child.

I shook myself awake and looked at my surrounding. I instantly scrambled for a handhold.

It was night once again, and we were on top of the Space Needle. Cain sat over me as I lay on the cold, slippery steel of the roof. He was no old man now, but a young, tall man with quick, inquisitive eyes. As I regained consciousness, he stood and straightened his suit. He was well-dressed, almost opulent, and strode toward the edge of the dish as if he wasn't six-hundred feet off the ground with a brisk wind blowing from the south. At the precipice, Vivian and Tebor were waiting, looking glum and cold in the night air.

"Good evening Detective," Cain said, as I risked pulling myself up to a sitting position.

"What's going on?" I stammered. It was only slightly less of a stupid question than: Where am I? Or: Who are you? But I didn't really care. All I wanted was to get back to the Geneing. I wanted nothing else but the ignorant bliss of Eden. Why had Cain brought me out of my perfect dream? What could be so important that he would deny me that?

"You must accept my sincere apologies for pulling you hence from the land of the lotus eaters," he said. "But your presence is required, once more, in the harsh, cruel, realm fools call 'reality.'" Cain was standing at the edge of the Needle's roof, looking down into the darkness. The wind whipped his clothes so harshly around him, it surprised me that he wasn't blown clear of the rooftop. Tebor and Vivian were similarly buffeted, Vivian's hair forming a great mane behind her.

"I was...you were...there was," my mind reeled. I could vaguely remember before the bite. But it didn't matter. I looked at my wrist. Where Vivian's knife had cut me there was no wound. "How?" was the question I finally settled on.

"The bliss I can give and I can take away," Cain said. "The Elysian Fields shall always be waiting, my friend. My colleagues here tell me that I owe you a debt of thanks." Cain nodded at the dower-faced Tebor and Vivian. "They tell me that it was you, Detective, who decoded Dark's book, ran his ridiculous little paper chase, and saved me from my interminable prison. For this service, I greatly thank you."

I didn't know what to say. I hadn't meant to do it. I remembered meaning to do something very different. The gun...

Cain bowed in gratitude, then shifted into mocking imitation of his two, glum compatriots, comically frowning and moping about. "The giant still thinks we should eat you," Cain said from behind his hand, point a thumb to Tebor. "And the girl thinks you're trouble. But they're terminally shortsighted, as is the tendency of our kind.

"When everything must be accomplished by dawn, you often forget what great things you scurrying, little, defenseless humans can accomplished in the daylight." Cain turned to look out over the lights of the city skyline. "You forget that all of civilization grow while we slumbered, hiding from the sun. All of it." Cain gestured at the city lights. "Just look, Detective, all the wonders of the world. I've seen them all. From the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, to the harems of Ismail Ibn Sharif. I've sailed between the legs of the Colossus and traveled the Silk Road, from Constantine's throne to the Forbidden City's gate. I've dined with Genghis Khan on the blood of his fallen foes and seduced away Helen from her handsome Menelaus.

"All of these things I've done, skulking in the dark, Detective. All this I've achieved. But always, in the burning light of noonday, the humans came." Cain looked up to the moon, hovering in the sky above. "Always, the single, fervid eye, staring down from heaven. He watches us all...always watches..."

"We can end it tonight," Vivian growled, barely audible over the rush of the wind. "We don't need _him_. We don't need _them_." She nodded down off the edge of the Needle's roof.

I then realized I'd missing something – something down on the ground below – cringing for my life so far away from the precipice of the Needle's dish. Curiosity begged me forward, but the barking wind and the slippery roof kept me rooted to my spot.

"No," Cain shook his head. "I see providence stretched out before me, my dear. To slumber and awake to find...an army prepared for me? It cannot be foolish change but a gift. We will not squander it. There will be no mistakes this time. We are the flood this time, my sweet. They shall not drown me again. Those that have come here to destroy me, they will be taught a bitter lesson. Tonight or tomorrow. The tide will rise. We will not abate. We will fill their lungs. The water will rise. Today and the next day and the next day and the next day. Forever. We will drown this globe in blood."

Now, I knew I was missing something important over the precipice. Something was happening at street level below me. I couldn't just cling to the cliff face like a baby bird. I slowly, delicately climbed to my feet. My boots squeaked ominously on the wet, angled rooftop. But I staggered slowly until I'd joined the three, windswept figures at the edge of the dish. In an uncharacteristic show of charity, Tebor firmly grabbed my wavering shoulder and held me steady.

I looked down.

Vertigo almost sent me head-over-heels off the edge, but Tebor's massive mitt held me firm. My eyes watered in panic, blurring away the city below me. But as my head swam, the solid, spinning earth below me began to resolve into view. A crowd of a thousand – no, ten thousand – had gathered at the base of the Needle. A swarm of humanity, clogging the streets of the city for blocks and blocks in all directions.

"Oh my God!" I screamed and lost my footing. I held onto Tebor's giant fist as a lifeline. "Who are they?"

"Every Genie in the city," Vivian said, with more than a little pride. "When word that Q had returned..."

"You do have an army," I observed.

"An army greater than any in history," Cain said, standing at the very lip of the rooftop, but balancing without effort in the bucking breeze. "One, two, three million strong. All my children. All under my commanded. For my blood runs in their veins. They will obey me. They will obey _you,_ " he said, turning to face me.

"Me?"

"Yes. Every army needs a General. _You,_ Detective, shall be mine."

"I don't-" I started. But it wasn't worth protesting. If Cain commanded me, I obeyed. I was a Genie now, too. Just like the throng below. "We are the tide," I said instead, somehow knowing it was what Cain wanted to hear.

"Yes, the rising tide. And every other city on Earth shall drown. Each and every vile offspring of my brother will pay for the 10,000 years of my suffering. This world will drown in a new flood, and Eden shall rise from the waves."

Cain was mad. Insane. As much as the retrovirus in my blood made me love him, I could still see that. What was Eden to him but death and destruction? He'd feed on the blood of humanity until no one was left. No one but his kind. Vampires and Genies, until it was time for the Genies to die.

All he would leave to wander the Earth would be the walking dead. Eternal, cowering in the dark.

"It's certainly a long way down." I stated the obvious. It was all I could think to say in the face of the doom of mankind.

"Afraid?" Cain asked, looking at me with a smirk.

"Yes," I admitted.

"There's no need to be afraid, Detective," Cain said, stepping out into nothingness. "Fear is our best ally."

Cain fell into the darkness, plummeting toward the earth below. As he fell, he spread his arms, and the wind seemed to catch him. He arced up, banked, and flew back into the sky in a blur of speed.

"And now!" I heard the wind call out. "Let the wild rumpus start!"

Tebor and Vivian each took one of my arms and jumped off the roof of the Needle.
Chapter 22

We hit the Fed's battle line like a wave breaking on the shore. They made their stand at Second and James, a spot that gave their vehicles room to maneuver, but also allowed me to concentrate my attack.

I gathered at least three thousand behind me before I launched my assault, waiting over half an hour, under the guns of the waiting Feds, to form a phalanx.

All the while they blared orders from megaphones and bombarded us with teargas. But my Genie army held firm, unconcerned with their threats or the stinging effects of the pink gas. We carried no weapons, had no need for them. We were Cain's weapons. Our lives were unimportant.

When I felt that I'd gathered together enough, I charged.

Had the Feds not reinforced their numbers during the day with a regular army battalion from Fort Lewis, the battle would have been over in minutes. Instead, behind the riot shields and water cannons of the riot police, we met Browning machine guns and Stryker LAV's.

That first attack at Second and James put an end to the pretense that the Feds were trying to quell a civil disturbance. Once my Genies overwhelmed that line of riot cops, we were officially in an all-out shooting war.

When the machine guns barked to life, Genies started dying.

It made no difference to me. I just readied the next wave. I knew their ammunition couldn't last forever.

And I had all the cannon fodder I'd need.

After less than twenty minutes of fighting, the Army's blockade at Second and James collapsed. With it went what little control over the Genies that I had. I had no means of commanding my force beyond the range of my voice. Whatever orders I gave to the grungy, blurry-eyed Genies, they obeyed without question, but once my forces scattered into the streets of the city, chasing down what fleeing Feds they could find, I no longer had any direct control.

So my assault floundered and turned into a running, gunning door-to-door battle with the splintered Army ranks. The loss of momentum allowed the Feds to regroup and counterattack.

By 2 a.m., the tide had turned. I was caught down on First, as the maneuverable Strykers began to herd random groups of Genies into a crossfire. They were laying into us with small arms, tearing us apart, when Tebor came to our rescue. The air, again, filled with screeching bats.

The swarm filled the sky, blocking out the street lights and sending the soldiers cowering for the cover of their armored vehicles. The bats descended on a single point in the street, gathering together and forming into the outline of a gargantuan man. There was a split second when the bats seemed to freeze in mid flap, then Tebor erupted from their cocoon.

He picked up a Stryker by its front fender and flipped it onto its back. Rifle fire peppered him from the murder holes of a second Stryker, and in a blur, Tebor sprang across the road and planted his shoulder square into the armored car. He knocked it back through the storefront beside the road, and over onto its side in the rubble of the building.

When the dust had settled, Tebor was the only figure left standing. He stalked in a slow circle, like a lion looking for prey. But none dared attack the beast-man.

I pulled myself up out of the dirt and the blood.

"Thanks," I said meekly. I knew I was lucky that Tebor hadn't torn me in two, along with the Strykers.

"Focus," Tebor growled. It was the first word I'd heard him say, and now I knew why. He was almost unintelligible. "Focus on the Town Hall," he said, and suddenly vanished into thin air. A new swarm of bats appeared, as if from a running faucet, spewing like a tornado in the sky.

I did as instructed. I gathered together the few stray Genies I could find and sent them to gather more. By 3:30, I had a good force of eight hundred to a thousand concentrated in Westlake Park.

I was running out of dark. It was only a few hours before dawn. If there was going to be a last-ditch, Alamo attempt by the Feds, I wanted it to happen while Cain and the others were still aboard in town. If the Feds held out until daybreak...well, they'll have all day to peck away at the Genies before nightfall. No, I wanted the battle to be over before they got that chance.

I began to lead my new army south down Fourth, heading for the Town Hall and Constantine's mobile HQ. If I could destroy that, the war would be over. Seattle would be mine.

The occupation would finally be over.

The Army, however, had other ideas.

The Abrams TUSK sat, waiting for us just north of the Central Library. Without ceremony, its turret turned to welcome are advancing line and belched forth with a hail of AP fire from its main cannon.

The centimeter tungsten ball bearings tore into the Genies, decapitating and severing arteries. I was at the point of the advancing force and only survived by throwing myself face first to the concrete. The tank's automated machine gun started to fire as the main cannon reloaded. Bodies fell as Genies leapt for cover.

The second blast from the cannon swept the street clean. What Genies escaped the meat grinder, including myself, took cover in the hotels at Fourth and Spring.

The tank had us pinned down.

An hour passed slowly into two as the tank sat in the center of Fourth Avenue. Any movement was quickly answered by a salvo from the automated turret.

Dawn was rising. I could see it off to the east whenever I dared raise my head from cover. I tried to send a runner to get help, but he didn't make it twenty feet before losing a leg to the .50 caliber.

All I could do was sit tight.

Just after 5:30, the tank seemed to acquire a target north, up Fourth. It squealed on its tracks, shifting to a better position, then its turret angled for a shot. The cannon fired, and the ground shook. I had no vantage point to see what it was shooting at, but it seemed to hit something.

The shot was answered by a deafening thunderclap. The rubble of the old hotel crashed down all around me. The tank seemed to stagger back, as if hit by an invisible shock wave. It rolled forward a few feet, then stopped, then rolled forward again, listing to the right.

It turned ninety degrees and its turret came swinging about. The turret did a full rotation, the barrel of the long cannon drooped toward the pavement, followed by muffled screams of pain. Then silence.

I risked climbing up from behind cover.

The tank sat, still. I stepped out though the blast hole in the brickwork and took a step toward the tank. Just as I did, a hatched popped open. I staggered back. But no solider in battledress emerged. Instead, Vivian pushed up out of the hatch, throwing out her handbag and slinking her curves out of the confinement of the tank. She leapt clear, landing in her high heels on the blacktop and smoothed out her dress.

"How'd you do that?" I asked, as Vivian's heels clicked past me, heading back up Fourth.

"Do what?" she paused.

"Get inside that tank?"

"I'm good in tight spots," she smiled and continued on up the avenue.
Chapter 23

Even with the tank disabled, we'd make no more progress that night.

The sun was up, and the Army's Strykers were back in control of the streets. I couldn't gather together more than a score of Genies. There were so few left. Even totally loyal to Cain as they were, some had summoned up the willpower to retreat from the battlefield as the sun rose. After all, they were little more than target practice for the Army in the daylight. The battle of Seattle was over for now.

Cain might have awoken to find a ready-made army at his disposal, but even the most devout followers were no match for an M1 Abrams.

I went to ground with what few loyal Genies I could find in the city. We tried to stay out of sight of the patrols, rest up for the coming evening. There was nothing we could do in the daylight by stay alive.

Between sprints between blown-out buildings, I let the bliss of Geneing take control of me. It was better than sleep, better than sex, better than anything I could have imagined. Every second I could spare, I let the warmth of it consume me then shook myself free of its embrace when time came to move.

But it was quickly becoming harder and harder to do so. Every time I slipped into the Geneing, I became more and more sure I would never come back. But I knew that Cain was still depending on me to marshal his attack. He was depending on me to take the battle to the Rosicrucians who'd staged the occupation of Seattle, seeking his destruction. Loyalty kept bringing me back to reality. But loyalty could only carry me so far.

In my Elysium, if I thought of _Where the Wild Things Are_ , I came back to Earth. That was my trigger, my escape: my favorite book as a child. Funny how Geneing got into my head.

Past noon, I lay in the destruction of an old stationary store's basement stock room and slipped off into unreality. We'd just lost a particularly persistent Stryker crew that had cost me three Genies, but I was feeling safe in that basement. I let the Geneing take over me.

But this time, instead of finding bliss in its hold, I found myself back in the living room of Vivian Montavez's apartment.

I knew it was a dream – a warm, safe place to escape to – but something about it felt strangely real. That same eerie sensation I'd felt on first stepping foot in her apartment, I felt again. Like I was home.

I could smell coffee brewing and the sound of bacon frying from the kitchen. I looked around and the apartment looked the same. I looked at the city beyond the windows. It was a sunny day. The city wasn't burning. There was no riot here. It was a dream, but it felt more real than reality.

"Sit down, the eggs are ready," a woman's voice came from the kitchen. I knew its owner, but then I didn't know her either. I walked to the kitchen, pass the breakfast table set for two and looked at Vivian standing at the stove top. "Coffee should be ready," she said, turning the bacon in the pan.

She was Vivian, but not _that_ Vivian. Not the Vivian I knew. It was Vivian from before she'd died. She was wearing PJ bottoms and a sports bra, her hair a tangled mess of bed-head. She looked up and smiled at me as she sneaked a piece of bacon out of the pan and nibbled at its end.

"Ouch!" she laughed and dropped the rind back in the pan. She leaned around the stove and pecked me on the cheek. "What's wrong? You look dazed and confused."

"I..." I looked down at myself. I was wearing the top half of the PJ set and a pair of baggy boxer shorts. I _was_ home, I realized. This had always been my home. I lived here with Vivian. Had for years. I opened a cupboard and took out my favorite mug, the one with the wrestling kittens on it, and poured myself a cup of coffee. I sat down at my place at the table and looked out the window.

The crazy old crone with the apartment next to us was using her window as a clothes dryer again. The Super had told her not to hanger her underwear out there...

"Here you go," Vivian said, sliding a plate of bacon and eggs before me. Her eggs had gorgonzola, mine extra pepper.

"Thanks," I said, picking up my fork.

"Do you have to work today?" she asked as she began to chew on her bacon.

"No, I did my four tens. I'm off until Tuesday," I said.

Vivian laughed. "A Saturday free. A rare treat!"

"Mmm," I said around my eggs. "What do you want to do?"

"Well, there's plenty of work to do at the P-Patch. You can come help me."

"Or, I can watch the game." I smiled across the table at her.

"Or you can watch the game." She smiled back.

Right then, I could think of nothing but how much I loved her. I'd always loved her. We were happy. Young and alive.

I never wanted it to end.

Then, like the most unwanted nightmare you could imagine, I remembered that I was Geneing. Was this what it was like for the other Genies? It was no surprise that they died of thirst and hunger. To be so...happy. Was this the small sliver of Eden that Geneing was showing to us? The simple bliss of being happy?

It was a horrible trick.

I had to wake up, I was in the middle of a war. There was no time for me to sit around and play house in my imagination with Vivian Montavez. She didn't really exist. Not this Vivian. Vivian was nothing like this woman. Perhaps she had been once but not anymore.

The Vivian I knew was a killer. A destroyer. A monster.

I tried to think about Max and the Wild Things. But I wasn't waking up.

What was wrong?

"We have to talk, Sasha," Vivian said across the table.

At first I ignored her, like a TV turned to a channel I wasn't watching. But then I realized Vivian was talking to me. The real Vivian was talking to the real me. Not the howdy doody couple we'd just been pretending to be.

"Vivian?" I asked, looking at the young, beautiful, fresh-faced girl for any signs of the woman I knew.

"Yes, Detective," she said, sighing. "As always, there isn't much time. So it's best if you just listen."

"How?" I said, looking around. "Aren't I Geneing?"

"Yes... it's too hard to explain. All the Genies escape to the same place, I guess. You can climb into each other's fantasies if you know what you're doing."

"Is this my fantasy or yours?"

"Does it matter?" She shook her head. Her bed-head jiggled. "What's important is that Cain can't hear us here. He has no power here."

"But when we're awake?"

"He hears everything. Knows everything."

"Fuck." I ran a hand across my stubbly chin.

"Listen," Vivian said, putting down her fork and leaning across the small breakfast table. "There's one last part of Dark's mystery left to decipher. One last task to do before everything is complete."

"There's more? More than decoding his book? More than finding Q?"

"Yes," Vivian said, taking hold of my hand. "We have to destroy Cain."

"Destroy?" I replied in shock. "But, you—"

"No, never." Vivian interrupted.

"Then, you're still with the NeoCons? Still with your father?"

"I'm still with the side trying to put an end to a monster."

"But why get yourself killed? Why become like he is?"

"To find out how to truly destroy him," Vivian went on. "Dark knew he couldn't do it."

"He took the Geneing. He was like me."

"Yes, but that's not important. He knew Cain was invulnerable. Even to sunlight. We all are. It destroys but it doesn't kill. Dark could have burned Cain to ashes, and while one molecule was left intact, he would slowly coalesce back into his original form. It's happened before. But Dark knew how Cain could be destroyed. Forever. I'm sure of it."

"None of this was in his novel."

"No. He didn't even trust the Rosicrucians with this fact."

"But how?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know?" I said, incredulous. All of that? For nothing? "But you're sure he can?"

"Yes. I am now. Now that I'm like him."

I sighed. Disgusted.

"Look," Vivian forged on, anger burning in her brown eyes. "I know we're not real vampires. Real _real_ vampires. Tebor and I. Cain said as much. The Geneing virus is a bastardization of his blood. He considers us Nosferatu-lite. When 1768 extracted the virus from Cain, they must have modified it in some fashion so they could control it."

"Yes, the on/off triggers," I agreed.

"But you were created directly by Cain. His bite, not from 300. You shouldn't have them."

"No, but _Where the Wild Things Are_..."

"Right..." Vivian prodded.

"It must mean that Cain has been infected by his own virus..." I said, confused. "But how can that be?"

"Dark must have infected him. Cain has a trigger," Vivian said in disbelief.

"Cain is a Gene Genie," I agreed. Then laughed. "Just like us all."

"That's how he can me destroyed," Vivian added, excitedly. "If his consciousness is forever trapped here..." She gestured around at the apartment.

"Perhaps then, he can't regenerate. You said he didn't sleep like humans do. Even in death. He's forever awake."

"But if he's Geneing..." Vivian trailed off, then came back, forcefully. "We just need to discover his trigger."

What were we doing? I shook myself. Plotting against Cain? Only a few hours ago I was fighting a pitched street battle in his name. Now I was conspiring to undo him. But I felt no guilt. Vivian was right. Back in reality, I was under his control. But in the fantasy of Geneing, in my own little haven with Vivian and breakfast bacon, I was a free man. My body might be dying, but my mind was free. Again, the idea that I was glimpsing at a little sliver of Eden made me only the more curious about paradise.

"He'd have done it all in here," I said, looking around.

"Who?"

"Dark."

"In this apartment?" Vivian asked, confused.

"No. In his head. In his bliss. And hidden his work, even from himself. In here he was free to plot against Cain, but once he returned to reality, he'd have been a slave, just like us. No wonder there was no mention of Cain's trigger in Dark's writing, he wasn't even aware of it himself. He'd have hidden it as a cypher, unconsciously somehow, even beyond his considerable powers of reason. But what?"

"You need to find it," Vivian implored. "And you need to find it quickly. Cain is resting, but when night falls, he'll descend on this town with vengeance. The NeoCons and the Army won't stand against him at the height of his powers."

"There was nothing in Q..." I was still thinking. "...nothing about a trigger for Cain. He must have pasted down the cypher through the Rosicrucians orally."

"Are you listening, Sasha?" Vivian shook my shoulder. "There's no time for this."

"But once I leave this apartment," I protested. "Cain's power over me will return."

"No," Vivian said, raising from her seat. "We can fight against it when we're together. If we focus on this apartment, on this place. We still have free will, Sasha, even with Cain's blood in our veins."

Vivian pulled me up to my feet, away from the breakfast table.

I resisted, shaking my head. "I'm not ready. I don't even know what I'm looking for. Can't we wait just a few more minutes? Finish breakfast?"

"No, Sasha, it has to be now," she pulled hard on my outstretched arms. I pulled back, pulling her in close. I took my opportunity. I'd only get one.

I kissed her.

She kissed me back.

After a long, perfect moment, she pulled away, taking a breath. "Wake up, Sasha," she said. "And sailed back over a year, and in and out of weeks..."

"No!" I screamed.

"...and through a day, and into the night of his very own room..."
Chapter 24

I awoke in the stationary store's basement, snapping suddenly back to attention. What few Genies I still had at my command were sprawled out on the floor around me. The sun was starting to set outside the tiny, barred window that faced onto the street.

There was hardly any time left.

I climbed painfully to my feet.

I found my pack of Kools in my bomber jacket and knocked out a cigarette. I stepped across the blissed-out Genies and climbed the backstairs to the alley. In the evening light, I lit my smoke. All I had was minutes and no idea of what I was looking for, or where to find it.

I smoked my cigarette slowly. It was, at the very least, something to do.

Out on the city streets, I flagged down the first Stryker I saw. It was cutting across an avenue, heading up the hill, but it obliged me by making a U-turn and training its weapons on me. I put my hands into the air and waved my badge at the six wheeled armored car. When I bellowed that I wanted to see Special Agent Constantine, a hatched popped open, and a young Corporal popped out.

He gave me a ride back to the Feds' mobile HQ.

I could feel the pull of Cain's will tugging on my mind, but while I focused on Vivian and breakfast in her apartment, I could fight against it. But not for long. Cain's fingers dug deep into my mind. Into my soul. But Vivian's kiss fortified me.

I would need Vivian beside me if I was going to see my task through.

Constantine's Cobra Commander Missile Command Center sat in shambles. Sometime in the assault, Genies had made it through the perimeter. The Feds had made some attempt to clean up the mess in the daylight hours, but burned out cars and broken equipment still littered the street in front of the City Hall. Constantine's occupying forced had worked to raise their banner of Competence, Community, Compassion over the door to the Town Hall, but the Genies had torn it partially down. Now, just the tattered remains of three gargantuan C's flapped in the breeze over the grand doorway. I looked up at them and contemplated the hubris, smoking my Kools.

"Where the fuck have you been?" Constantine called from the door to his mobile HQ. He'd traded his dark suit for body armor and fatigues, his centimeter assault rifle slung on his back. He trotted down the trailer's short ladder and across the street of spent brass and rubble. He eyed me warily. "I thought you were dead."

"No," I shook my head and threw away the butt of my spent cigarette. "They took me. Made me take them to Elton. He's alive. Awake."

Constantine nodded. "I know."

"Then you know..." I turned to squint at the setting sun. "...that they'll attack when the sun sets."

"Yes, we're ready."

"No, you need to pack up, Special Agent. You can't win this battle."

"The Genie threat has been contained," he said, angrily.

"Genies yes but they were just the appetizer. The main course is this evening."

"Reinforcements are arriving from McCord-Lewis. Armor. Air support."

"It won't be enough. Not against Q."

Constantine paused. "Then it really is him? Elton?"

"Yes."

"Some of the reports..." Constantine joined me, watching the setting sun. "It just doesn't seem real."

"You need to fall back, regroup."

"No," Constantine said with an air of inevitability. "We fight here, or we'll always be retreating. The farther he travels, the more Genies will flock to his cause. The longer he's alive, the more followers he'll create. Right now there's just him and...those two from the van?"

"Yes."

"Their ranks will never be this small again. No, Detective, we fight here, tonight. Or the end of the world is upon us."

"You can't fight the devil, Special Agent," I said.

"We can and will," Constantine countered. He turned and started back toward his mobile HQ.

#

"I don't know what I'm looking for," I said to myself and to Vivian at the same time. I was standing before the Town Hall, before Constantine's mobile HQ, but I was also still back in Vivian's apartment, sitting at the breakfast table.

"A trigger," she replied then took a sip of coffee. "Like all the Genies. Some mnemonic that kicks off Cain's Geneing. It will be something ironic. You know how Dark thought."

"It could be anything."

"Exactly. But Dark left a clue. He liked to play games; we know that much about him. With letters and numbers and puzzles and ciphers. Somewhere, he encoded a cipher for us to decode, a hint to Cain's trigger, you just need to find it. And before the sun sets."

"Where are you?" I asked.

"Right here."

"No, _where_ are you?"

"Hidden. We're waking up. Tebor and I. Cain has already risen. You don't have long."

"No pressure, no pressure," I exhaled, trying to think. I turned a full three-sixty, looking around the destruction. "Dark would have hidden it in plain sight. Those were the kind of games Dark liked to play. Like checking PFC Elton into a nursing home for a century, without anyone noticing anything out of the ordinary. He's looking down from heaven, right now and laughing at me."

I turned my eyes to the heavens, in the futile hope that Dark might part the clouds and provide me with a little divine inspiration. No such luck.

"That fucker isn't up in heaven, I can tell you that for free," Vivian said across the breakfast table. She smiled. I smiled back. I was also grinning like an idiot, standing alone in the middle of the street.

"Wait," I called out, as something about the tattered banners over the Town Hall doors caught my eye. "That's it!"

"What's it?" Vivian looked up from her breakfast.

"There," I pointed at the banner. "Competence, Community, Compassion."

"What about it?"

"C, C, C. It's a Rosicrucian liturgy, right? Co-opted by the NeoCons but originally Corpus, Cruor, Civitas, right? The body, the blood, the state?"

"That's right," Vivian said.

"So, that came from Dark, correct? The three C's? I thought it was his puckish nod to the Geneing virus: C as in the Roman numeral for one-hundred. C plus C plus C is 300. Batch 300. It's encoded on the genetic marker of the Geneing virus. It was the decrypt code for Dark's last novel."

"Yes?"

"But, what if Dark encoded still another layer of meaning into that liturgy."

"The trigger?"

"Exactly!" I exclaimed. In my mind's eye, I could see that Vivian had climbed to her feet in anticipation. Now I had to deliver on the details. But the exact significance still escaped me. I stared at the tattered banner, frantically thinking.

"What is it?" Vivan asked.

"Just give me a second."

"Sasha," Vivian said, earnestly. "There isn't time. We're already on the move..."

"Dark was a science fiction writer, right? A speculative thinker. A cryptologist. He'd never have used something as backward as Roman numerals..." The answer was right at the edge of my consciousness. If I could just coax it into focus...but the pull of Cain's will was blurring my mind. I had to fight against it. It was a constant strain. I closed my eyes and tried to focus on Vivian in her PJ bottoms with her mess of bed-head. If I just sunk back into Geneing for a few minutes...but no, there was no time. If I returned to Vivian's apartment, I'd never leave again. I knew that. And the sun had almost set.

"C is the third letter in the alphabet," Vivian offered. "So three plus three plus three is nine..."

That was it! The revelation hit me like a wave. Vivian was right. I mean, she was talking total bullshit, but she was right!

"It's not C the letter, but C the number," I whispered.

"You just said it _wasn't_ a Roman numeral."

"Not C for one-hundred," I added with excitement. "But C as in the hexadecimal!" O'Day had once bored me with an explanation of how computers count. In a base greater than ten, letters are used to represent the numbers we lack characters for. Dark would have known this intimately, encoding his whole novel by hand. "C isn't the third letter of the alphabet, but the hexadecimal number for twelve."

"Twelve?" Vivian said in shock. "As in the twelve apostles? The twelve tribes of Israel?"

"The twelve labors of Hercules, twelve months in a year, twelve hours in half a day, _Twelve Monkeys, Twelve Angry Men, Twelfth Night_."

"The twelfth rib that Adam sacrificed to create Eve," Vivian added. That made us both pause. Considering.

"MJ-12" I said ominously.

"That sounds like Dark's sense of irony," Vivian added. She was fading. Something was happening. I was losing sight of Vivian's apartment in my mind.

I only had seconds left. "But it's not twelve. It's twelve times twelve times twelve..."

It's hard to explain that feeling you get when you realize something you should have known all along. A creepy, spin-chilling shock but also a profound sense of your own stupidity.

"Twelve times twelve times twelve?" Vivian said, she was now a great distance away.

"1768," I answered.

"Of course," Vivian said wistfully, her voice almost lost in the great void between us.

"But it's not 1768," I answered, reaching for my phone in my pocket. "It's hexadecimal, remember? C times C times C is..."

"What do you get?"

I paused, looking at my phone.

"Well?" Vivian squeaked. She'd almost vanished into the ether.

"Do you know the Bible?" I asked her.
Chapter 25

The Genies hit the Feds' battle line just after dark. There weren't many left, but Vivian and Tebor were at the forefront of the assault. They tossed armored soldiers around like rag dolls, tipped over tanks, and threw Humvees into walls. Almost before the attacked had begun, Constantine ordered his men to retreat.

He had to make it look good, but too many people had already died.

Tebor was the first to come sniffing into the Feds compound. Like any animal, he could smell a trap. Even one that had not been set for him.

Genies followed him through the breach. Inside the defenses, they engaged the soldiers and technicians in hand-to-hand. Tebor prowled the chaos, growling at soldiers and Genies alike. There was no one worthy for him to fight. But when his eyes fell on me, sitting on the Town Hall steps, smoking a cigarette, he paused.

"We thought you were dead," Tebor grunted. His words slurred together as he mouth fought against his fangs.

"Where's Cain?" I asked abruptly, putting out my smoke and pulling myself up. "Where's Vivian?"

"Cain sent me."

"You're no good," I dismissed. "Go and get Cain. Tell him I have those he seeks. Those who came here to destroy him," I waved back up at the Town Hall with my gun. "In there."

Tebor smiled. Or grimaced. For the creature, both expressions were identical. He looked up at the night's sky, the first stars of the evening appearing above us. Something dark, almost invisible, cut through the night air. It began to grow cold.

Very cold, indeed.

The random skirmishes still underway began to subside. Ice began to form on the cannon barrels of tanks. I pulled my bomber in closer around me, the icy air biting at my fingertips. I could see my breath clouding before me.

He was here.

The wind began to stir, the brass and debris in the street began to jitter. Then the air pressure dropped dramatically, and my ears popped, as everything seemed to be pulled toward the center of the street. I staggered down the Town Hall steps, irresistibly pulled toward the gathering gust. Then, as if the whole city had sucked in a breath and released it, it pushed me back, causing me to stumble and fall onto the stairs.

Materializing from nothing, Cain and Vivian appeared in the center of the street, Cain in his fine suit, and Vivian still dressed for the opera. Tebor walked up to his master and whispered into his ear.

"Ah, excellent news, Detective." Cain's face broadened into a wide smile. In his presence, there was no question of where my loyalties lay. I was his servant. He was my master. Never in a thousand lifetimes would I be able to betray him. That I knew with all certitude.

Luckily, Special Agent Constantine had prepared a surprise for Q. The NeoCons had not come to Seattle unprepared to battle vampires.

"It's a trap, Sire," I whispered, half of my mind fighting against the other half.

"What was that?" Cain stepped toward me. He held out a hand and helped me up off the steps.

"It's a trap, Sire," I repeated. "I'm sorry. I couldn't—" I shook my head, fighting against myself. Some part of me was able to hold my tongue.

"Don't worry, Detective, I'm well aware—" Cain began. But perhaps he wasn't. In an instant the night became day, as dozens of ultraviolet lights in the windows facing onto the street flickered to life. The glare was scalding. I shielded my eyes.

Cain, Vivian and Tebor writhed in pain. Where the perfect, white light touched their flesh, they burned. Cain screamed, falling to his knees before me. His visage bubbled and boiled with blisters.

Vivian fell to the street, too, bringing her hands to her face. She wailed in pain as her eyeballs in their sockets caught alight, exploding into two flaming embers.

Only Tebor remained standing, smoke billowing his head like a halo. Like a great oak in a forest, sawed through to the core, he teetered on his feet.

"Now! Move! While they're down!" a voice came over a loudspeaker. The great doors of the Town Hall flew open as TAC-30 came storming out of the building, centimeter rifles raised. Constantine was in the lead.

From the storefronts, soldiers appeared carrying shiny chains and manacles. Silver.

Tebor finally tumbled to the blacktop, and in the glaring light, the soldiers fell on him and began to wrap him in chains. One soldier got a collar around the blinded Vivian's neck, as smoke still poured from her eye sockets. She wailed in pain as the silver came in contact with her skin.

But no one approached Cain as he lay crumpled at my feet, smoldering in the bright light. TAC-30 stayed at a respectful distance, keeping their weapons raised. Constantine slowly approached with his pistol in his hand.

He moved down the steps until he was standing above Cain.

"What the hell are you doing?" I yelled up at Constantine.

"His weakness for ultraviolet light is well documented," Constantine said, paused just out of arm's reach of Cain. "We just need to coax him out of his hiding place."

"No, no, this will just—"

"Thank you Detective, you've been most helpful. We'll take it from here." Constantine waved in a squad of waiting soldiers. They moved toward Cain, holding silver chains.

"What are you going to do with him?"

"I'm sure 1728 will be overjoyed at the return of their test subject."

I paused in shock, mouth lolling open, as the troopers quickly bound Cain up in silver chains. I saw the truth of it now: Constantine and the NeoCons had never intended to destroy Cain. Or free him, either. They'd come to capture him and return him to his cage. Return him to 1728, so they might continue the work that Dark had interrupted over a century ago.

The Rosicrucians hadn't infiltrated the highest ranks of the U.S. Government – the highest ranks of the U.S. Government had infiltrated the Rosicrucians, perverting their cause to enable the recovery of the Cain subject.

I had it all one-hundred perfect wrong. For such a smart guy, I sure was pretty fucking stupid.

I was all alone.

To my left was Cain and his Genie army. The enslavement of mankind.

To my right was Constantine and his NeoCons, their New World Order and their three C's. Were they any better?

I was all alone.

No, that wasn't true. I still had Dark. Dead as he was, he was still standing there with us on that rubble-strewn street. He still had his last trump card to play.

And there was Vivian. Blind as she was, bound in silver shackles, laying in the street.

What an army, I said to myself, with which to save the world.

"Private First Class Michael Elton," Constantine began as his men tightened the chains to Cain. "You are under arrest for the crime of..." Constantine had to think. "Vampirism. You are deemed to be a dangerous biological threat. You will be taken from here to a place of quarantine—"

"That is more than enough," Cain said softly, bound in his restraints.

"What was that?" Constantine asked, backing up slightly, raising his weapon. The TAC-30 Team followed his cue and raised their weapons.

"That will be more than enough," Cain said again, louder and clearer.

"What—"

Cain pulled himself erect, coiling up like a cobra, dancing to the charmer's flute. His skin still bubbled and popped in the glaring white light, and he was still bound tight in his silver chains, but he raised his head in defiance.

"I said enough!" he screamed. His final word exploded like a thunderclap, shattering glass, sending shards and sparks cascading from the ultraviolet lights.

The street was again bathed in darkness.

Without effort, Cain flexed his arms and shattered the chains that held him.

"I've had enough of this game," Cain said, smoothing out his suit.

Behind him, Tebor and Vivian climbed to their feet. With effort, they fought against their chains and sent them clattering to the ground.

The Tac Team fired. Everyone at once. Constantine fired his centimeter gun. Cain took the bullets without flinching. His suit jumped and shredded with the onslaught, but Cain stood still, straightening his tie, until an errant round tore it in two.

That finally got a reaction.

Cain twirled, as if about to start a dance, and dissolved instantly into the whirlwind. The tornado grew in size until it consumed Constantine's TAC-30. It picked each man up off his boots and cast his into the air, sending men raining down like so much garbage blocks away.

Cain slowly reformed back in the center of the street. Only Constantine, myself, Tebor and Vivian remained.

Cain's visage was once again handsome, as if the ultraviolet lights had not touched him. Tebor and Vivian still showed the extent of their wounds – Vivian fumbled, blind – but Cain was whole once again. His suit, however, had seen better days.

"Do you understand now, Detective?" he said to me. "There is no real choice to make. The human race is doomed to destruction. They will destroy themselves, or I will destroy them. There is no third path."

"No," I shook my head. I didn't believe it, I wouldn't believe it. But my options were rapidly dwindling. Cain was hell-bent on clearing humanity from the face of the earth, and repopulating it with his kind. The NeoCons wanted to use Cain as a weapon to do exactly the same.

I only had once chance.

Vivian.

I only hoped she was still strong enough, blind and stumbling as she was, her eyes burned out of her head. I tried to reach out in my mind and find her in her apartment. If I could take her hand, I could give her my strength.

"No," I continued to shake my head, but now I meant it in a very different way. "You're right, Sire, there is no choice."

"Then stand with me, Detective," Cain commanded. "At this most auspicious moment. The first city of mankind has fallen to my will. The rest will tumble like dominoes."

Cain pointed to a spot beside him on the blacktop.

I wearily took a step.

"Fonseca," Constantine said behind me. "Don't move." I paid him no heed. "Fonseca!" he called out. I couldn't see it, but I knew his centimeter gun had swung around to me.

"No!" Cain cried out. Even his inhuman reflexes weren't fast enough to stop the shot. Something smashed into my left shoulder, hard. It felt like brick hit me. It sent my spinning. I came full around and crashed down onto the concrete.

Cain moved like lightning. One second he was in the center of the street, then next he was on top of Constantine. Rage burned in his eyes. He crushed Constantine's head against the stone steps and bared his white fangs. He was lowering in for a bite when a thunderclap echoed in the street.

Blind Vivian move with equally incomprehensible speed. She vanished for her corner of the road and materialized above Cain. She leapt on top of both men and wrapped an arm around Cain's neck.

But she didn't attack or bite or fight him, instead she leaned in close.

Back in her apartment, I could hear her reciting the worlds along with me. We spoke together in soft tones, low and reverent.

Vivian whispered, quick and haunting into Cain's ear. Pacified, Cain let go of Constantine and fell back onto the steps. Constantine quickly scrambled to his feet, but Vivian kept hugging Cain from behind, whispering into his ear.

I muttered the words myself, laying, bleeding in the dirt. We spoke together as one: " _God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth_." I coughed, spitting up blood. " _God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth..._ "

The hexadecimal of 1768: 6C0. Dark had coded Cain with a trigger, hidden in the text of the Bible. Genesis, of course. Chapter 6, verse 12, word 0. The first word on the line for a mathematician like Dark. God. The real Q. The true Source. That was Cain's trigger. That was his undoing.

I could feel my heart beating faster. The bullet. Constantine.

But none of it mattered. I was free. I could feel the Geneing washing over me. I was back in Vivian's apartment. She was there. Breakfast was almost ready. I could smell the coffee on the stove.

Epilogue

Sasha finished his story.

"That's it?" Vivian said, as Sasha got up to pour himself another cup of coffee.

"That's it," he said.

"What about Cain? What about the Genies?"

"Cain remained, undisturbed on the Town Hall steps until the sun rose. He fried, the wind dispersing his ashes. Lost in his Geneing, he couldn't regenerate. He was finally dead. And with Cain dead, every Gene Genie on the plant woke up all at once. Sober. Sporting the mother of all hangovers." Sasha returned to the table, sipping at his coffee.

"And you and your gunshot wound? And me without eyes?"

Sasha shrugged. "Well, here we are." He smiled over the rim of his coffee.

Vivian laughed. "You are so full of shit!"

"You asked," Sasha said, defensively. "You wanted the truth. Well, there you have it."

"You know..." Vivian leaned forward on the breakfast table. "...I could almost believe your story, right up to the part where _you_ read a whole book."

Sasha laughed into his coffee. "Yeah, well, miracles can happen."

"And all of it?" Vivian pressed her advantage. "Being dead, being a vampire...I don't remember any of it? Why?"

Sasha shrugged again.

Vivian shook her head and began to clear the breakfast things.

"You are so full of shit," she said again, with no malice in her voice.

"Hey," Sasha conceded. "Maybe we're still Geneing, and this is my Eden. Maybe the world is burning all around us, and we're dying of thirst in some squalid, rundown hovel."

"Oh, that's sweet," Vivian sighed from the kitchen, putting the plates into the sink.

"What? That the world is being destroyed by vampires?"

"No, that you think this is paradise."

Sasha snorted. Vivian returned to the table and kissed him on the cheek.

"Well, this paradise comes with laundry," Vivian said, changing gears. "And it's your turn." She was heading for the bedroom, already taking off her pajama bottoms.

"Ugh," Sasha complained, putting down his coffee cup and raising from the table.

"You should be grateful," Vivian called out from the bedroom, then quoted. "You know that Nietzsche thing? About what doesn't kill you makes you stronger?"

"Yeah?" Sasha called back.

"Well, good news," she said, tossing her pajama bottoms and bra out through the door and poking her head and bare shoulders around the jam. "Laundry won't kill you."

Sasha smiled and scooped up Vivian's discarded clothes. He tossed them into the over-full laundry hamper and hefted it into his arms.

No, it might not kill you, Sasha thought as he pushed through the bead curtain and started toward the front door. But experience had taught him there were far worse fates than death.
