Epilogue AFTERMATH

THE DUSTUP IN THE SLEEPER’S MAUSOLEUM HAPPENED LAST month, but I’ve only been home for a couple of days. Mo was just about mad with worry when I rang the doorbell at seven o’clock, bleary-eyed and sweaty, straight off the red-eye from DC to Heathrow. Economy class, of course; it may be painful, but I’m not stupid—after the mission ends, it’s back to business as usual.

I slept for about six hours, ate, slept for about eighteen hours, and spent the next day in a zombie-like haze. Today’s the first day I’ve been sufficiently compos mentis to go back to the office. Lockhart, I gather, is chewing the carpet. (Good.)

You can blame the Black Chamber for the delay. Officious as any other component of the labyrinthine American secret state, they had to first satisfy themselves that I was not, in fact, an enemy agent. The carte blanche helped—or at least convinced them to make some phone calls first, rather than shooting me out of hand—but was not sufficient on its own to dig me out of the crater I had landed in. However, some pointed nagging from somewhere up the ladder at Dansey House—up the ladder from Angleton, I should add—eventually shook me loose.

Not that they were keeping me in twenty-four-hour lockdown in the brig at Quantico; I had my own private five-star hospital room to occupy while recovering from superficial burns and concussion, to say nothing of suspected neurological insults that required multiple appointments with an MRI machine to rule out Krantzberg syndrome.

Persephone and Johnny—if they survived—I don’t know about. They disappeared and the Nazgûl won’t tell me anything, and I wasn’t asking questions that might give away anything they’re not supposed to know I know. However, I’ve got some fragments, and I can speculate:

I can infer that Persephone did not do a runner, but in fact used the Hand of Glory to conceal her side-trip to Schiller’s vestry in the New Life Church, where she did her best to wreck the link between his pastor’s sacrifice of souls and the power source in the Temple of the Sleeper. Then she came back to rescue Johnny—and me.

Did she succeed? I don’t know. Like I said, she and Johnny disappeared while I was lying on my back in the vestry seeing stars.

I’m pretty certain that Persephone saw to it that Schiller didn’t make it out of the temple alive after he tried to sacrifice Johnny. She’s nothing if not possessive.

I’m pretty sure Schiller cut Johnny’s throat—I saw the blood. And the blood of two elders of the priesthood of the Sleeper were spilled upon the altar while it was hooked up to a grid powered by the prayers of thousands of god-raped worshippers. But the Sleeper—or Jesus, depending on which eschatology you choose to run with—did not clamber out of his sarcophagus and start rampaging across middle America. Maybe they got something wrong? Mind you, the tremors under the plateau suggest someone turning over in their sleep. The fimbulwinter that gripped central Colorado prior to Schiller’s summoning is very worrying, but the thaw afterwards suggests the information bleed between the walls of the worlds was staunched in time. Or at least prevented from turning into a flood.

Which finally brings me back to the present, and the inevitable fallout from the operation. Which, I gather, will involve a lot of committee meetings that I won’t trouble you with.