That Nietzsche Thing (8 page)

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?