01 Babylon Rising (19 page)

He was about to press the point when he felt his jacket being yanked from behind. Off balance, he staggered backward and fell heavily against a table. Before he could regain his feet, someone pinned his arms behind him and started shoving him toward the door.

“Hey, get your hands off me.” He managed to wrench himself out of the armlock and whirled around. The barman stood smirking, arms folded. Next to him was another man Chuck had never seen before, heavier set, unshaven, with faded tattoos on his forearms.
Must have come out of the kitchen
, he thought. The man stepped forward, getting right in Chuck’s face.

“Get out. Now. Before we decide to get nasty. We don’t want scum like you in here no more.”

Chuck reckoned he could take the barman, no problem. But the kitchen guy looked like he meant business. No point getting all busted up for a pitcher of beer, no matter how thirsty he was. He brushed himself off and did not look back.

A few minutes later, the man known as Talon left an untouched beer on a corner table and walked out of the bar. He scanned the street. No sign of Chuck in either direction. No matter. It wasn’t exactly hard to predict his next move. He sniffed the air, then turned right. Toward the river.

As he walked through the town, past the little corner drugstore, then the thrift shop with its display of teddy bears in the window, he wondered how long his work would keep him in Preston. Long enough to make a lasting contribution to the place, he felt sure. To make a few changes that would be remembered. He stopped at the Hey Preston! magic shop with its hand-painted sign depicting a rabbit peering over the brim of a top hat, and smiled. Oh, yes. He’d show them a few new tricks before he was done.

Another ten minutes and the cute little shops and family
restaurants began to give way to boarded-up storefronts and vacant lots. Even Preston had its bad part of town, where the street lighting wasn’t so good and the picket fences were missing a few slats and a coat of whitewash. He began to search for a likely spot.

He found it almost at once. An alley between a Chinese takeout place and a liquor store. A good shortcut if you weren’t afraid of the shadows and anybody who might be lurking there. Somebody who might be badly in need of some cash and didn’t care how they got it, for instance.

He peered into the gloom. There was a powerful stench of rotting vegetables. No doubt this was where the restaurant dumped its garbage. The scraping and scurrying sounds told him he was not the first to figure that out. He took a few steps into the alley and listened. Just in time. He walked another ten yards through the discarded boxes, then ducked behind a Dumpster and pulled out his cell phone.

Chuck kept the little man pinned to the wall with one hand while he tried to flip through his wallet with the other. The guy was so terrified, he probably could not have run, let alone fight back. But the lessons you learned in jail stayed with you. Never turn your back. Never let your guard down. And never assume your opponent is down for the count unless he’s actually stopped breathing.

The other rule was to listen hard. You might not see trouble coming, but maybe you could hear it. And right now Chuck could hear a siren. Hard to tell how far away, but it
seemed to be getting louder. Time to finish his business and get on his way.

Suddenly a flashlight swept across the alley, blinding him for a moment. Behind it stood a cop, nightstick at the ready. “Stop right there,” he shouted. “Step away from the wall with your hands out front, where I can see them.”

Chuck shoved the wallet into his jacket and let go of the little man, who crumpled against the wall and slumped to the ground. Now what? He didn’t have a weapon and the cop was advancing steadily. He’d be on him in a second.

If he didn’t think of something quick, he’d soon be back in Cell 486, and this time they’d throw away the key.

The cop found his target again with the flashlight, and now Chuck couldn’t see a thing. Then suddenly there was a crack, a sharp cry of pain, and the light veered off into the shadows. As his eyes adjusted again to the gloom, he made out a dark shape—a tall man standing over the cop with what looked like a piece of two-by-four in his hand. The cop wasn’t making a sound now.

The man turned toward Chuck and he saw his face. Bone-white features and blank eyes that made him shiver. He beckoned Chuck forward with a gloved hand.

“His friends will be here in a minute or two. Time to ship out, Chuck.”

Chuck froze in place, uncertain what this ghoul had in mind. His brain had shut down.

The ghoul seemed to sense his fear. He flung the two-by-four into a pile of boxes and held both arms out to the side. “You have nothing to fear from me, Chuck. Quite the opposite.

In fact, you could say I’m your savior.” He laughed, though Chuck couldn’t see the joke. It was a harsh, animal sound, not really a laugh at all.

The sirens were loud now. Only a few blocks away.

“Come on, I have a place where you can get cleaned up. Money. I even have a job for you. Unless you’d rather go back to jail, of course.”

Chuck’s brain unscrambled itself enough to figure out he didn’t really have any more choices.

“Okay, mister,” he said. “You’re the boss. I guess you better lead the way.”

STEPHANIE KOVACS FOUND
herself gazing out the window for the third time in the last half hour, wondering how she had gotten stuck talking to one of the most boring men in the world while researching a story that to her great surprise was one of the hottest of her career. Since her worldwide exclusive at the home of Farley the Fanatic, the U.N. window washer who still had not turned up, Stephanie’s media star was rising at BNN even faster than before.

Of course, it did not hurt that Shane Barrington himself seemed to be following this story with keener personal interest than he had exhibited about any prior news story. From the moment Stephanie had gotten the anonymous phone tip to rush to the Farley rental in Queens the night of the U.N. attack, she had wondered about the coincidence of Barrington’s
first meeting with her, essentially ordering her to investigate the evangelical Christian movement and this headline-making discovery. Considering she herself had barely picked up a Bible since she was twelve, religious talk was now filling her days.

The competitive reporter in her was more than a little envious about not getting to follow up some of the links resulting from the U.N. window painting. That seemed like hard news, or, more appropriately, hard lack-of-news, because no further evidence had been uncovered to connect Farley either to a known evangelical group or to any additional physical evidence of a U.N. bombing plot. But her revelations of that night still stuck in people’s memories.

Now she was following a direct tip from Shane Barrington himself. When he called to congratulate her—first time ever—on her scoop, he let slip that high-level people in Washington had told him that the FBI had questioned none other than Professor Michael Murphy in connection with the U.N. attack. Stephanie had suggested that they were probably talking to Murphy as an expert on the Bible to get clues about the painted message, much like the networks all had talking-head experts for every crisis.

But Barrington suggested she should go to Preston University and snoop around about Murphy. After all, he was a TV personality, and TV people like nothing better than a whiff of scandal about another TV star, even if he was only the star of some dusty archaeology specials on cable.

Which was how she found herself listening to Dean Archer Fallworth drone on and on about the university grade-point average and student community service initiatives. She did not want to tip her hand about her interest in Murphy until she
had gotten a sense of how he fit into university life, but now it was time to cut to the chase.

“Dean, how about the evangelical Christians? Are they active on campus?”

Fallworth’s eyes narrowed. “Evangelicals? Well, yes, we do have some very”—he waved his hand, searching for the right word—
“energetic
members of that particular religious group at Preston. Only a handful, really, but they tend to make rather a lot of noise.” He flashed a smile he wanted to appear to be conspiratorial. “What exactly is your interest?”

“Let’s just say there’s a lot of concern among ordinary citizens that these evangelical groups are getting too big, too scary. I want to find out how a fine liberal arts university like Preston is affected. Institutions like yours as the front line in the battle against bigotry. Our viewers would be interested in that.”

Fallworth’s smile became a Cheshire cat’s grin. “I like to think we do our best. Fighting the good fight against ignorance and intolerance.” He clasped his hands together and leaned forward over the desk. “But it isn’t always easy. They’re
very
well organized, you know. And some of their leaders are tremendously cunning.”

Here we go
, thought Stephanie. “Anyone in particular?”

Fallworth pursed his lips. “I don’t want to speak ill of any faculty members, of course….”

“Unless it’s in the public interest.”

“Quite so. Well, there is one professor here who makes it his business to stir up trouble, filling impressionable young minds with the worst kinds of spiritualistic nonsense. His name’s Murphy.” He winced, as if Stephanie had forced an unpleasant confession out of him. “Professor Michael Murphy.”

Bingo. That was the name Barrington had given her when he’d called two nights earlier. Just a little follow-up, he’d said. To focus the investigation. She had no idea why he was so keen to nail him, but there was no doubting the strength of his feelings. In his icy way, he was practically breathing fire into the phone. And Murphy seemed to be just as unpopular with Fall worth.

He must be quite a character
, she thought.

“So, what does this Murphy teach?”

“Biblical archaeology, if you will. His mission is to authenticate the Bible by digging up artifacts that confirm Bible stories. The very opposite of science, in my opinion.”

“And has he found any?”

“So he would claim.”

“And his classes are well attended?”

“I’m afraid so. Students tend to find him … charismatic. He’s something of a cult figure on campus, and I mean that in the worst sense. Perhaps it’s because he’s an outdoors type.”
Unlike real scholars such as yourself
, thought Stephanie, noting Fallworth’s paunch and pasty complexion. “Rock-climbing, archery, all very gung-ho.”

Stephanie stood and gathered her briefcase. “How intriguing. If I’m going to go after these evangelicals, it looks like Murphy’s the place to start. So, where can I find him?”

THE MAN KNOWN
as Talon entered the house and let the screen door shut in Chuck Nelson’s face behind him.

As he scrambled to pull open the screen door to this place where Talon said he was living, Chuck was really puzzled. The guy had plenty of cash, whipping out a large roll of small bills at every store, yet he was living in this house Chuck figured was two grades below a dump. It was about twenty miles outside of Preston, so it was not even close to anything except back roads and forest. The porch was sunken to the point of near collapse, there was a leak in the roof over two of the bedrooms, and the bathroom sink had only one faucet knob, and it was crusted with a muddy mix of years of rust and dirt.

Chuck’s reflexes were a little slow because he was tired from having driven Talon around for four hours. There were stops in three different megastores—each in a different county,
miles apart from one another. None of what they bought made sense to Chuck, and it especially did not make sense that they couldn’t just buy it all in one place, but Talon made it clear early on that questions of any kind were not part of his routine.

“Start hauling the bags and boxes out of the car,” Talon ordered.

“I’m beat. Can’t it wait until morning?”

“Haul. Now. School’s in session.”

Chuck scowled. “What school?”

“Shut up and learn, genius. I’m going to teach you how to shake things up but good in this hick town of yours.”

Within an hour, the card table in what once might have passed for a living room was spilling over with torn bags and ripped-open boxes. As Talon showed Chuck how he wanted the crude ingredients mixed, he surprised Chuck by being in a more talkative mood than before.

“That sister of yours, she got a thing for that Professor Murphy?”

“I told you, I haven’t spoken to her pretty much since I was in the joint. I’m just living there because I can’t afford to be on my own yet, and it’s clean, a lot cleaner than this place. But I doubt it. She’s just a goody-goody girl, always was.”

“What do you know about Murphy, or his wife?”

“Don’t make me laugh. You expect me to know something about a teacher and his stupid wife? My sister knew him from church, before she went to college, I know that much. Why are you so curious about Murphy?”

“A warrior always studies the enemy.”

After Talon sent Chuck home for the night, letting him drive the rental car and telling him to be back in the morning to pick him up for a full day of errands, he grabbed his secure satellite-link phone and dialed a New York number.