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“Ah,” said Crowley bitterly. “You mean none of this cheap, mass-produced murder? Just personal service, every bullet individually fired by skilled craftsmen?”
Aziraphale didn’t rise to it. “What are we going to do now?”
“Try and get some sleep.”
“You don’t need sleep. I don’t need sleep. Evil never sleeps, and Virtue is ever-vigilant.”
“Evil in general, maybe. This specific part of it has got into the habit of getting its head down occasionally.” He stared into the headlights. The time would come soon enough when sleep would be right out of the question. When those Below found out that he, personally, had lost the Antichrist, they’d probably dig out all those reports he’d done on the Spanish Inquisition and try them out on him, one at a time and then all together.
He rummaged in the glove compartment, fumbled a tape at random, and slotted it into the player. A little music would …
. . . Bee-elzebub has a devil put aside for me, for me …
“For me,” murmured Crowley. His expression went blank for a moment. Then he gave a strangled scream and wrenched at the on-off knob.
“Of course, we might be able to get a human to find him,” said Aziraphale thoughtfully.
“What?” said Crowley, distractedly.
“Humans are good at finding other humans. They’ve been doing it for thousands of years. And the child is human. As well as … you know. He would be hidden from us, but other humans might be able to … oh, sense him, perhaps. Or spot things we wouldn’t think of.”
“It wouldn’t work. He’s the Antichrist! He’s got this … sort of automatic defense, hasn’t he? Even if he doesn’t know it. It won’t even let people suspect him. Not yet. Not till it’s ready. Suspicion will slide off him like, like … whatever it is water slides off of,” he finished lamely.
“Got any better ideas? Got one single better idea?” said Aziraphale.
“No.”
“Right, then. It could work. Don’t tell me you haven’t got any front organizations you could use. I know I have. We could see if they can pick up the trail.”
“What could they do that we couldn’t do?”
“Well, for a start, they wouldn’t get people to shoot one another, they wouldn’t hypnoti
ze respectable women, they—”
“Okay. Okay. But it hasn’t got a snowball’s chance in Hell. Believe me, I know. But I can’t think of anything better.” Crowley turned onto the motorway and headed for London.
“I have a—a certain network of agents,” said Aziraphale, after a while. “Spread across the country. A disciplined force. I could set them searching.”
“I, er, have something similar,” Crowley admitted. “You know how it is, you never know when they might come in handy … ”
“We’d better alert them. Do you think they ought to work together?”
Crowley shook his head.
“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” he said. “They’re not very sophisticated, politically speaking.”
“Then we’ll each contact our own people and see what they can manage.”
“Got to be worth a try, I suppose,” said Crowley. “It’s not as if I haven’t got lots of other work to do, God knows.”
His forehead creased for a moment, and then he slapped the steering wheel triumphantly.
“Ducks!” he shouted.
“What?”
“That’s what water slides off!”
