A Creature of Smokeless Flame

by Margaret Ball

  Harrison didn’t even have the decency to look surprised or ashamed when Lensky stormed into the room he was using as a temporary office in the old Concho County prison. “Ah, Brad. I assume you’re here to complain that I’ve poached your assets?”

  “No wonder you’re not picking up my calls. And I thought I was calling you to get help.” Lensky wanted to spit. He’d just told Verrick that Steve Harrison was a good guy. Now he found out that his own boss was behind the disappearances.

  “You want your assets back?” Harrison grinned. Bared his teeth, anyway. “Get their cooperation, and you can have them. They’ve been nothing but trouble up to now.”

  “Yes. I want them back. And I want my wife freed. Immediately!”

  Harrison picked up his phone and pushed a button. “Tell Dean to stop the experiment and bring the topologists here.” He looked back at Lensky. “Okay. You can see your agents in a few minutes. As for your wife, I’m afraid I can’t help you out there; I didn’t even know you had married.”

  “Last month,” Lensky said between his teeth. “One of the topologists. Thalia Kostis. Your intelligence gathering abilities must be slipping. Badly.”

  “Wasn’t it up to you to report that? I don’t remember even getting your ‘close and continuing relationship’ statement.”

  “Not required. She’s an American citizen.”

  “I wonder why she failed to tell us that she was married to you. We certainly wouldn’t have handled her like the others if we’d known that.”

  Knowing Thalia, Lensky suspected that was exactly why she hadn’t enlightened Harrison and whoever else he was using for this mission. She wouldn’t buy special treatment for herself that way.

  “How have you handled them? Do I need to call an ambulance?”

  “No need. They’re essentially undamaged.”

  Essentially, in Harrison’s mouth, covered a nightmare range of possibilities. Fortunately, before Lensky could give in to his impulse to throttle the man into giving details, the door opened on four tired, angry, disheveled, red-eyed, coughing and sputtering topologists followed by a couple of armed guards and Harrison’s stooge Dean.

  “Pepper spray,” Harrison murmured apologetically. “The effects won’t last, now that they’re out of the sprayed area. I told you they weren’t really hurt.”

  That was clear; even while they coughed and scrubbed at their eyes, the topologists were arguing.

  “I told you we needed to modify the shields to keep out poison gas!” That was Ben. “We need to define them at the molecular level. Now, branching covers on a three-manifold—”

  “Yes, but the only algorithm you ever came up with also shielded against oxygen!” Ingrid said. “Read my – aack! – lips: humans need oxygen. If—” Whatever she’d been going to say was drowned in a fit of coughing.

  “And your model kept the carbon dioxide in, which is even worse!” Colton contributed through a bout of sniffles.

  Lensky barely registered the argument. The small, dark-haired woman who’d come in last had cut through her colleagues like a logician through philosophers to reach him. Once he had his arms around her and knew she was safe, nothing else mattered for a moment. Then she sneezed. “You godda hadkerchief?”

  He produced a folded white square and she buried her face in it for an explosive few seconds. He noticed that the damp T-shirt clinging to her body was on back to front.

  “You must have got an extra dose,” he said, comparing her red eyes and husky whisper to her companions, who appeared to have recovered completely from the effects of the pepper spray by the time they got into the second stage of their theoretical discussion.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” she croaked. “For some reason these guys don’t seem to like me.”

  “You’ve been giving them grief, haven’t you?”

  “Of course, it’s my…” She started coughing again. Lensky saw a half-empty water bottle on Harrison’s desk and grabbed it for her. She gulped the contents and sighed. “That’s better. Giving pushy government types grief is my Prime Directive. You should know that. It’s not like we started out on great terms.”

  “Yeah, but you’re cute when you’re being snippy. That’s when I started to fall in love with you.”

  “Oddly enough, my witty repartee doesn’t seem to have had that effect on Thug One and Thug Two.” She nodded at Harrison, who was listening in total bemusement to a three-way topological debate about open and closed sets and boundary conditions, and then at Dean.

  “Is he the one who hit you?” Lensky asked, looking at Dean. His finger traced the blossoming bruise on her cheekbone.

  “No, that would be Tall, Balding, and Ugly over there.”

  Lensky turned on Harrison, who dodged behind the desk. “Brad, try and remember that I’m your boss!”

  “No, you’re the man who beat up my wife.” He moved towards Harrison, but Thalia hung her full weight on his arm, dragging him down.

  “What’s your problem,” he said, aggrieved, “don’t you want me to hit him?”

  “I don’t want you – to wreck – your career!” Thalia panted, gripping his arm with both hands and leaning backward with her full weight, all ninety-five pounds of her. He tried to pry her loose, but her fingers were so tightly clenched he would have had to hurt her to free himself.

  “If it requires my standing by while the Company maltreats my wife, I don’t want this career!”

  “You don’t understand!” Harrison began, holding up his hands placatingly. “Brad, we had to get their cooperation. We don’t have any time to waste. And why aren’t you helping Patel with Sandru Balan?”

  Ingrid abandoned the topologists’ debate and joined in this one. “You could have tried asking politely, instead of drugging and kidnapping and threatening,” she told Harrison.

  “You could even have gone through Lensky,” Ben chimed in. “Isn’t that what he’s in Austin for?”

  “We needed him elsewhere,” Harrison defended himself, “and—there’s no time, dammit, no time! Brad, go ahead and hit me if it’ll make you feel better. I won’t write you up. Just help me get these maniacs’ cooperation and afterwards you can beat me to a pulp.”

  Lensky relaxed slightly. “I’ve been known to call them maniacs myself. What exactly do you want, and what’s the desperate hurry about? Of course you want to get whoever pulled off this bombing. I’d like that myself. But terrorizing a bunch of ivory-tower academic types isn’t going to get us there.”

  “You don’t understand,” Harrison repeated.

  “Try me.” Lensky reached for a chair with his free hand, pulled it towards him and sat. Thalia finally relaxed her death-grip on his right arm. With luck, full circulation would resume any minute now. “What exactly, apart from the fact that it targeted our headquarters in Langley, makes this bombing so different from all other terrorist attacks that we have to throw the rule book out the window?”

  “We’ve managed to keep it out of the media,” Harrison said slowly, “but it wasn’t just headquarters that was targeted. It was the day-care center.”

  “The CIA has a day-care center?” That was Ben.

  “For obvious reasons, we prefer not to publicize it. But just like every other large organization,” Harrison snapped, “we have employees with young children, and employees with school-age children who need after-school care. Unlike other organizations, though, our people are always at risk. It seemed best to take care of these problems in-house, where we controlled security, rather than expecting our employees to come up with their own patchwork of child-care solutions.”

  “So… how many children were killed?”

  “None. Someone called in the bomb threat in plenty of time for us to get all the kids and their teachers into the safe room. And the bomb itself didn’t amount to much. If we’re forced to release anything about the day-care to the news media, though, we may say that three children were killed.”

  “Why?”

  “Because…” Har
rison looked sick. “Because that’s how many are missing.”

  “Missing? You’re sure…”

  Harrison looked around the room. First at Thalia, standing beside Lensky, and then at the other three topologists. “I’m not sure we ought to continue this discussion in front of people who aren’t cleared to hear it. I probably shouldn’t have started it. I’m supposed to verify they have special abilities that can help us before sharing any information with them.”

  “And how has that been working out for you?” Lensky asked, keeping his tone superficially cordial.

  “As you see.” Harrison bit off the words.

  “So maybe we try it the other way around. Get chairs for everybody, get them something to eat and drink, have a civilized discussion.”

  “If this doesn’t work,” Dean muttered to Lensky while Harrison was making calls to get all that organized, “your job is toast.”

  Lensky gave him a cold stare. “If I hadn’t gotten here before you escalated to actual torture, you would be toast. You lying, insinuating, sadistic bastard. Don’t think I can’t guess who egged Harrison on. You’ve always been too damned fond of hurting people.”

  Dean laughed. “Hey, dummy, relax. We hadn’t even waterboarded your little friends yet!”

  This time Thalia wasn’t hanging on to him, and it was tremendously satisfying to see Dean go down with a crash.

  In the interests of peaceful discussion, Harrison suggested that Dean take himself off to collect the food while the rest of them settled into the ex-prison’s best excuse for a meeting room. At least it had a table and nearly enough chairs. A row of empty vending machines took up most of one wall; this must have been an employee break room, back in the day.

  Harrison did bring in a third player, a Rob Torres, who evidently represented the skeptical side of the debate. He protested vociferously when Harrison began to outline the situation, and only shut up after a direct order.

  As Harrison had said, three children were missing: two boys and a girl. And they probably had not been selected randomly. One was Harrison’s son Sam, nine years old, who had been kicking his heels in the day care after his summer science camp until his father could take him home. The other two, a boy of five and a girl of six, were also the children of highly placed CIA officials.

  “You think they were targeting your boy?” Lensky asked. If so, that would have limited the hours during which it was useful to strike at the day care center. Unlike the younger children, Sam Harrison was only there for a couple of hours after camp each day. That would explain the late-afternoon timing of the attack.

  “Yes. No. I think so, yes.” Harrison scrubbed his face with one hand. “Getting hard to think…”

  “Mr. Harrison,” Thalia spoke up. “Have you slept at all since the bombing?”

  “Huh? Yes. Probably. I don’t know.”

  “That might explain some of his poor decisions,” she said to Lensky. “Can you guys talk him into taking a break?”

  “No! Not when—we don’t have time.” Harrison hunched forward over the meeting room table. “Every hour that passes, every minute…”

  “Tell us how you think we can help, then.”

  Harrison stared at her. “Does that mean – you will help?”

  “Yes,” Ben said. His youngest sister was eight years old.

  “Probably,” said Thalia.

  “I… don’t know,” Colton said.

  Ingrid just looked down her nose. “It all depends. Is my fiancé all right?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Jimmy DiGrazio. He wasn’t in the office when you grabbed me, and neither were Annelise and Meadow.”

  “Oh, the support staff? We just needed to get them out of the way while we were collecting topologists.” Harrison relaxed slightly.

  “They’re all fine,” Lensky reassured his people. “Dr. Verrick has seen them.”

  Beside him, Thalia stirred.

  “What about Mr. M.?”

  “Who?” Both Harrison and Torres looked blank.

  She gave Lensky a dirty look. “Don’t tell me you’ve been censoring Mr. M. out of your reports.”

  “I try to limit the number of impossible things I ask my superiors to believe in any one report,” Lensky defended himself. “I was going to tell them about Mr. M. Eventually. Just as soon as I didn’t have half a dozen other weird things to explain.”

  “Well, he was around my neck when these goons grabbed me, and he wasn’t with me in their van. I just want to know that nobody stepped on him.”

  Torres was shaking his head well before Thalia finished. “What is she talking about? There wasn’t anybody else in the office when we collected her. She was the last one.”

  “Thalia,” Lensky said in an urgent undertone. “Can we put the matter of Mr. M. aside for now? You know as well as I do that he’s probably off pursuing some mischief of his own, and I don’t think I can calm Steve down enough to give him a full explanation of Mr. M. until he has some sense of progress in this matter.”

  “I’m worried about him,” Thalia said.

  “Look, if these idiots pissed him off in the course of kidnapping you, they’re the ones who should be worried.”

  Thalia sputtered. “You have a point there. Fine, fine. Let’s get back to finding out what they need and what we can do for them. It won’t be my fault if they’re attacked by a highly pissed-off, hyper-caffeinated Babylonian turtle mage even as we talk.”

  “Who’s Mr. M.?” Harrison asked.

  “We can go into that later. Tell me why you’re so desperate to use my people on this case.”

  “Because there’s reason to believe that whoever carried out this attack also had paranormal abilities.” Harrison laid out supporting details. The three children had disappeared from an internal “safe room” that was locked down as soon as all the day-care kids were inside. No, they hadn’t simply been left outside by accident; one teacher and several other children insisted they’d seen all three missing children inside the safe room after lockdown. There had been no overt attack on the room and there was no evidence of any tampering with the hi-tech locking and security system.

  “What do your colleagues think about the paranormal hypothesis?”

  Harrison sighed. “The DDO started from the assumption that it wasn’t possible and leaned on the teacher, who must have been – in his view – complicit. I managed to get an interview with her, told her I believed she was telling the truth, and got a little more information. She said she caught glimpses of a dark-skinned man in white robes, but there was something off about them. The glimpses. She couldn’t explain exactly, she just said it was like he was a projection, maybe a holograph, not really there. Something else human-shaped was there but wasn’t properly visible; a kind of darkness in the air, with a shimmer like flames. Naturally she hadn’t told the DDO any of this, he would just have taken it as more lies.”

  The food arrived then, brought in by a scowling Dean, and discussion slowed as the four topologists fell on the sandwiches and soft drinks as if they were starving. Which, Lensky thought, they probably were.

  “Did all of you teleport back to Austin, or was that just you?” he murmured to Thalia.

  “We all did.”

  He asked Harrison to send out for a couple of boxes of doughnuts. Sandwiches were a good start, but his people were used to inhaling doughnuts for a quick lift after major applications of topology.

  “Don’t bother,” Thalia interrupted after gulping down the last bite of her sandwich. “That was an adequate refill. I’ll get the doughnuts, and make your buddy Thug One happy at the same time. If I could have my wallet back?”

  She stood up, slid the wallet into her hip pocket and put one hand in her right front pocket, and disappeared. Torres shouted in alarm.

  “Give it a few minutes,” Lensky suggested. “She’ll be back.”

  “I hope she gets some of those chocolate-covered ones with chocolate cream filling,” Ben said.

  “Yo
u have crude tastes,” Ingrid told him. “Chocolate is actually even better paired with other flavors. Raspberry jam filling, for instance.”

  Ben looked hurt. “I know that. Didn’t I invent the chocolate root beer float?”

  “I retract ‘crude.’ A better term would be ‘barbaric.’”

  “I’d settle for an apple fritter,” sighed Colton.

  The topologists’ matter-of-fact demeanor persuaded the CIA men to sit quietly and wait, though Torres was restive.

  A few minutes later there was a widening slit in the air, briefly displaying – well, only a colorless chaos to the CIA officers; Lensky knew that the topologists claimed to see a blackness shot through with points and streaks of colored light. Then Thalia stepped through the slit into the conference room, carrying two pink cardboard boxes, and the opening in the air healed itself. She leaned forward, flipped one of the boxes open and held it out to Harrison. “Care for a doughnut?”

  His eyes were very wide.

  “How did you do that?”

  Thalia set both boxes on the table and smirked. “Not many people could have pulled it off at this hour. But I happen to be familiar with the location of the best twenty-four-hour doughnut shop in Austin.” She tapped the nearest box. It was imprinted with the name of the shop and an address on Ben White Blvd.

  “You went all the way to Austin for those? But I thought you couldn’t…”

  “You were misinformed,” Thalia cut him off. “We can travel farther than you think. And it was much easier to teleport two hundred miles to Austin than it would have been trying to buy doughnuts after midnight in, what’s the nearest town, Brad?”

  “Eden,” he supplied. “She’s right, you know, Steve. Eden probably rolls up the sidewalks after 10 PM. I was surprised you were able to get sandwiches.”

  “They weren’t very good ones,” Ingrid said, wrapping up the crusts left over from her second egg salad sandwich.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Ben argued. “Pre-made, sure, but no worse than the ones the Student Union sells.”

  “As I said – not very good.” Ingrid helped herself to a chocolate-covered doughnut with raspberry filling. “Everything about this so far has been second-rate, except for the music.”