Nightwise (35 page)

“So the faceless and the powerful run the world and the rest of us poor bastards have to sniff up a life eating your table scraps. This is not exactly a shocking revelation, Giles.”

“Tell me, Mr.…”

“Are you trolling me?” I said. “'Cause you still have a good hand. You are honestly telling me you don't know who I am?”

“I do not,” he said. “Berman handled the initial details of obscuring your investigation and, after your persistence required James be removed, I dealt through his man, Ettinger, or Memitim, if you prefer his nom de guerre. I understand you people enjoy your little street names.

“I saw no reason to be any more hands-on than that until your clumsy attempt at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing activated certain mystical safeguards I had put in place. Again, I let Ettinger deal with you, as he assured Berman and, later, me that he could dispose of you easily. It's regrettable that I didn't close that loop with Ettinger sooner, since he led you to my door.”

“So did you even a give a fuck about the people you were having killed?” I asked, shaking my head. “Did you even know their names?”

“So, tell me, Mr.…” Harmon said.

“Hillbilly will be fine,” I said. Or Hoi Polloi, if you prefer,” I said. “Fancy fella like you might like Hoi Polloi.”

“No, I think Hillbilly is more apt,” he said. “Tell me, Mr. Hillbilly, have you ever killed another human being? I suspect the answer, but I want to hear it from your own lips.”

“Yes,” I said, “I have. Many times.”

Harmon nodded. “Tell me, what have you killed for in this life?”

The question made a greasy eel squirm in my guts. “The usual,” I said. “Survival, self-defense, anger, revenge.”

“Never for love?” Harmon said, a smile on the edge of his lips. “The most noble of the passions. That's a shame. Never for greed, for power? Come now, Mr. Hillbilly, a man who traffics with the Devil surely has some experience with these?”

“Yeah,” I said. I knew this was not the conversation to be having. I knew it was dangerous, and a man like Harmon was a master of emotional judo, but after Harel, after Boj—who was most likely dead by now—and this all for nothing, after Torri and after driving away all the people who hadn't known me well enough to know I wasn't good to be around, I needed this from some anonymous asshole. I needed confession, I needed to look into the black mirror at myself and speak my truth.

“I've killed for things I wanted, coveted,” I said. “Killed for knowledge I didn't have, couldn't learn on my own, and craved. Killed for things I thought I deserved and someone else didn't. I've killed people to prove I was more powerful than them, for bragging rights, for my legend, my reputation, and my pride. Yes. I've killed for those things. Yes.”

“Welcome to the human race,” Harmon said. “You honestly think any of those troglodytes out there would give a second thought about killing me and my family, about killing you and yours?

“You think there is some inherent nobility in poverty? Extreme poverty does the exact same thing to a person that extreme wealth does. It burns away many of the pretenses about human nature we cling to in the dark, about good and evil that we thought were truth. You know the truth about humanity, the same truth I know, Mr. Hillbilly. Don't you?”

“We do what we have to, to survive and to claw our way to better,” I said.

He nodded and smiled, raised his empty glass with his bleeding hand. I took it and refilled it and my own.

“Very eloquent,” Harmon said. “So let us both dispose of the pretense that I am some master villain and you the dashing but world-weary hero. We are exactly the same thing, Mr. Hillbilly: predators in a world of sheep. You think some home invader or carjacker gives one drop of piss about who he's taking from, who he's murdering, any more than any other predator concerns itself with killing with fangs or claws or guns, taxes or foreclosures, interest rates or credit scores, laws and regulations, or downsizing? Some do the eating and some get eaten. How many did you kill or lie to or sacrifice to get to me, to get to Dusan Slorzack? So, ask me again, Mr. Hillbilly, about the names of those I had killed because they were a threat or an opportunity or an obstacle. Tell me how morally superior you are to me.”

I handed him his glass, and he raised it in toast. “To the top of the food chain,” he said. “Congratulations.”

We clinked out glasses and drank.

“So,” I said, “Slorzack. Where?”

He reached into his robe pocket, and I came at him fast.

“Stop!” he shrieked, and immediately hated me for making him do that. “I am merely pulling out my wallet. I have no desire to receive further pummeling. We have established that I cannot defeat you.”

He pulled a thin leather wallet from his pocket and liberated a hundred-dollar bill. He held it up for me to see.

“When you killed,” he said, “were there times you were hungry? Did someone you love need money, like this, and not have it?”

“Fuck you,” I said, and yanked him off the couch by the lapels on his blood-crusted robe. He was still smiling. “Last time before I do some serious damage to you, Giles, where is Slorzack?”

He jammed the bill in my face. “Here, he's in here.”

I struck him hard and let him fall to the floor. The Benjamin fluttered to the ground a bit slower than its owner had.

“What?” I said.

Harmon sat up. He laughed, the kind of laugh that begins when fear is cooking itself into madness.

“The Greenway,” he said. “He's hiding inside the Greenway.”

 

TWENTY-SEVEN

“What the hell is a Greenway?” I said.

“
The
Greenway,” Harmon corrected. “There is only one. It's … magnificent, a marvel for the ages. It's the philosopher's stone, the Holy Grail, a magic artifact in an age of dull skepticism and anorexic wit.”

Harmon snorted in disgust as he climbed off the floor and then winced in pain from the exertion. He dropped back onto the couch and took another long pull on his drink.

“Mr. Hillbilly,” he said, “do you have any concept of what drives the higher orders of magic?”

I shrugged. “I've heard lots of different answers to that question from a lot of different masters,” I said. “None of them satisfied me. I say it's basic, unbendable will. You dominate the universe into doing what you want it to do. Mind over matter, in the simplest terms.”

“Quite the simplest terms,” Harmon said. “Magical theory from a street-brawling banjo player. Quaint. Your grasp of magic is as homespun as your accent.”

“Okay,” I said. “What's your take?”

“My
take,
as you so quaintly put it, is the true path to power in this world and others,” Harmon said.

“The power of love,” I said. “Huey Lewis and the News were right?”

Harmon ignored me.

“Faith,” he said. “At its core, magic is about faith. The more you can engender, the more you can accomplish. With enough faith, the magus is no different than God. Magic requires unswerving belief, does it not, Mr. Hillbilly? You are able to do what you do because you don't just think you can, like the little engine, you
know
you can. Doubt cannot be in the lexicon of the wizard.

“The earliest miracle workers, the earliest of our kind, shared that characteristic with the most fervent priests and worshipers. They knew the gods were real, they knew they were watching, acting upon the universe in tangible ways, and that belief, that faith, gave the gods as much power as us. Faith can and did move mountains, did it not?

“The difference between the gods on high and us was, and still is, that our power comes from within us, while the gods have to go, hat in hand, trolling for believers. We believe in ourselves, or abilities, supremely. We have no other option. The best of us are egomaniacal, because we must be.

“There are a handful of us in this world—wizards, mystics, magi, call us what you will. We are woefully outnumbered by the huddled masses. They will never have the hardware to do what we do, but they possess the raw fuel of belief, and that was the genius of the Founders, the architects of America, and of the Greenway.”

Harmon leaned forward with a groan and retrieved the hundred-dollar bill from the floor. He held it up for me.

“Faith,” he said. “‘Backed by the full faith and good credit of the United States government.' That's what they say, isn't it? Not gold or silver locked up in some vault, not anything real anymore, just blind belief that the giant will keep lumbering right along. The gods are shades, Mr. Hillbilly, starved long ago from nothing on their altars but dead flowers and ashes, but the green, ah, the green.”

“Money,” I said, “is some kind of magic?”

“The most powerful in the world,” he said, climbing to his feet. “It creates matter out of nothing more than paper or base metals. It controls minds and behavior, can kill or save a life. It is the charm, the focus, of countless millions of human lives. It is considered as essential as air, water, or food, and it isn't real. Behold the greatest source of sympathetic ritual magic in the history of mankind—the currency system of the United States.”

“How?” I said. “I saw the magical operating system on the printing dies and plates. That system was unlike any magic construction I had ever seen before. It was … poetry.”

“It's uncertain with whom the idea originated,” Harmon said. “What is known is that the rituals, the formulas, and the thought-form architecture were postulated, argued over, and eventually finalized and created by Jefferson, Franklin, and Hamilton.”

“The system I saw changed and evolved,” I said. “Long past the life spans of any of them, unless you're telling me they are still creeping around somewhere.”

“No,” Harmon said. “The architects are gone, but like their social and political experiments, they made the framework for the magical system tied to the currency of their new nation adaptable, flexible, and sturdy. It has been modified and amended and improved upon over the decades, over the centuries, by the seven occult scholars allowed to tinker with it officially—the seven engravers at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. They are high priests of a sort, of a long-lost conspiracy that only a dozen individuals worldwide even know exists anymore. Seven engravers, seven—a powerful numerological, spiritual, and occult symbol, is it not? The Greenway was not originally created as an Illuminati venture, but as our influence grew in the nation, we eventually discovered the experiment and made it our own, for a time.

“The symbols you saw on the dies and plates serve the same purpose as those of any enchantment on an object or the formula surrounding a summoning or protection circle. It gives the power a foothold, an anchor to cling to and perform its function.”

“And its function is what, exactly?” I asked.

“It takes the belief in and worship of a sympathetic object—in this case, U.S. currency—and transforms that faith into usable, workable magical power. Workable power that was then directed into a singular miraculous purpose, the creation and sustaining of the Greenway.”

I stood and took Harmon's glass. I filled it and then mine. I had to open a fresh bottle of scotch to do that. Harmon drained half his drink quickly.

“That,” I said, “is slick magic. So, in effect, you had a huge amount of the American population at first and then, pretty much the global population, participating in ritual magic for you guys twenty-four/seven. That's … wow.”

Harmon was well past drunk now and feeling much less pain. He laughed again, that something-broken-inside laugh, and sloshed his glass around as he gestured.

“It took time. Faith can't be rushed, Mr. Hillbilly, it must be nurtured and given signs and portents. At first the currency, the notes, were an easier way to deal with large transactions, and it was backed by the blustering young nation's vast material wealth, but over time, as America's power grew, faith and belief in the money grew. Eventually it was coveted for its own sake across the world. Nothing more than an idea, bound to simple paper, enslaves the human race and controls all of us. It was genius.”

“That it is,” I said. “I have to admit.”

“It wasn't just the money, either,” Harmon went on. He was slurring a bit now. “A magical undertaking of this magnitude required additional underpinnings to ensure it would sustain itself. Occult architecture was employed. Pierre Charles L'Enfant and Andrew Ellicott were commissioned to help design Washington, D.C., with Jefferson's assistance, to produce an evolving, fluctuating mystic circuit of unimaginable size. Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Vermont Avenues and part of K Street form a massive pentagram, a summoning symbol and the focus of the sympathetic ritual. The White Lodge, or White House, the obelisk, or Washington's monument. Lincoln's memorial is a Greek temple to the gods. All envisioned for the Greenway before they were ever physical buildings on this earth.

“They bound the Greenway to the other symbol of traditional power—the All-Seeing Eye, the pyramid. The thunderbird, or phoenix, became the eagle, clutching Apollo's spears in one foot and Athena's laurel in the other. Symbols have power, my hayseed friend. Making a symbol into a reality—that is the power of true magic. Control, harnessing the minds of the powerless to serve the powerful and keeping them ignorant that they are slaves, giving them a prize to strive for, a dream that might come true but never does. Person by person, child by child, generation by generation until they are willing cogs in an arcane process they will live and die never knowing about.”

I had drunk too much. It was a bad idea. Giles Harmon, even in his present state, was one of the most dangerous men on earth. I had started drinking because I knew what was coming and I didn't think I could handle it sober. However, my booze-soaked brain was beginning to turn over some of the implications of what Harmon was saying, and the scope of it sobered me, somewhat.