The Last American Wizard (27 page)

When they reached the intersection, the corridors extended in both directions; the yellowish light was a bit brighter to his left. It looked the same through both eyes, so he assumed it wasn’t magical.

He jumped as he felt a soft tap on his forehead. When he heard a soft hiss of frustration, he realized it must be Ace. Another touch moved from right to left and he assumed that meant they were going to the
left.

About two yards before the T, the light was significantly brighter; he could see Ace’s arm as she reached up and tapped his forehead twice. He took one step to his right and stood against the wall. He could now make out Ace’s silhouette as she moved low along the hall to the corner, then she stretched out prone and moved forward slowly until she could see around the
corner.

She didn’t move for a long time and Steve began to get bored. He considered invoking the golden hound from the second tarot card but worried that it might glow. He was working on ways to create different-colored dogs when he saw Ace rise to a crouch and slide around the corner. Steve and Carlos
followed.

When they reached the corner, Steve could see that they were entering a large room. Two sconces on the far wall held what looked like ancient raw-filament light bulbs and flanked a raised dais. Between their dim light and the diagrams that Send Money was still constructing, he could see that the room was about thirty feet square and, for the most part, bare of furniture. Along the
walls were thick curtains or tapestries alternating with rectangular objects he assumed were paintings. The floor was a thick carpet that muffled their
footsteps.

As he came closer to the dais, he could see that there was a chair–he thought it probably qualified as a throne–on the dais, and behind it, an enormous copy of the Illuminati’s eye-on-the- pyramid symbol. It was made out of some polished metal and the edges flashed even in the dim light. He felt Carlos’s hand leave his belt and could just make him out as he went to the left wall. Steve walked carefully to the right and tried to make out what was in the framed paintings by the light of the smartphone’s screen. Send Money helpfully brightened the image.

The first painting was of an unfamiliar man in some sort of medieval garb, as was the second. The third portrait on the wall
was instantly recognizable. Richard Nixon stood there in a formal pose with his hand resting on a globe. “Wow. No surprise there.” Steve thought. “It does explain how he managed to get elected in 1968.” He didn’t recognize the next oil painting, but the last was Paul Volcker–longtime Chairman of the Federal
Reserve.

He moved to the center of the room, where Ace was
examining the throne-like chair. As he approached, she stepped around to the back and disappeared. Steve walked slowly up and around the throne. Ace was nowhere to be found. He had learned enough to wait for her to appear again. He was quite proud of the fact that he resisted the temptation to sit in a wooden
chair.

“Doesn’t look terribly
comfortable.”

Steve’s heart felt as if it had stopped for several minutes and then had to pound furiously to catch up. He turned enough to see Carlos standing close behind him and, with some effort, refrained from strangling him. Of course, the younger man could thrash him even without changing to his monster form, but Steve preferred to think of it as an example of his restraint and coolness in
battle.

He glared at the young man instead. Carlos continued to study the engravings, rather annoyingly unaware of any glaring, restrained or otherwise. Steve was about to simply give up on glaring when Ace appeared on his other side, and his heart started throbbing like a go-go backbeat again. In the dim light, he could see the gleam of Ace’s teeth as she
smiled.

She motioned both of them to put their heads together–the phone vibrated sharply and Steve held it up as well–and outlined the situation in a low
whisper.

“There’s a door hidden behind that drape.” She pointed behind the throne. “I guess this is where the dimmer members of the Illuminati come to get their orders from the smarter or at least better-lit leaders. The concealed door lets them appear and disappear mysteriously, which I’m sure makes them feel incredibly superior to their followers. Typical douchebag
behavior.”

Steve could hear the soft pats and clinks as Ace checked her weapons while she talked. “On the other side of the door is a changing room with a bunch of dumb-looking cloaks on hangers. I figure we can swipe some of those to blend in. And we will need to blend. I opened the door on the other side of the changing room and there’s definitely some sort of ceremony going
on.”

“You can feel the ethereal vibrations?” Steve
whispered.

He could feel the arctic nature of her stare. “No, I could hear them
chanting.”

Barnaby’s voice came out of the speakerphone at low volume. “If you all will be quiet, Send Money and I will throw all the gain we can into the microphone and see if we can’t identify
it.”

The three stood silently for about ten minutes. Steve could see no indication that the cell phone was even working, much less isolating sound from the deep silence that was all he could hear around
him.

“Well?” he
whispered.

“
Cushlamochree!”
Barnaby said in a strangled voice. “Damn! I had four damper relays on the input feed and you still managed to blow out all the signal processors in a cascade series that took up an entire rack of
servers.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve whispered. “More importantly, what was that you said
first?”

“No idea. It came from one of the servers you blew. Maybe when it’s speaking to me again, you can put your ears in a bright- red pair of those Beats headphones cranked to 11 and ask nicely. I’m sure that the server won’t harbor any malice, and even if it does, Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony after he lost his hearing. I’m sure you can do just as
well.”

“OK, OK,” Ace whispered. “Lecture him later. What did you hear?”

“I can’t identify it at 100% accuracy because there’s been so little comparison data in the past hundred years, but from some of the forms found in the Samaveda–believed to have been written in 200 BCE in India–interpolated with some of the chord sequences where “The Wizard” by Uriah Heep matches up with Black Sabbath’s
version–”

“Oh, come on,” Steve said. “You can’t use headbanger music.”

“Why not? When they were writing, most of those guys had little, if any, contact with reality. Anyway, do you want to hear this or do you want to make
comments?”

There was silence. In Steve’s case, only because he was trying to decide between the two
options.

“Thank you,” Barnaby continued. “It’s a ceremonial chant supplicating someone or some
thing
to accept a sacrifice and to…recharge batteries? No. Ah, yes. Give the supplicants more magical muscle. Yes, it’s a prayer for more power. The odd thing is that it’s only a preparatory ritual…like a boot-up sequence. They’re asking for the power to jumpstart a far more potent ceremony.”

Ace asked, “Who is being sacrificed?”

“I can’t tell,” the computer
responded.

Carlos asked, “And this is not the kilo-logos event your were talking about,
right?”

“Oh, hell no.” Barnaby said, “Although I suspect it’s related. They referred to this as a
laghubhojana
—that’s “snack” in
Sanskrit.

“How do you spell that?” Steve asked. “In case I need to order takeaway from the other
side.”

Instantly, the cell phone screen
showed

अल्पाहार

“Not very helpful,” Steve
complained.

“Enough of this crap,” Ace snarled. “Let’s go kick some Illuminati butt before it’s too late for whoever is playing the part of an appetizer. Carlos, you take point with me and be ready to switch to
cadejo
form as soon as we start taking
fire–”

“Literally,” Steve
added.

“–and Fool-boy here with all the jokes can hang back and
hold the camera in case the Digital Duo get some more details on who these scum-bunnies are and what they could be planning next. OK?”

Carlos nodded, Send Money gave R2-D2’s upward whistle– the one that Princess Leia got after she’d had him record the message to her father–Barnaby said, “Recording,” and Steve
sighed
deeply.

The ceremonial robes were on hooks in the room behind the hidden door. Steve thought a secret society that was supposed to run the world could have afforded wooden hangers at least. His cloak smelled as if it had been worn by someone who hadn’t taken a bath in the past two hundred years. He could see, even under the very old and very dim incandescent lights, that it was threadbare and the colors had
faded.

When they were all robed, Ace slowly opened the door on the opposite wall of the chamber. Send Money was showing a large blinking red arrow pointing right, so when Ace glanced back at him, Steve motioned in that direction. He was quite proud of making that on-the-fly deduction in a combat
situation.

They proceeded down the carpeted hall in a single line, hoods pulled down over their faces, hands in their sleeves–only the occasional soft
clink
from Ace’s weaponry marking them as intruders. Unless, Steve thought, the Illuminati bosses didn’t wear these damned robes when they weren’t out impressing the rank and file.

Suddenly, Ace’s hand went up in a fist. Carlos stopped and Steve, with a great deal of effort and a few intricate dance steps, managed not to run into him. They stood in silence for several moments. Slowly, Steve began to pick out the distant murmur of a repetitive chant that rose and fell in strange minor chords. It sounded almost stereotypically
evil.

Steve had a short internal debate on whether it was worse than Starlight Vocal Band’s “Afternoon Delight” but finally called it for the Illuminati. After all, Bill and Taffy Danoff were a local band, and you had to give them extra points for that. He missed the signal to start moving again but managed to catch up with Carlos
as they wove through passages, at first wood-paneled but soon walled with the same pebbled concrete that made up the exterior walls of the park. Small heaps of powdery decomposed concrete at the bottom of the walls demonstrated just how old the place was, and how long-dead government contractors had skimmed by upping the proportion of sand to
cement.

Steve looked through the lens over his left eye and could see that they would soon arrive at the precise center of the enormous nexus of energy where the Fall Line and the American Meridian met. Steve could feel the deep
thrum
it put out in every bone in his body.

Suddenly, the chant rose to a crescendo that sounded like either the shrieking of men and women in agony or one of Patti Smith’s early concerts. Then it cut off so quickly; it was as if it created a vacuum of sound. Steve’s heart pounded in his ears and the slight rustling of Carlos’s robe as he walked was as loud as a kid kicking his way through dry autumn
leaves.

“Shit!” Ace spat out. “I think we’re too late to rescue anyone.

Let’s at least grab one of these bastards and get some
answers.”

As the echoes of the horrible shrieking still seemed to fill the corridor, she added, “One is enough. I’d say any more Illuminati than that are
nonessential.”

“That’s the consensus here as well.” Barnaby’s voice came softly from the speaker. “Sonic analysis indicates those screams came from more than a dozen voices–some as young as three and four. Two of the server clusters have gone offline to reboot their empathy
software
suites,
and
we
have
one
D-Wave
Two
that’s attempting to become corporeal so he, or she, can come down and kick some
ass.”

“They can’t really do that, can they?” Steve
asked.

“Who the hell knows? They operate in a bath of nitrogen at absolute zero and can be in at least two places at once. As far as I’m concerned, they can do whatever they
want.”

“Well, keep us informed. I don’t want to become
Schrödinger’s Cat.” Ace snapped to the others. “OK, it’s time to shut up, dump these robes, and take out some human
garbage.”

She was running down the hall before her robe had floated to the floor. Joan of Arc’s sword was hanging from her belt, the wrist rocket was snapped out into full action mode, and her free hand flew as she checked her hidden
weapons.

Carlos motioned for Steve to move back out of the way and performed the wild flapping transition into his monstrous alter ego. Steve could see why he wanted to go first; he filled the corridor from wall to wall. In seconds, the enormous animal had caught up and was running right behind Ace, hooves pounding on the rocky floor. Steve propped the phone so the lens stuck out above the lip
of his breast pocket and followed at a fast
walk.

There were a number of turns, as if this corridor had been built as a place for a last-ditch defense. It wasn’t
working.

Twice, Steve came around a blind corner to find
an Illuminatus on the floor–unconscious or dead. Ace and the
cadejo
had taken them out without even slowing down. Steve got to the last turn just in time to see the two reach the end of the corridor
and fling themselves through a door on the
right.

When he reached the door, he stopped, transfixed by a scene far worse than he’d ever imagined. He was standing at the entrance to
a
hall
that
had
been
carved
from
a
natural
cavern
in
the
white quartz. It had been painted in garish reds, blues, and purples with touches of gold leaf sparkling in the light of a ring of torches set into the stone floor at the
center.

Outside the torches lay thirteen naked bodies. Ranging from small children to a man whose wrinkled skin placed him well over seventy; the bodies had been placed so that they lay on their backs with their feet toward the center. Small channels were cut in the rock and they gleamed where blood had flowed from deep cuts on the victims’ wrists and ankles. Their throats had been cut so deeply that in several cases, the weight of the head had pulled the gash open, and Steve could see the white of vertebrae. He shuddered
and gasped as he struggled to keep the camera aimed at the carnage while he fought down wave after wave of
nausea.

The stone channels converged in an enormous bowl carved deep into the rock. It should have been filled with the blood of the victims, but all that was left were large, long streak marks. After a minute’s thought, Steve realized the marks were where a tongue at least a foot wide had missed a few drops of its
meal.

He instantly lost his battle against
nausea.

When he could stand upright again, he could see that the faces of the sacrifices had frozen into expressions of exquisite horror. At first, he thought that tears still ran down their cooling cheeks. He gave a sudden gasping sob when he realized that the watery ooze smeared and dripping from their faces was residue from the pits where their eyes had been. Steve could only guess that the last scene they witnessed had caused their eyes to burst like overripe tomatoes.

Just past the torches, the hoofed dog was howling as it pursued two men in robes who were attempting to climb one of the pillars of stone that held up the ceiling. As Steve watched, Carlos caught the lower man’s pant leg with his teeth and pulled. With a scream, the acolyte dragged his companion down with him. The enormous dog broke the initiate’s spine with a whiplash of his entire body like a terrier with a rat, threw the men to the floor, and the massive hoofs began to pound.

On the opposite wall, two more of the robed followers had collided as they simultaneously attempted to exit through a narrow wooden door. Ace, moving at full speed right behind them, launched herself into the air, and hit the door with both booted feet. The men staggered back into the central chamber–one left his right arm on the other side of the closed
door.

Ace considered the one-armed man and pulled the sword from her belt. “Not that you deserve it, but this is compassion,” she said. “You’re already going to bleed out, I’ll just make it a quick death.” Then she drove him into a corner, ran him through the gut, and put two of her knives into his
eyes.

The last Illuminatus fell to his knees, hands clasped, and begged for his life. Ace gave him a measuring look, and then hit the centers of the large muscles on his arms and legs with four well-placed slingshot pellets. He screamed and fell to the stone floor, effectively
paralyzed.

She walked over, turned his head so he could see the
sacrificial victims, and said calmly, “The Bible
says,
‘For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no
mercy.’”

Then she stood up and said to Steve, “I do hope that you’re
not having any moral qualms about eliminating these
bastards.”

Steve just shook his head, unable to speak, and then both of them turned to watch Carlos. It was clear that his monster persona wasn’t conflicted by the slightest reluctance to kill. Steve wondered how much this differed from his drug lord persona. In the end, the
cadejo
turned and used his rear feet to kick what was left of the two men in an arc that passed above the torches and the horrible central bowl and smashed into the opposite wall. His eyes still gleamed with rage, but he shook his head as if to clear it, stamped his hoofs in a vain attempt to clean them, and walked to where Steve and Ace were standing.

Send Money vibrated. When Steve pulled him out of his pocket, he could see a single symbol on the
screen.

義
.

As he watched, it
changed.

Barnaby’s voice came from the speaker. “It probably is
justice, my little Chinese friend, but remember what a great American once said: ‘It is hard to tell where justice leaves off and vengeance
begins.’”

“A great American?” Steve said.
“Who?”

“Chuck Jones, the man who did all the Bugs Bunny cartoons,” Barnaby said. “Now, let’s see if we can find out what this was all about. Steve, Ace did a superb job as bad cop; could you play good cop?”

Steve went over and knelt by the man who was still groaning and writhing in pain. Steve had a suspicion that the man had already realized that his injuries might not be fatal. There was just
a bit too much drama in his
anguish.

Steve brought the Fool card to the forefront of his mind. Once again, the pack had changed and this image was of a tall man with some sort of rattle playing gently with two children. Steve concentrated on the object in the Fool’s hand and decided it was a toy, a source of soothing comfort. He
Studied
the object and felt the familiar pain rip down his arm and deep into the pit of his stomach.

When he’d caught his breath, he placed his hands on the acolyte, a golden glow spread like a thick liquid, strongly reminding Steve of maple syrup on pancakes. The man’s agony seemed to recede and his eyes locked on Steve as the spell spread to his
legs.

“Feel better?” Steve
asked.

The relaxation of the man’s facial muscles indicated that he did, but he remained
silent.

“Thought that might help. I’d give you a cigarette if I had
one. Seems
traditional.”

The man looked
disappointed.

“Yeah, I guess if you’ve been alive since tobacco came to Europe, all of today’s frenzy about no smoking must seem silly. Let’s just try to make the best of it, OK?” Steve took a deep breath and forced a smile. “You know, I can tell that you weren’t one of the ringleaders of all this. You’re just not that evil; I can see it in your
eyes.”

Steve carefully pulled the robe aside and placed his hands on the man’s bare chest. “Your heart is untainted as well.” In fact, Steve was picking up a small thread and then a flooding wash of the acolyte’s thoughts–a dreadful unfolding of this twisted and vengeful little man’s centuries of petty crimes, reprisals for perceived slights, and knives slipped between ribs in the dark of night. It was like biting into an apple and finding not one worm but hundreds spilling out of the
center.

Steve bit his lip to help hide his revulsion. “So, what were
your bosses doing here? They forced you to participate; I can tell. Tell me about it and I’ll make sure you’re treated like a hero when they’re finally
caught.”

In the noisome miasma of thought that was now flowing into him at full force, Steve could feel a furtive slyness as the man sensed a chance for
survival.

“Let’s start with something easy.” Steve took a deep breath and began. “What’s your
name?”

In a soft voice, the man answered. “Frank Zwack.”

“‘Zwack’?”
Steve
chuckled.
“My,
you
must
have
had
a
hard time in school with that
name.”