What Would Satan Do_ - Anthony Miller [38]
Outside, sitting in a cab on Pennsylvania Avenue, Clyde Parker waited. The wad of twenties he’d handed to the cab driver had not, at first, been enough to persuade the man to stay put in the face of all of the fiery unpleasantness happening back at the Hoover Building. The man had driven almost a block before Parker had managed to extract a small revolver from his boot. Now Parker peered through the rear window of the car, watching as a handful of conspicuously non-descript cars roared up, surrounding the orange Lamborghini, and a phalanx of uniformed and plain-clothes men, all carrying firearms, formed a perimeter. He watched as the men pointed and waved their hands and talked into walkie-talkies as more government cars arrived. Finally, an extraordinarily tall man came out of the building’s main entrance.
“Would you look at that?” whispered Parker. “Another goddamned angel!”
That angel, who appeared to be carrying a sack of some sort, paused just outside the entryway with his enormous wings fanned out, and surveyed the scene.
Parker saw one of the angel’s wings shudder and recoil an instant before he heard the loud popping noise that he recognized as the sound of a revolver. He didn’t see what happened next because there was a blinding explosion of light, like a flashbulb on steroids. He turned away involuntarily, shielding his face.
When he opened his eyes again, everyone had disappeared. There had been, he estimated, at least twenty agents. He scanned the scene, but they were all gone. All of them. And the cars were toppled all over the place like toys tossed by a giant toddler. Except for the orange Lamborghini. The angel was gone, too.
He watched as a man – he looked like the same man in the suit from before – climbed in to the brightly-hued automobile. Seconds later, he heard the furious sound of the car’s engine howling and screaming its way back to life. The car lurched, its rear end drifting slightly to the side as its tires smoked and screamed before finally catching and catapulting the vehicle forward.
“There!” he said. He waved his gun at the rapidly-receding sports car. “Turn the car around!” He smacked the cab driver. “Go! Now! Follow him!” The cab driver turned the car, hitting the curb before tearing down Pennsylvania Avenue after the Lamborghini.
Chapter 14. Wanted: Antichrist
Bill Cadmon sat in his office in the bowels of the Driftwood Fellowship Church and worried. It was an unpleasant sensation – one he usually dispensed with by assuring himself that God would simply work things out. But that approach wasn’t available this time. In fact, that was the problem. God was relying on him to handle the situation. Technically, it was Ezekiel – the weirdo dumbass angel – who had asked Cadmon to find an antichrist, but then he supposed that the angel was doing God’s work.
It was a strange deal. Cadmon liked to talk about doing God’s work on Earth, but now he felt like he’d been asked to do God’s job. It was like a parent calling up their college student and saying, “We need you to send us rent money this month.” It made his brain hurt.
He leaned back in his over-priced ergonomic chair and sighed at his three-panel computer display. Three screens is a lot when you need your secretary’s help just to turn the computer on, but Cadmon had the money, and he liked nice things.
He let out a quiet groan, and then turned, calling out to his secretary over his shoulder. “Janie!”
He’d hired Janie because she was a good Christian girl and because she knew exactly how to turn on his computer. It had absolutely nothing to do with the numbers 36-26-36 or Janie’s habit of wearing short skirts. The same was true of Laura, who handled the mail room. And Stephanie, who did all his PR. And Danielle, the girl who backed up Janie when the computer turning on got tough. Cadmon couldn’t help it if the most talented candidates always seemed to look like supermodels. The Lord works in mysterious ways.
Janie came in, and Cadmon said a little prayer of thanks for nice bottoms, but then sat forward, all business.