That Nietzsche Thing (13 page)

“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.”