Mercury Revolts (19 page)

As he reached under a desk to pick up an errant gum wrapper,
he was jolted out of his ruminations by a loud squawking in his ear. He’d
forgotten about the earpiece, and in his terror he jumped straight up, banging
his head on the bottom of the desk.

“Nisroc, what’s your position?” the voice squawked.

“On the floor,” moaned Nisroc, holding his head.

“Well, get up!” said the voice. It was Izbazel. “Have you
planted the bomb yet?”

Nisroc crawled out from under the desk and got slowly to his
feet. Still holding his head, he spoke into the microphone hidden in his shirt.
“Not yet,” he said. “I’m still working on the trash.”

“The
trash
?” asked Izbazel. “Forget about the trash
and plant the bomb at the red X!”

“That’s the thing,” said Nisroc. “I’ve been all over this
floor, and I don’t see the red X.”

“It’s not going to…” Izbazel started.
“Never
mind.
Just leave the cart anywhere. It’s doesn’t matter if it’s not
right on the X. It’s a nuclear bomb, for Pete’s sake. It’s going to take out
the whole downtown area.”

“OK,” said Nisroc. After a moment he added, “Over and out.”

Nisroc wasn’t really very keen on the whole nuclear bomb
idea. He didn’t quite grasp why anyone would want to take out the whole
downtown area. It seemed to him that it would just make a big mess, and if
Izbazel kept shuffling Chaos Faction from one secret mission to the next,
Nisroc probably wouldn’t be around to help clean it up.
Too
bad.
Nisroc liked cleaning things up.

He let out a heavy sigh and reached into the bottom of the
big black garbage bag. Finding the little switch cover with his fingers, he
pulled it open and flipped the switch.

OK, so that was done. The bomb was armed and it would
detonate in thirty minutes. Plenty of time for Nisroc and the rest of Chaos
Faction—who were waiting in a coffee shop down the street from the Vanden
Heuvel building—to get out of the blast radius. In fact, Nisroc thought,
probably enough time for him to empty a few more trash bins. He wheeled the
cart to the next desk and leaned over to pick up the bin, which was brimming
over with crumpled papers and yogurt containers.

The something struck him on the back of his head and
everything went black.

Some time later, he regained consciousness tied to a chair
inside what appeared to be a janitor’s closet. A single fluorescent panel
overhead lit the small room. Judging from the brands of the cleaning products
on the shelves, he was still in the Vanden Heuvel building, but it was
impossible to say what floor. He thought he sensed someone behind him. He
strained against his bonds, but they were too tight for him to wriggle free.
Next he tried to grab hold of some interplanar energy in the area to weaken the
cords, but found that something was interfering with his efforts.

“Not going to work,” said a man’s voice. It sounded
strangely familiar, but he couldn’t place it. “I’m not going to let you get a
handle on the energy,” said the man.

“What do you want?” asked Nisroc. “I was just doing my job.”

“Doing your job!” cried a woman’s voice, which he didn’t
recognize. How many people were in this supply closet? She went on, “You know
who else was just doing their job?
The Nazis!”

Nisroc thought about this for a moment. He supposed it was
true. The Nazis must have had janitors, after all. What if all the janitors in
Germany had refused to empty the trash bins of any Nazis? Eventually the
offices of the Third Reich would have been so clogged up with papers and banana
peels that the whole war machine would have shut down. Was that what the woman
was implying? That by emptying the trash bins on the thirty-fifth floor of the
Vanden Heuvel Building, he was facilitating some vast enterprise of evil? Pangs
of guilt struck his heart, making it hard for him to think. This is what always
happened when he started thinking for himself.

“We know about the bomb,” said the woman. She walked around
to stand in front of Nisroc. Nisroc felt like he should recognize her, like
he’d seen her on a TV show recently. She didn’t look like an actress, though.
She was kind of short and a little too well-padded to be the lead in a TV show.
She might have played the fat friend, but she wasn’t quite heavy enough for
that. She was in that awkward range of height-to-weight proportion that put her
squarely in the demographic that made up seventy-five percent of the female
population that wasn’t allowed to be on television. Also, her hair was purple.

“Oh, the bomb!” exclaimed Nisroc. He had forgotten about the
bomb. He wondered what time it was.

“Don’t play dumb,” snapped the purple-haired woman.

“I’m fairly certain he’s not playing,” said the man, walking
into view. Nisroc was confirmed in his belief that he had met this man before.
It was when he and Ramiel were guarding that condo in Glendale, the one with
the interplanar linoleum portal.

“Hey, you’re…” Nisroc started.

“Ederatz,” replied Eddie.
“Used to work
for the Mundane Observation Corps.
You can call me Eddie.”

“Who do you work for now?” asked Nisroc.

“A better question is
,
who do
you
work for now?” Eddie replied.

“Well,” said Nisroc. “We call ourselves Chaos Faction.”

“What?” asked the
woman.
“
You’re
Chaos Faction?
The terrorist group?”

“Not just me,” replied Nisroc. “There are four of us. Well,
there are more, but most of us are in prison.”

“So,” Eddie said. “Michelle has her agents working with
Chaos Faction, to make it look like the bombing is an act of terrorism.”

“Michelle?” asked Nisroc hopefully. “You mean
the
Michelle? So we’re the good guys, then.”

“You’re about to detonate a nuclear bomb in the downtown
area of a major city,” the woman said. “Does that sound like something the good
guys would do?”

Nisroc frowned. It did sound pretty bad when you just came
out and said it like that.

A phone rang and Eddie pulled it out of his pocket and
answered it.

“Yeah,” he said.
“On the roof?
What
does it look like? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yeah, that’s what I thought too. OK.”

He hung up the phone.

“Did he find it?” asked the woman.

Eddie shook his head. “He says there’s a black duffel bag on
the roof.”

Nisroc’s brow furrowed. He didn’t know anything about a
duffel bag on the roof. Izbazel never told him anything.

“But you don’t think that’s it?” asked the woman.

“Mercury thinks it’s too obvious,” said Eddie.

“Isn’t that the point? They planted the bomb right where we
expected them to.”

“Mercury thinks it’s a decoy. If we try to grab it,
Michelle’s agents will swoop in and arrest us. He also says there’s
a Balderhaz field emanating from somewhere near
the top of
the building.”

“A what?”

“There’s a device called a Balderhaz Cube that prevents
angels from performing miracles within a given range. It complicates our
efforts to dispose of the bomb.”

“But you said you don’t think the bomb is on the roof,” said
the woman. “So where is it?”

“Ask Mr. Just-doing-his-job,” said Eddie.

Nisroc bit his lip. He wasn’t happy about the whole nuclear
bomb situation, but his feelings of loyalty to Chaos Faction made him reluctant
to divulge the location of the bomb.

“Look,” said the woman. “You seem like a decent guy. My guess
is that you just got mixed up with the wrong crowd. I know how it goes. I was
on the team that helped build that bomb. I didn’t fully realize what was going
on until it was too late to stop it. But it’s not too late to keep the bomb
from going off. You just have to stop following orders and do the right thing.”

Nisroc shook his head. “It
is
too late,” he said.

“What do you mean?” asked the woman.

“I flipped the switch. The bomb is armed. It will explode in
thirty minutes. I mean, thirty minutes after I flipped the switch.”

“Holy shit,” said the woman.

Eddie glanced at the cell phone. “It’s been fifteen minutes
since we nabbed you. How long before that did you flip the switch?”

“Oh, not long,” said Nisroc.
“Maybe a
minute or two.”

“Where is it?”

Nisroc figured it didn’t make much difference at this point.
If there was a Balderhaz Cube at the top of the building, there was no way they
were going to get the bomb out of the building in time. “In the janitor’s
cart,” he said.
“Under the trash.”

Eddie hit a button on the phone. “He’s not answering!” he
said after a moment.

Nisroc heard a door open behind him. “Wow, it’s cozy in
here,” said a voice. “Got room for one more?”

“Mercury!” exclaimed the woman. “The bomb is in a janitor’s
cart on the thirty-fifth floor. It’s going to detonate in less than fifteen
minutes!”

“Hmm,” said Mercury.

“Hmm?
All you have to say is ‘hmm’?
Go get the bomb!”

“The problem is,” said Mercury, “they’ve shut down the
elevators and they’ve got guards in the stairwells to keep anybody from getting
to the roof. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem, but with that Balderhaz cube
up there, I can’t get past them.
Can’t fly up there either.
The cube seems to have a range of about a hundred yards.”

“So, what?” asked the
woman.
“We
just sit here in a supply closet until the bomb goes off?”

“Hmm,” said Mercury again. “Hey, what’s that stuff on the
bottom shelf? Is that spray paint?”

Chapter Twenty-three
  
 

New York;
Autumn
,
1780

Such had been Arnold’s reputation
among his fellow officers that when incriminating documents were found bearing
his signature, he was not immediately suspected of foul play. The papers found
their way into the hands of Colonel John Jameson, who commanded a cavalry
outpost a few miles from White Plains. Assuming the documents were part of some
elaborate ruse on the part of the British, Jameson wrote a letter to Arnold,
explaining what had happened. Rather than send the letter directly to Arnold,
however, he sent it by courier along with another—with similar contents—addressed
to General Washington. Washington was traveling at the time and ended up taking
a different route than was expected, with the result that the courier missed
him. The courier delivered the letters to a residence where Arnold was supposed
to be meeting Washington and several other officers for breakfast. If
Washington hadn’t tarried to examine some defensive fortifications before the
meeting, it would have been a very awkward breakfast for Benedict Arnold
indeed.

As it was, Arnold read the letter and, with admirable
composure, finished his croissant, took a sip of tea, and excused himself from
the table. He said goodbye to his wife and infant son, ran to the yard, leaped
on a horse, and galloped down to the river, where he took a barge to the
British sloop called, rather ominously, the Vulture.

Washington soon received the letter addressed to him and,
having learned of Arnold’s flight, quickly deduced what had happened. He
alerted the men of West Point to the possibility of an attack, thus undoing the
British advantage. As Washington dined that evening in the very room Arnold had
fled in the morning, he received a letter from the traitor insisting on his
wife’s innocence in the matter. Summoning one of his officers, the
broken-hearted general said quietly, “Go to Mrs. Arnold and tell her that
though my duty required no means should be neglected to arrest General Arnold,
I have great pleasure in acquainting
her
that he is now safe on board a
British vessel.”

Having evidently exhausted Lucifer’s use for him, Benedict
Arnold never saw his mysterious benefactor again. It became clear to all
concerned shortly after the West Point debacle that the British cause was lost,
and it can be assumed that Lucifer decided his energies were best spent
elsewhere for the time being. This is not to say, though, that Arnold was never
visited by another angel. In fact, while brooding on his fate on the deck of
the Vulture that night, he noticed a familiar figure leaning against the
railing.

 “Pretty nice sloop,” the man said. “One of the better
sloops I’ve
seen,
and I’ve seen some sloopy sloops. I
think this sloop is the sloopiest sloop.”

“What do you want, Lord Squigglebottom? Or is it Mercier
today?
Or Mercury?
Or
Long-Drink-of-Water?”

“Just Mercury,” said the man. “Sloop is a great name.
Almost as good as man-o-war.
What’s your favorite kind of
ship, Bennie?”

“Frigate,” said Arnold.

“Watch your mouth,” chided Mercury. “It was an innocent
question.”

Arnold sighed. “So are you here to add to my torment? To
tell me I was wrong to betray the American side?”

“Nah,” said Mercury. “I’m pretty sure your conscience is
going to be eating at you for the rest of your life, so I don’t really see the
point in piling on. If it makes you feel better, that Rezon guy was actually
Lucifer. You know, Satan? You’re not the first person he’s tempted to doing
something they later regretted.”

“Yeah,” said Arnold. “I had deduced as much myself.”

“Really?
And you went along with
his plan anyway?”

Arnold laughed bitterly, staring out at the moonlight
reflected in the calm water. “You know why they hang traitors?” he asked.

“Um,” replied Mercury.
“Something to do
with loyalty, I think.”

“If an American officer is captured by the British, they
treat him like a houseguest.
Same thing for a British officer
captured by the Americans.
It’s all tea and crumpets and no hard
feelings. Neither side would ever dream of executing an officer just for being
on the wrong side. It’s universally considered barbaric.
So
why the gallows for a man who switches sides?”