by T D Raufson
She forced herself to recover from the surprise and realized she really needed to leave. Jaeger was staring at her from behind his desk where he was crouched on the floor. Good, the coward needed to be hiding behind his desk. He was lucky she didn’t have time to send a present his way. She did look back at him and pointed with an evil grin. He ducked below the desk, and the comforting sound and aroma of his urine running out onto the floor satisfied her. She walked through the broken wall past the two men and a room full of shocked watchers.
Odd time for spells like that to start working, but it was her day after all. Maybe this was the direction she needed to be heading anyway. Something more was happening than what she had expected. First, her allure spell had caused women to hate her, and now bolts of energy were rushing from her fingers at her command. There was little doubt that she would need to find a new job, but before she could do that she would have to figure out why spells she had cast her whole life with no effect were suddenly twice as powerful and blowing people through walls. That might open several doors, literally.
She exited the shattered work area and walked toward the receptionist’s desk on her way out. There was no other exit, and she was not hanging around. When she reached the front, the young receptionist was looking at her with her finger on the speaker in her ear. It was obvious from the look on her face that she didn’t like Rebekka anymore either. Jaeger’s boss was standing next to his wife with an unbelieving look on his face. His wife looked at her with a mixed expression of hatred and fear. Rebekka smiled and shook her finger at them all. The two women jumped, and the older man looked like he wanted to melt into the floor. With a giggle of excitement, she recited her favorite phrase again. This time she could feel the power build with each word. At the crucial moment, she was careful to hold back the power a little and pointed at his crotch. A little tickle coincided with the blue streak that struck him and bent him over next to his wife. She didn’t wait to watch the reaction.
Rebekka turned her back on them and walked out the door into the foyer to wait for an elevator. So far, no one was coming after her, but that would not last. She had broken the law. She couldn’t take it back now. How could she defend what she did? She couldn’t just tell them she had cast that spell hundreds of times but today, it worked.
She giggled hysterically at that idea. How could she possibly explain what had just happened? How could anyone? Her hands started shaking, and her knees followed. She needed to get out of the building and find a safe place to sit down before she fell down. By now someone was calling the police. The next elevator to open on the floor could be full of security and then she would have to do something worse than she had already done. Could she escalate? Could she attack the police?
The elevator was taking too long. She looked toward the door to the stairs and cringed at the walk down, but felt it might be safer. She turned toward the stairs as the elevator dinged. It was too late to run now. She turned back and braced for a rush of security officers preparing the spell she had used twice already. A woman from a higher floor was standing in the car looking at her with an open look of disgust.
Great, Rebekka thought, another angry woman.
She hesitated a moment recovering from the absence of an attack, walked into the car and hit a button for the main floor. For a moment, she thought the woman had growled at her. She laughed aloud at the absurdity of the situation. At least the car was not full of security guards or police.
As they descended in silence, she thought about what to do now. She obviously had no job. They might have changed their mind about paying her to the end of the next month, too. She couldn’t be sure it was safe to go home.
Her nerves didn’t improve on the trip down. When the elevator stopped at the other woman’s floor, Rebekka waited for her to exit, punched the first floor button and jumped back against the rail in the back of the elevator. She was alone and her shakes turned to tears. As they formed and she felt her emotions rising to overcome her she inhaled sharply, voiced her little confidence spell and fought them back. She was not going to be weak like those men and women wanted her to be.
She could hear her mother in her head telling her that using magic came with responsibility. She and her grandmother had lectured her about the power of magic and how important it was to respect it. They believed it had always existed and still worked in small ways. She remembered the lesson now; respect the power in its small form so when it returned she would be able to handle it. Obviously, she had failed to learn that lesson, but she was starting to understand it now.
The door opened again, and she held her place at the back of the car. She had no idea if security was waiting for her on the ground floor. As the doors parted, a cluster of men looked into the empty car at her. None of them were security, and they all looked like she was holding them up. One of them exhaled and shifted to enter the car. She released the rail and walked past them, trying to look as calm and confident as she could. The man who had started to enter gave her an angry scowl. She scowled back, refusing to give ground. She didn’t stop once she was heading toward the front door. She cleared the entrance and walked with purpose down the street, but she refused to run, no matter how much her fear was screaming at her. She was two blocks away before she stopped to look at the first newspapers she had cared to see that day, her day.
Normally she would have read the paper on the way to work, but she had been caught up in what was going to happen. The picture on the front was impossible. It looked like a scene from a movie so much that she checked the banner on the paper again. She dropped change onto the stack, took one off the top and walked toward the metro where she could sit for a while and read.
As she skimmed the article, she understood why no one had called the police. If the seemingly impossible scene on the front of the paper and the other stories were true, or if everyone at work had read them, she would be just another impossible event that no one knew how to handle. Her grandmother’s belief, that magic would return some day, was right. All of those spells she had told her about, the ones that filled the grimoire she had received when she had joined the coven as a teenager were real. Rebekka paused.
So, how could she use this to her advantage? She needed a job. She laughed at that idea, what she really needed was a kingdom. She needed a way to turn her abilities to her advantage. She needed a way to stop working so hard. She continued to giggle like the little girl she had been when she realized her mother and grandmother were witches. Their powers were weak, but she would be much stronger. The days of spells being gentle nudges to reality were over. The age of the witch was here again.
She looked up and noticed where she was on the metro map. She hadn’t realized where she was subconsciously heading but it made sense. Powerful people congregated in a few places in every city. She wanted the internationally strong. The business centers where the conferences met would give her access to some of the most powerful people in the country. Once she was in that group, she could move up. Now, all she had to do was get that grimoire and get better at what she already knew. For a moment she wondered how long this would last, and then she shook off the doubt and waited for her transfer point. Today was her day. Tomorrow would take care of itself. She was taking advantage of what came her way. If everything changed back tomorrow, she would figure out what to do then, but that would be on someone else’s day.
June 21 – 0550 EDT – Langley, Virginia
Silas keyed into his office with a rapid tattoo of numbers on the keypad. As his fingers flew across it, he glanced around, aware of any observers in the dimly lit basement hallway. Although the code had changed every week since he had moved into the office four years ago, he had no need to look at the keypad. He had not been born with the deep distrust of other human beings. That he had cultivated with the help of his father, grandfather, and several key members of the Milli Istihbarat Teskilati. Now, distrust was as close to him as a twin brother.
The buzz-click of the lock grated his nerv
es. To trust lock-work to electronics was a mistake. He had told them that when he first moved into his cell at Langley, and then proved his point by disabling the electronic lock with his pocketknife. To be fair, his pocketknife was special, but locks should not be that easy to defeat, especially at the main office of the Central Intelligence Agency.
He turned the handle and walked into the small office, which he used to comfort himself through his exile. The back wall was blank with only a picture of his parents’ property in Maine. The wall on the left side of his desk contained a glass shelf filled with puzzle boxes collected from all over the world. Among them were a myriad of closed metal polyhedrons that looked alien among the other opened wooden and stone puzzles. Two, on the lowest shelf, had wicked looking blades sticking out in all directions, mocking his failure. He would solve those one day. He certainly had enough time on his hands each day waiting on the call that would never come. Although his new duties at the agency were consultation and training, he had done very little of either since his old college friend had won the election. Who would have ever guessed that knowing the President of the United States could damage a career?
Each day Silas had to remind himself of the secret truth about his reassignment. They had talked about it before the election. It made sense to have someone she could trust standing by to help with any sticky problems that may come up. Now all Silas had to do was live through the ninety-nine-percent of dull waiting for the one-percent excitement. It had been an amazingly quiet four years. In a few more months, once the election was over, either his sentence would continue or he would be released and allowed to return to Turkey or somewhere else that didn’t have basements. Some days it was enough to make him consider changing his vote.
The rest of the agency could never know about the secret line to the White House. They could never suspect he was under cover. He had to look like a disgraced field agent, one put out to pasture in the early years of his career waiting on retirement and just holding on, somehow, against the merciless budget knife. It was tough to look like a failed agent while remaining ever vigilant, but that was what undercover work was all about.
Each day he scanned his office for any sign that he had been compromised. The most rudimentary of his signals was broken so whoever had entered his office was a novice. Silas felt his hackles rise as he quickly scanned the room. His eyes paused for a moment on the only award he felt he had ever really earned. The third place trophy from the International Snipers Competition, perched on a small glass shelf by the door, had earned a place of honor on his wall where he could see it all day. The event had been early in his career at the agency, and he would never forget the grueling training that led up to it. No other event or mission had challenged or taught him more. The award reminded him that he could accomplish anything. In a way, he was proving that with this mission every day. This was no weather swept pinnacle where he watched secluded from view for his target, enduring days of solitude while waiting for the word. No, the weather here was a little nicer.
Silas finished his scan by returning to the most obvious evidence someone had been in his office. A single box sat on his desk that had not been there when he left the day before. The irritating box reminded him of the insanity of requiring locked doors then giving everyone keys. He took a moment longer to reassure himself that the box was all they had left and then stepped into the room. The door closed behind him with a reassuring click.
He took out his pocketknife and turned the box around gently with the unopened implement. The label on the box made him smile and relax a little. The address was handwritten in a very pretty Abjad that he recognized as the handwriting of a dark-haired angel in Istanbul who sat at the front desk of Akil’s small import-export business. Silas opened the thin blade on the knife while enjoying memories of his friend and brother.
He had met the slender Arab in a musty storehouse full of stolen Persian artifacts. As he recalled, neither of them really cared about anything in the building. They were both looking for a secret passage that, according to a family legend, led to something far more important, something hidden by the Folkvardr, their shared ancient lineage. After several attempts to fool each other, they finally figured out, mostly by mistake, that they shared the lineage they were trying to track down. Together they found the first and most dangerous of the polyhedrons on Silas’ wall. He stole a quick glance at the menacing little puzzle box on the bottom shelf with blades sticking out all around it and grinned at the shared memory.
He and Akil had designed the matching set of pocketknives after nearly killing themselves with that puzzle. There were only two in the world. They looked like any number of Swiss-style knives, but they had a full set of lock picks and other useful tools secreted among the blades.
The spicy aroma of the packaging and the handwriting on the label diverted Silas’ thoughts from his clansman to the most perfect woman in his memories. He could never forget the smooth creamed-coffee color of her satiny skin and one hot night in June. It had been too long since he had seen Dalal and enjoyed a good cup of coffee that she made in the very old Turkish cezve. The memory of sitting among dusty exports in his friend’s warehouse smoking a pipe and sipping a good Turkish coffee was starting to dim. He needed to visit his old friend and the only woman Silas could ever really consider as more than a challenging puzzle to figure out and then place on his shelf.
He ran his fingers around the taped edges feeling for wires or other indications of an explosive. It was not that he didn’t trust Akil. In fact, he trusted him as much as he trusted anyone, but he could not afford to drop his guard. Silas still had enemies in the field, and being in a basement office in Langley, Virginia, made finding him too easy. He took a few more seconds to scan the box. Satisfied he was safe, he ran the blade under the tape that enclosed what had to be a new treasure from Akil.
The packaging, as always, was filled with crumpled newspaper, which he discarded into a drawer. He would read what Akil wanted him to know later. First, he had to see what the man had found. Nestled in the bottom, surrounded by packing foam, he found the prize—a dodecahedron with several interlocking metal plates on its surface. The metal of the puzzle box was tarnished but not rusted. It had aged well, but it was very old. With caution, he lifted it out by placing the creases of his fingers along the edge of two opposite sides. There was no way to know what would set off the trap mechanism in the package, but he had learned over time that the edges were usually safe to hold when carrying them. Uneven pressure on any one side could set off the trap and take the hand. He gingerly placed the new prize on the blotter on his desk and stepped back to look at it.
As always, there was no writing on the outside. There was never any indication there was anything inside of the puzzle box. Silas could not prove, even through years of trying to open the menacing little things, that there was anything in them. But he knew from stories that never should have existed that the Folkvardr had often hidden important treasures in this form of puzzle box. Ask anyone else, and neither the Folkvardr nor the treasures ever existed, and that was how Silas wanted to keep it.
He looked at his watch. Although the offices around him would all be filling up over the next few hours, it would be unlikely he would have any visitors before noon. If everything remained the same, he would not have a visitor at all today. Why not see if he could find the secret of his new puzzle?
Although the pocketknife was an acceptable tool in a pinch and was always his first choice, this work would require his full kit. From his key ring, he selected a small nickel-plated box. He opened the box and removed a delicate key that looked like three very thin toothpicks with fine hairs lining both sides of the blades. He inserted this key into the lock on his desk drawer and turned it. The reassuring click of real security thrilled him and with a fleeting thought of thanks, he put the gnome key back into its case. As a final show of respect, he ran his thumb across the raised rune on the lid of the key box.
From the side drawer he pu
lled a battered leather roll. The leather had been around for generations and had that warm beaten feeling he loved. It still smelled of leather and oil, which spoke to the respect the men who had owned the kit had for it. A combination rune that looked like thurisaz struck through with a long diagonal stroke was tooled into the corner of the roll. The tooling had almost vanished back into the leather, but the lesson and matching tattoo that marked Silas as a member of the ancient protective brotherhood would never leave him. He ran his thumb across the symbol on the roll.
He opened the case and rolled out the covers to expose a collection of tools ranging from very fine to more coarse. Each tool had a place in the rolled pocket, and they decreased in size from the top. The ones he wanted were at the very bottom and were almost hair thin. In a small pocket, masterfully added to the kit by a later generation, he found a delicate pair of levered lenses attached to a bar with a nosepiece in the center.
He set the lenses on his nose and turned his attention to the puzzle box on his desk. Satisfied the space was workable, he sat down in the chair to focus on his prize. He selected several lenses, changing the magnification until he had them set just right. When he could see the space between the joined plates, he started studying how the thing worked. It was very intricate, and he had no idea how it had been made. No one had yet matched this level of machine miniaturization in the modern world, not even the very old Swiss watch on his wrist. Computer chips and electronics had surpassed this miniaturization but not physical machines. Cautiously he inserted a thin blade selected from several probes in the kit. The magnifiers made the tool look almost too big to fit into the tiny slot.