006 was seething, and utterly baffled. "The evil in my heart? I never did a damn thing to that woman—whatever her problem was. How does that make me evil?"
"That's what I think. That's what you think. But she didn't see it that way." Bella set the blue box down and sighed. "And neither did… him."
"This time the altered zone was small. Fewer than ten people were affected—the object can't hold more than that much sin. My guess is he was running an experiment." She paused. "Going by their beliefs… I suppose this was their idea of building paradise on earth."
She'd deliberately left out the word angel—no point giving 006 something else to spiral over.
Bella crushed the blue box in her palm without looking at it. The thing had no purpose beyond containing human sin. But if every trace of darkness were stripped from a person's heart, replaced entirely by goodness—would they even still be human?
Castiel's plan was elegant in theory. He'd used Diane as his entry point, placing her at the center and gradually drawing out the darkness from everyone around her, one thread at a time. The idea was to start from one person and spread outward.
But it was never going to work. You couldn't engineer paradise through human nature—Diane had been swallowed whole by her own delusions before the plan even had a chance to breathe. Whether or not the Phoenix had intervened, the whole scheme had been dead on arrival.
Naive. Bella thought very little of Castiel.
"Paradise on earth." 006 stared at her. The words felt like they belonged to a completely different universe than the one he lived in. He pressed his jaw tight and asked what he'd been needing to ask. "Why me? Why target me? Does building this paradise require taking me out? Is that it—knock me off and suddenly the Kingdom of Heaven switches on?!"
His voice climbed until the last words came out as a shout.
This had been too much. The humiliation burned in his chest, and he had no way to vent it.
Bella understood. She would've been just as furious.
She gave it to him straight. "The one pulling the strings behind all of this was an angel. If the name I heard is right, Castiel is the Shield of God—he's one of the Powers." She pointed at him. "As for why you specifically? My analysis is… it's your number."
006 said nothing, waiting. He wanted to hear what possible connection existed between his codename and some divine creature.
"In the Bible, seven represents absolute perfection—God created the world in seven days. Six is the opposite. Absolute imperfection. If you ever see someone on the street screaming '666,' walk the other way—because 666 represents the ultimate evil of mankind. The deceiver. Satan himself. The Antichrist."
Bella had the citations ready. "Revelation 13:18 spells it out directly: 'Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.'"
006's mouth had fallen open. He looked like he could fit an egg in there.
He had, at last, found the reason for his rotten luck.
Bella spread her hands. "You haven't hit three sixes—but in an angel's eyes, you're already marked as deeply corrupt. When Diane decided to come after you, that good angel didn't lift a finger to stop her." She let that sit a moment, then continued. "If you think back carefully, you'll notice 007 has always had considerably better luck than you. And your predecessors—the previous 006s—most of them died on bizarre, low-stakes missions. The jobs involving anything related to Christianity probably account for the overwhelming majority. The fact that Britain eventually retired the 006 designation and committed to 007 likely had similar reasoning behind it."
006 stood there, slack-jawed. So that was it.
The supernatural world was genuinely terrifying. If he was being honest, the older he got, the more it unsettled him—all these things he couldn't understand, couldn't predict, couldn't fight. When he was young, he'd have thrown a punch at God himself if given the chance. That temper had long since cooled. The deeper he stepped into this world, the smaller he felt.
He'd gone in hoping to secure ancient Templar relics and find some fragment of supernatural power. Now he was just afraid.
Bella hadn't said it outright, but he'd gotten the message clearly enough. He understood his place in this picture.
Even the name "Templar Order" suggested ties to angels, to the Church, to all of this. The thought alone made his skin crawl. If one washed-up actress with a grudge could wreck him this badly, what was he doing tangling with organizations like that? Compared to Diane and her petty, vindictive nature, Bella was practically a saint.
She'd saved him. He returned the favor in kind.
"There's something I want to bring to your attention," he said. "I know a historian. His name is Ben Gates."
He laid out everything—his connection to Gates, his original reasons for pursuing the man—though he left out his own earlier ambitions. Bella pretended not to notice the omission.
006 was done with the supernatural. He was also, incidentally, out of money.
"The Charlotte? A shipwreck lost somewhere in the Arctic?" Bella turned the National Treasure leads over in her mind. Ben Gates himself was optional—but the wreck was a necessary piece of the puzzle.
Still, there was no reason to spend years funding an expensive archaeological expedition. The Brotherhood's coffers weren't deep enough, and she wasn't about to throw Weyland's money at it.
She extended her right hand, right there in front of 006, and began her divination.
Divination wasn't prophecy—it was a magical method of reading the truth already embedded in the world. Her ability had limits. She couldn't divine from nothing. Time, place, subject—she needed an anchor, a point of entry, before her power could reach outward and interpret what it found.
With nothing to work from, all she'd see was a blank.
Using 006 as her anchor, she pushed her psionic energy into the reading. Pale threads of light drifted up and began to move through the air. Symbols representing the occult sciences appeared, overlapping and colliding, and Bella sorted through them one by one, narrowing the field.
006 had seen her cast before, but never at this range. He watched the incomprehensible symbols rise and spin around her. Some were completely alien to him. Others—and this was stranger—sparked something in the back of his mind. A familiarity he couldn't explain, as if he'd seen them before, though he was certain he hadn't. The feeling vanished each time a new symbol appeared, and the constant cycle of recognition and loss left him dizzy and disoriented.
The reading ended quickly. Bella picked up a map and marked several red dots on the Atlantic, in the sea north of Greenland. Then she signed a blank check—ten million dollars—and handed both to 006.
It was a lot of money, in theory. Thrown at a polar expedition, it was a drop in the ocean. But with the search area narrowed this far, it would be enough.