What a load! The words tumbled over each other as the pressure that had built up over the past year burst forth like air from a balloon. By the time the last one left my lips, my heart was racing and my lungs were on fire. I wanted to take big gulps of air, but forced myself to breathe slow and deep so as not to seem too agitated. Of course it was too late for that.
BB answered me with silence, gray eyes peering into mine. It was unnerving as hell. He held my gaze for a full minute then dropped a bombshell: “You’re right.”
What? What? What?
Oh, wow. This is your brain; this is your brain when the world just became something other than what you thought it was. See the difference? My mind went to places better left unexplored. It was my turn to say, “What do you mean?”
“It means you’re right,” BB said, gray eyes grim. “After Omaha, I lost faith. When the public needed a face to go with the BSI, I gave them you because the publicity tours would occupy enough of your time that you couldn’t force your way back into the field. Then came that movie about your life and what happened in Denver and the publicity tour for that took another few months. All that plus Green Pea training ate every scrap of time you had for the past year and I was content to let it be so. That movie and those tours put Congress square in our pockets, so I was able to leverage the clout to keep the BSI running lean and mean. Expansion of our team roster was the only concession I had to make and it was a good one.
“It’s been a tumultuous year for you, for your family, and for the Bureau, I get that. The late-night talk shows, that ridiculous movie in which my character was played by Stanley Tucci, the whole lot. But as troublesome as the last year has been, as much as my headaches increased tenfold, nothing rattled my cage more than what you did in Omaha. I mean, I knew you were a bit unstable, fractious, headstrong, and wild sometimes … but to torture a man? That’s wrong no matter what the situation, Kal. It shook me because you are the best, and if the best of us goes off the rails, how long before more Bureau Agents follow your lead? They worship you, Kal, and word of what you did spread faster than influenza. And do you know the hell of it, Kal? The hell of it is that I understand why you did what you did. You did something that every one of us at the Bureau would love to have done, but it’s still wrong, and we have to be better than that. We must. Your example hurt us because no one blamed you, no one held you accountable … except me. Not the politicians, not the ACLU, only me.
“So yes, Kal, I lost faith in you because it hurt so much to see you fall from grace. It hurt me to have to give you that black mark in your file, and it hurts me to know how brittle you’ve become since your sister Leena’s spirit left you.”
BB hung his head while I stared, mouth slightly open. Hearing a soliloquy from BB was like watching the sun rise in the west. “For ten years you’ve been the Bureau’s secret weapon, the best of the best, and we’ve used you despite your issues and that’s on me.” A deep breath. “Your moral failure was the result of my poor judgment. I should never have left you in charge. If I had chosen Matt Alba instead, he would never have let you go to Omaha.”
“And Maydock would’ve killed hundreds if not thousands of people.” The words tasted like defeat in my mouth. How is it that when we get what we want, it often leaves us feeling empty? “And we wouldn’t have discovered the organization that was kidnapping and selling kids.” Those kids, those future Magicians, were being sold to very powerful, very corrupt people who could bend them to their awful will. Children made into slave Magicians for those without a moral compass. The thought still boiled the acid in m my gut.
As for the organization, it was run like a terrorist network, each cell interacting only when absolutely necessary with the most minimal of information. Various counter-intelligence teams in Europe and Russia managed to shut down some of their operations, but I knew deep in my gut we’d only scratched the surface.
“Be that as it may, Kal,” BB sighed, “as the Director of the BSI, the buck stops at my desk. You know that, so your failure is mine. That’s why I’ve been avoiding you. When I see you, I see my own failures. And I’m sorry, Kal, I should not have shut you out.”
As my favorite superhero character was wont to say, Oh, my stars and garters. Everything below my navel went numb and the palms of my hands as well as my fingertips began to tingle. I wanted to drop something just to see if gravity was still working.
“That’s more than you’ve said to me all year.” A brief pause. “Apology accepted.”
BB nodded.
“What now, boss?”
“Take the job,” he said quietly.
Of course. My suspicious, nasty side wondered if the last minute of BB’s verbal diarrhea had been a ploy to obtain my cooperation.
When did I become so cynical?
Still, I sensed an opportunity. “Okay, but once this op is done, I’m back and I mean back. No more Green Peas, and I mean ever.”
After a few seconds BB nodded.
“I pick my own team.”
“Agreed.”
“You’re agreeing too easily.”
He mentioned something about not examining the teeth of horses given as presents. I had to agree.
“Canton. I want Canton.”
A headshake. “No, he’s on assignment in Alabama.”
That was news. I’d seen him last week. “What’s in Alabama?” Besides Alabamites. Alabamians? Alaboomies?
“That hitter from Omaha, the one who was sent to kill Mr. G and Mr. Y.”
I remembered the report. G and Y were bigwigs in the organization and their failure to keep their child-trafficking operation safe led to a hit being put out on them. From what Canton told me, the hitter was quite a looker and lethal as a straight razor.
“So Canton is after the lady assassin? Seems a bit out of our purview.”
“He insisted. Actually, demanded. I sent Team Nu to shadow him, just like Canton and his team shadowed you in Omaha. Besides, since the Committee doubled the number of Agents the government employs, there has been a lot of downtime.”
True, more than half the teams sat around twiddling their thumbs when they weren’t training, but the Supernaturals that were appearing seemed to be deadlier and deadlier. Two months ago team Alpha ran into a group of Norse Jotun, giants with serious anti-social issues. Aside from having flesh so dense that even 50mm rounds bounced off them, they had the ability to hide in plain sight—quite a feat, considering the smallest topped twenty feet.
“Then I want Ng,” I continued. “He’s a pretty good egg for a Green Pea and he can keep his head in a tight spot.”
“Of course. He’s one of the more promising Agents we’ve had in the last year.”
Really not saying a lot. Although our standards were still the highest of any federal agency or military branch, the sudden influx of volunteers had the trainers at Coronado pulling their hair out by the roots; I imagined that by now they all looked like BB. The flood of fresh meat had become so bad that the Navy opened up a new base on Morris Island in Charleston Harbor all special-like to handle the overflow. Although we still took in Green Peas, it was more a catch-and-release program with a long waiting list. I was still baffled as to why so many wanted to perform a job so dangerous that even the most jaded adrenaline junkie would hide in a closet and discover religion.
“Great. Well, one of the best new lights we have besides Ng is Buffalo.” I called the guy Buffalo because he was slow to anger and damn near impossible to stop once you got him going. His real name was Robert Atkins, as steady a hand to watch your back as any man could want.
“Take whomever you wish,” said BB. He considered that statement for a moment then placed the DRAFT on his head, fingers tapping virtual icons only he could see. After a minute he shook his head in resignation. “Except for the Magician. Qualified field Magicians are still scarce, so I will assign you one.”
Oh, lord. Please, not Rat. Not Rat. Anyone but Rat!
“You get Rat.”
Awes
ome.
Chapter Four
Kal
Long Hard Times to Come
If anyone filled the role of Q from the Bond movies, it was Alex Dumont, resident super-genius and leader of Special Branch. Also one of the few people I considered a good friend, even though most of the inventions he’d made in the past few years tended to blow up or vaporize whole city blocks. But in this business, you take what you can get because when the technogeeknerds come through in the clutch, the results are spectacular. I stood in the middle of Special Branch surrounded by wizards and physicists and über-geeks and all manner of unclean beasties in lab coats. Getting in required another verification of my identity—Special Branch had at least a hundred million in gemstones in its vaults. Not to mention gold, silver, and platinum.
Gemstones and precious metals are essential to Special Branch because they store and absorb magic. Since Magicians first began to manipulate that strange force we call magic, they’d used gold and silver to give shape to spells. Gems acted as magical batteries. Special Branch offered the best and the brightest mankind had to offer in the way of Magicians with a command of magical theory, and they got all the best toys. Not to mention all the best in geological goodies.
Despite me standing there in all my glory (if you can call a gray T-shirt and blue jeans glory), I was pretty much ignored by the technogeeknerds because I was neither a cool particle accelerator nor the inventor of the USB port. But those weren’t the people I was interested in, not by a long shot. No, the person I wanted to see had her arms around my neck in a hot second after catching sight of me.
“Hello there, sexy,” said my wife Jeanie in her throaty English accent that always jump-started my hormones.
“Hey back,” I drawled, drinking in the sight of her flawless brown skin and deep, dark eyes. Her hair was done up in a style she called Beyoncé. We lip-locked for a good minute or so before parting. Then I told her what’s what.
A bone-crushing hug took the wind from my lungs. “Thank God!” she said.
My eyebrows headed north. “I thought you’d be unhappy to hear I’m heading into the grinder again.”
“Honey, don’t take this the wrong way, but over the last year you’ve been one of the unhappiest blokes I’ve ever seen. You’ve been driving me crazy with your moping.”
“I don’t mope.”
“You mope.”
“No, I brood. That’s how sexy men mope.”
That earned me slap on the chest. “So what are you doing here? Why aren’t you at ARMORY?” She was referring to the vault where the Bureau kept all its lethal goodies—everything one needed to destroy Supernaturals or half the planet. Call it my Happy Place.
“I haven’t read the brief yet, but my feeling is that Team Omicron jumped into the deep end of a crap-filled pool without a life preserver and I want to see what new goodies Alex may have. I’ve been given carte blanche on this.”
During the explanation, Jeanie’s face became grave. “How bad is it?”
“I have a feeling it’s the only reason BB agreed to let me back in the field and out of Green Pea training permanently. He had to placate the Committee. And the only reason the Committee would lean on BB is because whatever happened was very public and unpleasant. You know how unshakable BB is most times.”
Face unreadable, she said, “Let’s find Alex.”
The head of Special Branch sat in his office waiting for me behind his desk. An array of interesting items rested in front of him and the light in his eyes told me that he had something special in mind for my op. I began to sweat. His kind of ‘special’ usually detonated without regard to life or property.
Alex Dumont had more brains in his head than Congress. Wait, that’s a poor metaphor since most people do. Let’s just say he had a beautiful mind and would most likely have a theory of everything before the decade saw its end. Hmm, better. The only thing that made me question his massive brain power was his horrible taste in outerwear. At that moment, he sported his favorite tartan sweater vest, birth control glasses (as a Magician who could vaporize the Queen Mary with his mind, he should’ve figured out long ago how to correct his vision) and a pair of red denim pants, all encased in a white lab coat. It hurt my eyes to look at him.
“Hi, Kal,” Alex said, barely suppressing a smile. I began to sweat even more because when he smiled like that, it meant he had some clever and potentially lethal-to-operate gewgaw or doodad he wanted me to beta-test. “BB told me you were on the way.”
It was good to see the kid, although now that he was in his late twenties, he hardly qualified as a kid anymore. Still, he was the little brother I never wanted. He looked like a stiff breeze would send him flying like a kite, but underneath his lab coat lay some solid muscle put there by the Navy’s best. I wished he could have my back instead of Rat, a guy who thought hardcore S&M porn too tame.
“Hiya, Alex.” I gave the items on his desk a dubious glance. “Whatcha got for me?”
Jeanie headed out the door. “I’ll leave you boys to your toys.”
Both of us watched her go. Even in a lab coat she had enough oomph in her strut to give any heterosexual male with a pulse a dangerous blood-pressure spike. I didn’t blame the kid at all for looking—I sure was—but after a while I had to clear my throat to get his attention.
“Sorry, Kal,” he muttered sheepishly.
“It’s okay, kid. I’m sure Dove will understand.” Dove Jacobs was his girlfriend—a resident violent femme with an enormous chip on her shoulder. Short, muscular, and beautiful as a cheetah, she was one of the more dangerous veteran Agents in the Bureau. I’d already tagged her to be on my team.
Alex blanched. I guess any guy who dated Dove was used to a healthy dose of fear. Good for him; it built character.
“Don’t even kid about that.”
“Who’s kidding?”
In lieu of a reply, he began to point at the little thingamajigs on the desk. “These are our new field glasses.”
I picked them up. Looked like they belonged to the Blues Brothers. “Can’t be nightvision; we have contacts for that.” I put them on and the lenses automatically changed from tinted to clear in a matter of seconds.
“They do act as nightvision sunglasses, but only when paired with this.” A necklace flew my way, weighed down by a pendant the size of a silver dollar. It was surprisingly heavy. “They form a poor man’s version of a DRAFT.”
A smile formed, stretching my face tight. “Really?”
“When I say ‘poor man’s version,’ I mean they have the same capabilities as a RediPad and are interactive like a DRAFT, but have none of the DRAFT’s more esoteric capabilities like lie detection or deep forensic software. What you get is a RediPad built into a pair of sunglasses. The pendant is the CPU with a state-of-the-art micro-battery. Cold, it will power the CPU for five hours, but when worn next to the skin, it can run for over twenty hours by absorbing energy in the form of heat. Although you can use HUD as your screen, if you’re not comfortable with it, the glasses can project a display on any surface and you can use that surface as a touchscreen. We call it DRAFTlite.”
Cute. “Pretty cool, kid. They do anything that a RediPad can’t?” The Bureau’s computer tablets I’d been using for the past couple of years still had the edge on anything the NSA could develop.
That brought a smile to Alex’s face as he warmed up to the subject. “Sure. There’s an icon that will allow you to see in infrared and ultra-chromat, which means in at least five different spectral bands.”
Okay, chemistry is my thing, not that ultra-chromat thingie. I’m a pretty sharp guy, but Alex has the ability to make me feel like a chimp playing with matches.
“Ah, I can tell by the slackness in your jaw and the dull gleam in your eye that you have no clue as to what I’m talking about.” The kid was shoveling a good dose of smug my way.
“Pretend I don’t speak technogeeknerd and use words of no more than three syllables.”
“You never stud
ied, did you?”
“I studied ways to kill a geek with a pencil. Does that count?”
A skeptical look and a low chuckle told me he knew I wouldn’t harm a hair on his pointy little head. Sarky kid. “Ultra-chromat vision is what pigeons see; their eyes have four types of color receptors, one of which gives them the ability to perceive the ultraviolet part of the color spectrum. The others allow for perception of magnetic fields and polarized light. They can see nuances of color that humans can’t. For example, if you were to look at a plain white wall, you might see textures and variations in that white that would make it seem quite psychedelic.”
“Um … cool?” I had no clue what purpose that might serve, but any edge in a fight could save your life. “Anything else?”
“A separate icon enables X-ray vision, albeit for a limited time. It’s energy intensive.”
Now that was cool. “X-ray specs? You’ve invented magical X-ray specs? There are thirteen-year-olds around this great nation of ours who would sell their parents to get their grubby little hands on these, boyo.”
Before I finished, he was shaking his head. “Not magical, Kal. It’s all tech, the latest and greatest in spyware. Thanks to our budget doubling in the past year—and a little help from Ghost—we were able to achieve advances we’d only dreamed of. This is the latest in Bureau tech.” He grinned and pointed to the specs. “And there are micro-cams mounted on the temple arms that allow you to see what’s behind you as well as cameras in front that let others see what you see.”
The Spirit in St. Louis Page 4