"Don't do it there. I'll dispatch a meat wagon to your location, so we can bring them back to headquarters for a complete a.n.a.lysis. I want to go over those corpses with a microscope. Your a.s.signment is to make sure they get here."

"Yes, ma'am," Aaron said. "What about Marina?"

"Find an ambulance," Ethel said. "Have her taken to the nearest hospital. We'll pick her up after she recovers. Don't disappoint me again." She hung up.

He closed his phone and put it away. "Did you hear?"

Smythe nodded. "Every word. She's a tough boss."

Aaron gently stripped off Marina's weapons and body armor and left them on the ground. He picked her up. She was soft and vulnerable in his arms.

He carried her towards the burning house while Smythe walked beside him.

"How do you want to play this?" Smythe said.

"Simple," Aaron said. "We're dressed as FBI agents. These hick cops better stay out of our way."

"In other words, act like a.s.sholes."

"Exactly."

A fire engine was parked on the driveway. Several firemen held hoses and were spraying water onto the house. The structure was a total loss, but they were making sure the fire didn't spread to the nearby trees.

Meanwhile, sheriff's deputies were inspecting the surrounding area. They had already marked the storage shed with yellow police tape.

Aaron spotted an ambulance behind the fire truck. "Hey!" he yelled. "We have a hurt woman! Stretcher!"

Two paramedics grabbed a stretcher and ran over. He carefully transferred Marina.

"She has a head injury," he told them. "Get her to an emergency room!"

The paramedics carried her off. He sighed with relief. She'll get proper treatment now, he thought.

Two deputies came over. The older one had a name tag that read "Sgt. London." Thin wisps of brown hair lay across the top of his round head. His mustache was trimmed straight across on the bottom.

"Who are you?" London asked.

Aaron took out his wallet and showed his FBI identification. It was indistinguishable from the real thing. The Gray Spear Society prided itself on the impeccable quality of its forged credentials.

"This is an FBI operation," Aaron said. "Make sure your people don't touch a thing."

"What kind of operation?"

"The keep your f.u.c.king nose out of FBI business kind! You want to make yourself useful? Set up a perimeter. I don't want any civilians wandering into my crime scene and touching my evidence."

London stood in place and scowled.

"Is there a problem with your hearing, sergeant?" Aaron said. "I thought I made myself very clear. If you want, I can call the Bureau in Washington."

London muttered something foul and walked off.

For the next twenty minutes, Aaron and Smythe did their best to protect the dead bodies from evidence contamination. The deputies stayed out of the way, so the task wasn't hard.

Finally, the "meat wagon" arrived. It was a gray van with the word "CORONER" painted on the side in white letters. Aaron expected that the driver actually worked for the county corner, but he was also on the Society's payroll. Making dead bodies disappear was a recurring problem.

Aaron helped the driver load all the dead Eternals onto gurneys. One body was in the shed and another was in the woods. The last two in the truck were completely burned, but they were taken away regardless. Any kind of evidence was potentially useful.

Sergeant London rushed over. "What are you doing?"

"What does it look like?" Aaron said.

"You have to take pictures. You have to doc.u.ment the crime scene."

"These stiffs are all the doc.u.mentation I need."

London frowned.

Aaron wished Marina were here. She was the professional liar.

"You're really chapping my a.s.s," he said. "What's your full name?"

"Jeffery London."

"Hold on." Aaron called Ethel, and she picked up immediately. "I'm having a problem."

"Oh?" she said.

"A deputy named Sergeant Jeffery London."

"I'll take care of it."

"Thank you." He hung up.

Aaron stood with his arms crossed and stared at London. The sergeant stared back with a stubborn expression on his face.

A few minutes later London received a call on his own phone. "h.e.l.lo?" he said. "Oh. Yes, sir. I was just... No, sir. No. Absolutely not." He put away his phone, shot a final angry glare at Aaron, and walked off.

Smythe came over and whispered, "Who called him?"

"I don't know." Aaron shrugged. "It doesn't matter. The sergeant won't annoy us again."

They finished securing the dead bodies in the coroner's van. Then, drooping with weariness, Aaron and Smythe walked away.

Aaron looked at the corpses on the floor. Two were in good condition, but the other two looked and smelled like burnt meat. They were laid out on a plastic sheet in the workout room because it was the biggest s.p.a.ce available in headquarters. The entire team had gathered near the remains, except for Marina.

He noticed her absence every time he looked around. The latest word was that she had regained consciousness and was stable. He wished he could be with her.

Ethel crouched over one of the unburned corpses with a pair of scissors in her hand, and she began to cut off the black robes. "Every body tells a tale," she said. "We cover ourselves with clothes to hide our secrets."

She peeled back the robes to reveal a thin man with very short, brown hair. He wore a military radio headset under his hood.

"We begin with the skin," she said. "It's so pale you can count every vein. Sunlight rarely touched it. Even the face and forearms are like ivory, which is very unusual. This man only went out at night. I judge his age to be around twenty. The young make better warriors because they believe they're immortal."

She examined his hands. "Scarred knuckles. Calloused palms. The fingernails are trimmed and even. Attention to personal hygiene is a sign of discipline. This man is not a street thug. The fingertips are stained." She looked into his mouth. "But he doesn't smoke. Interesting. Drugs?"

She stood up. "Note how the abdominal muscles are taught and very lean. He exercised too much and ate too little. All his body hair is shaved off. He tried to cleanse his soul by cleansing his skin." She snipped off his underwear. "The pubic hair is gone, too."

"Ah." She studied his left arm. "Old needle marks. He used heroin but not recently. Perhaps the Order of Eternal Night cured him of a drug addiction." She rolled him onto his side. "A pattern of light scars on his back. He was whipped like a slave. The s.p.a.cing of the marks indicates an expert delivered the punishment. Tragic. No tattoos, though, so he was never in a gang."

She searched his robes and placed what she found on the floor. There were three knives, which she handled gingerly. The blades were covered with a thin layer of a green, pasty substance. She discovered a length of piano wire with a wooden handle at each end.

"A garrote," she said. "How quaint."

She found one hundred dollars in the form of crisp, new twenties. A hidden pocket contained a packet of a.s.sorted pills, and she gave these to Ramirez for a.n.a.lysis. There was also a cell phone, which she gave to Edward.

"No identification," Ethel said. "Not even a credit card. An anonymous a.s.sa.s.sin. Edward, be careful with that phone. It's probably b.o.o.by trapped."

He nodded.

"Did anybody else notice anything?" she asked.

"Let me see that headset, ma'am," Smythe said.

She slipped the headset off the dead man's head. A wire connected it to an a.s.sembly on his belt, and she gave both items to Smythe. He examined the components closely.

"This is real military gear," he said. "Digital, encrypted communication. Very high end. Not sold to civilians. I bet the manufacturer can look up the serial number and tell us who paid for it."

Ethel looked at Edward. "Well?"

"It's a good idea, ma'am," he said. "I'll get the information."

She turned her attention to the other corpses and went through a similar examination, but there were no more revelations.

Finally, she stood up and said, "We're done for now. Leave the bodies here. Everybody is dismissed."

The team quickly dispersed.

Smythe stayed with Aaron and asked, "Hungry?"

"Very," Aaron said. His body clock was so screwed up by a lack of sleep that he didn't know whether it was breakfast, lunch, or dinner time, but it was definitely time to eat.

They went to the kitchen. It was a large room with a white tiled floor. Granite counters and wooden cabinetry ran the length of three walls. There was a gla.s.s table in the center, which was big enough to seat the entire team. A pair of oversized, stainless steel refrigerators held enough food to withstand a siege.

Aaron opened a fridge and found a baking dish full of lasagna. "Hot or cold?"

"I don't care," Smythe said.

Aaron served up a large slab of cold lasagna for himself and another for Smythe. Aaron took a bite and smiled. Even chilled it tasted delicious.

"This is very good," Smythe said after he tasted the lasagna.

"Yvonne does the cooking and housekeeping around here. But don't think of her as just a maid. She was a legionnaire like us, once. A great one, I'm told."

"What happened?"

Aaron shrugged. "I never got the story. All I know is one of her missions went very wrong. Now Jack has to escort her whenever she goes outside. She jumps at her own shadow."

"That's rough." Smythe shook his head. "It sounds like your missions can get pretty crazy. How does this one rank so far?"

"Technically, we're not on a mission. We're just investigating. We don't have proof the enemies of G.o.d are involved, so we may not be able to do anything."

"But the Eternals are a.s.sa.s.sins. They murder people."

"Not our problem. We're not cops."

Smythe frowned. "We could at least notify the authorities."

"Maybe," Aaron said, "with Ethel's permission, of course."

"What if it turns out the 'enemies of G.o.d' are responsible?"

"Then we'll wipe out the Eternals down to the last man, and we'll destroy all evidence of their existence. We'll try to restore the Earth to a pristine condition. But back to your original question, I'd say this a.s.signment is par for the course, so far. I could tell you about my first mission."

"Please." Smythe took another bite of lasagna.

"It was another cult. They had the bright idea of starting a world war."

"Why?"

"To make the world a better place."

"That's insane."

"Yes." Aaron nodded. "They filled two ships with thousands of pounds of high explosives. They planned to blow up Navy Pier on the Fourth of July. It's hard to estimate how many people would've died."

Smythe's eyes widened. "I never heard anything about that."

"Right, because we did our job."

"Just you, Marina, and Ethel?"

"There was another legionnaire," Aaron said. "A man named Victor. He was killed."

"Oh," Smythe said. "Was he a good man?"

"I never really got to know him. He wasn't well liked though."