“You’re not what I expected you to be,” Lucille admitted, finishing his cup and holding it out for a refill.
“That’s how it is with most folks. You’ve been told who or what we are, and you believed it because it fit with what you’d been told we’d be or how QMG operates,” I said, filling his cup and sliding it back across the table to him.
“Well, yeah, I guess.”
“Thing is, people are rarely a monolithic thing,” I said after I got my coffee fixed. “Sure, I hunt monsters for a living, but I don’t go after the ones who don’t transgress the rules. Hell, we won’t even hunt vampires who are quiet about it and fill out the required paperwork.”
“Wait, there’s paperwork for being a vampire?”
“Yes, and it doesn’t involve ‘registering’ the vampire so we can track it down. There are vampires out there living on cow’s blood, for example, and we never even look at them. Unless there are a lot of cases of anemia in an area, and then we can usually track down the source of the problem fairly quickly.”
“How does that work?” he asked, fascinated.
“Vampirism, like therianthropy, is a twofold curse—part of it is a disease, and part of it is supernatural. There are people who are resistant, and there are people who are carriers but never show the outward signs of the condition.”
“Mr. Medved told us that,” he admitted.
“Ok, so they told you some truth. Did they also tell you we can track the sire or dam of a vampire or therianthrope by the DNA of the viron that infects the recipient?”
“No, he didn’t. He said you use magic to track the noble beings who pass on their gifts to those who can receive it,” Lucille said with a shrug.
“And we do that as well,” I said. “Magic can help us track down the sire or dam quickly, but there are other costs associated with using magic to track the supernatural. I’ve got a buddy in a coma because he was trying to track something with magic.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Lucille said.
I believed him.
“One of the risks of the job,” I said, “but yeah, if we can find a recent spawnling, we talk to them about their options. Unless they’ve consumed human flesh or blood, which is admittedly rare in cases of vampirism, we hold them until we confirm what line they come from and offer them ways to work within the system.”
“What about Jennifer?” he asked.
“You were aware there was thirty odd pounds of human flesh in the refrigerator in her hotel room, weren’t you?”
“No,” he said, blushing. “We were just getting off the elevator on her floor when you guys went through the door.”
“And you ran downstairs to follow the action on camera so you could post it on the net, right?”
He nodded.
“That happens,” I said. “We don’t go out of our way to find out who does it most of the time. You guys, though…”
“Yeah.” He laughed. “We were trying to prove something, you could say. We were going to show the rest of the world how evil QMG was for hunting the oppressed Otherkin. Instead, Ashley and James are dead, and I’m on the run for the rest of my life.”
“I’m sure Ms. Fields told you about Witness Protection,” I said.
“Yeah, but I really don’t think I’d fit in someplace like Pidcoke or Luckenbach,” he said with a laugh.
“Generally they avoid relocating people to places where a new person makes for a three hundred percent population increase,” I replied. “But yeah, it would probably mean moving somewhere safe by our standards, not necessarily somewhere you’d enjoy living.”
“It’s the price I’ll have to pay for being stupid, I guess,” he said with a sigh. “We heard you’d killed Jennifer. Is that a lie too?”
“Nope. I pulled the trigger myself, after she broke free of chains that should have held her and killed and partially ate her lawyer.”
“She ate her lawyer? That’s not what we were told,” he said.
“I can show you the footage,” I said. “On the upside, she only ate part of him.”
“You recorded it? We were told…” he said before I interrupted him.
“Yeah, I know what you were told,” I said. “How about we toss that out the window, though, because most of what you were told is probably bullshit.”
“It’s just hard to believe they would lie to us,” Lucille said. “I mean, we were on their side.”
“You find it hard to believe that agents of the Prince of Lies would lie to you?” I asked, my voice thick with sarcasm.
“Well, when you put it that way, it does seem kind of obvious,” Lucille replied. “In our defense, we weren’t aware that they were agents of…who you mentioned, until they made us sign contracts in blood. Before that, we thought they were just Otherkin in need of help.”
“Yeah, I get that,” I said, nodding. “But now?”
“Now there are still things I don’t know if I can talk about. Ms. Fields pointed out there are certain names that aren’t safe for me to mention, period. Even writing them down could put my soul in peril, or attract undue attention from sundry followers of the powers in question.”
“I’m betting you’re quoting her on that last bit, aren’t you?”
“Yes and no. I’m a law major at UT,” he said, laughing. “Man, are my folks going to be pissed. I can see my dad now—‘Son, you pissed away eight years of your life, and my money, for nothing. I’m very disappointed in you.’”
“About that,” I said. “There’s not a really good way to sugarcoat it, so I’m just going to say it. As far as your folks are concerned, you died in the fire in that roach motel out in Piccadilly. They got a casket marked ‘do not open’ with about a hundred and ten pounds of sand in it.”
“No one told me that!” he shouted, slapping the table hard enough to make the coffee cups jump.
“Well, it was that or open your folks up to the threat of being grabbed to use against you by the followers of Abzu and Oeillet,” I replied, holding up a hand to forestall his next comment. “Yes, devil worshippers will grab family members to insure compliance. If you’re dead, your family should be safe.”
“Oh. I see, I think,” he replied. “So I can never see them again?”
“If you go into the program, yeah,” I replied. “There’s nothing stopping you from walking out the door and going to see them right now; however, that will probably lead to them and you dying horribly, in great pain. Around here we generally call that Plan B and recognize that it’s a bad thing.”
“I can see that,” he said with a chuckle. “As much as I enjoy aggravating my parents, I don’t know that my death would be worth theirs.”
“Usually isn’t,” I replied.
He was slowly working through things. All I had to do was keep talking, and we’d get whatever he had on Medved, hopefully.
“What happens if I do decide to go into the program?” he said.
Alleluia!
“Well, first we’re going to pump you dry—you’re going to answer every question the interrogation team can come up with about Medved, Halybutt, Jennifer, and PBR Street Gang. Probably under the influence of a geas and a truth potion.”
“A truth potion? Aren’t those banned?”
“Yes and no. They’re like a polygraph—inadmissible in court. We won’t be using anything you give us in court. Besides,” I said with a grin, “everything you spill is going to be triple-checked at a minimum.”
“No queen for a day?” he asked, referring to the FBI program dealing with criminals.
“No. Because we’re going to violate the hell out of your civil rights with the spell and the truth potion. You’re going to tell us things from your childhood that you don’t even remember,” I replied.
“I…if that’s the way it has to be so I’m not eaten by something with way too many teeth and poor dental hygiene, then I guess that’s the way it has to be,” he said.
We all have our hang-ups. His apparently revolved arou
nd teeth. I’ve run across worse.
“So what’s the next step?”
“If you want to go forward, I talk to the folks listening in on our conversation, and they come in, along with a couple of lawyers, and explain the entire process. Then you sign a whole lot of paperwork—none of it in blood—” I grinned, “and the process starts.”
“Send in the lawyers!” he said, striking a heroic, hands-on-hips, head turned to display his best profile pose.
“Right,” I said, before we both broke down laughing.
There might be hope for this kid yet.
* * * * *
Chapter Nineteen
I turned Lucille over to the gentle ministrations of the legal department and went home. It had been that kind of day. Diindiisi and I enjoyed a meal at home, watched a couple of bad horror films, and called it a night.
This is where, in Victorian Literature—or an Agatha Christie novel, for that matter—there would be a pause, and the narrator would step in with something like ‘but little did he know…’ I’ll be honest, I was well aware of the approaching avalanche of paperwork. I wasn’t looking forward to it, but I was aware it was coming.
The first rash of emails was from HQ—they’d had time to digest the final reports I’d filled out in Piccadilly and had questions, as usual. There were also several requests for more information about the incident with the Piroboli, because they were a new monster for us. Finally, there were a couple of meeting requests and a message from Other Dave, which simply said, ‘Smoke Pit.’
I filled a cup with coffee and went outside to see Other Dave.
Other Dave shared his office with Fred. The dwarf had stuck around again, citing ‘orders from Herself.’ The dwarf was also smoking the foulest cigar it had ever been my privilege to be anywhere near, and the smoke curled my nostril hairs. I swear, that cigar smelled worse than the day a dust devil had jumped into the burn pit and then, as a small fire tornado, had jumped from the burn pit to the fecal storage pond in Iraq.
“That has to be a real Cuban cigar,” I said, shaking Fred’s hand.
“Pre-ban,” he replied. “The last engineer of the Mine was really into cigars, and ordered thousands of them. Setting up entire rooms as humidors is nothing for us, after all. The current engineer, she’s a bit more traditional and prefers a churchwarden pipe, so she decided to sell off the cigars her predecessor laid in. I bought most of them.”
He offered me a travel humidor, and I took one of the cigars and lit it. For all that the smoke smelled like a shit fire in a burning garbage dump, fifty-five years of aging had done wonders for the taste of the cigar.
“I’m pretty sure you didn’t call me out here to enjoy cigars almost as old as my parents,” I said. “Although this is a damn fine cigar.”
“Not really,” Other Dave said. “Lucille handed over his passwords before the voodoo psychologists got their hands on him last night.”
“Nice,” I replied. “I take it you got into his hardware?”
“His and the PBR Street Gang website. From there, I’ve been trying to get into the other two idiots’ hardware,” Other Dave replied, tapping a few keys. “I’ve found the leak, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
“I was wondering that, yeah,” I replied. “Who is it?”
“Jack Denny,” Other Dave replied.
“The head of IT here?” I asked, shocked. “That Jack Denny?”
“Well, it ain’t the violin-playing comic,” Other Dave replied.
“That was Jack Benny,” Fred said, grimacing.
“Ok, I’m not old enough to have seen him in anything but reruns of reruns,” Other Dave said, shrugging.
“You sure it’s not someone lower down the chain spoofing his address or something?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’m positive,” Other Dave said. “I pulled the data from PBR Street Gang’s computers. It took a little forensic digging to find what machine it’s originating from here. Denny covered his tracks, kinda sorta.”
“Kinda sorta? Is that like kinda sorta figuring out he did it?”
“No. Trust me, it’s from him. He’s the only one with access to some of the files that were sent, not to mention, the edits show they were done on his machine.”
“Edits?” I asked, feeling like the wrong side of a Socratic Dialogue.
“Edits. As in, some of the material they received was edited in a manner to make QMG look like the bad guys. Especially the footage of you killing that werebear. The entire fight consists of you shooting her in the head.”
“That explains a lot,” I said. “Shit, this is going to be a real pain in the ass.”
“How so?” Fred asked.
“We’ve got to grab him before he can wipe his systems. He has to know we’re looking for him. Basic internal traffic should let Denny know we’ve got Lucille’s passwords,” I said. “Especially since all that traffic routes through his desk. All it would take is a key word search program set to look for certain things in the traffic—and it’s not like we don’t use XKeyscore on a regular basis to track down vampires and others who’re breaking the rules.”
“You think he’d use XKeyscore internally?” Other Dave asked.
“Think? Hell, I would if I were trying to keep one step ahead of having to explain to my employer why I was feeding intel to the bad guys,” I replied.
“Well, so far he hasn’t done anything but normal traffic,” Other Dave said, shrugging. “I’m in his machine. I…look, I hack internal systems regularly so I can stay in practice. I’ve never used it for anything before.”
“I’ll go talk to Goodhart,” I said, pulling a knife so I could trim the ember from my cigar.
“I can get him out here if you want,” Other Dave said, checking the time. “For that matter, he should be coming outside for his usual fresh air break at any point now.”
“See if he’s coming. If he isn’t, strongly suggest that he should,” I said.
I really hate seecrit scwirrl shit. In a perfect world, I wouldn’t have to be sending messages to my boss to get him outside so I could get permission to grab one of our own. Then again, in a perfect world, I wouldn’t have a job hunting monsters, either.
About ten minutes later, Goodhart showed up, Jed in tow. Fred offered them cigars, and we all waited while they went through the ritual of lighting them.
“You found the mole,” Jed said, grinning satanically through the smoke.
“What mole?” I asked, my face innocent.
“Look, we all know PBR Street Gang was getting data from somewhere. About four people outside this group know that Lucille turned over his passwords. I also know you’ve been meeting with Other Dave furtively,” Jed said.
“Furtively, Gunny? Has living with Padre got you reading again?” I asked.
“Answer the question, Father Salazar,” Goodhart said.
“Other Dave found the leak, yes. But there’s a problem,” I said.
“There’s a problem, he says. Like there haven’t been issues since we started down this chain of events months ago,” Goodhart said, rolling his eyes.
“Jack Denny,” Other Dave said.
“Shit,” Jed replied.
“He’s been with the company for years. Why now?” Goodhart asked.
“No fucking clue, boss,” I replied. “I need permission to grab him at his desk so he can answer that and a couple of other questions.”
“Can you do it without a lot of fuss?” Goodhart asked.
“I wasn’t planning on flash-banging the shit out of IT, then taking the entire team in, armed to the teeth and guns a blazin’, if that’s what you’re asking. I figured I’d go find him in his cube and do something completely out of character for me,” I said.
“What?”
“I thought I’d ask him politely,” I replied.
“That might shock him,” Goodhart admitted. “Hell, it might even work. Who do you want to go with you?”
“I was thinking Fred here, honestly. If I take anyo
ne else, he might smell a rat,” I said.
“Am I too dumb or something?” Fred asked.
“No, but you and I might be there to ask about the chains or the implants,” I replied. “Since we’re still working on those.”
“You know, for an ad hoc plan, this makes sense. How’re you going to keep him from wiping his machine?” Jed asked.
“That’s up to Other Dave,” I said. “Me dumb grunt, me arrest bad man. Smart man use magic google-box to keep things from dis-app-earing.”
“That might work,” Other Dave said. “I can lock his computer down from here. The only problem might be if he has a deadman’s switch on it. I can also isolate his file block on the server.”
“Do it,” Goodhart said. “We’ll talk about how you can control his machine later.”
“I’ll isolate his files now. I’m going to wait to lock him out of his computer until you two,” he pointed at Fred and me, “are in the IT department. I can track them using the internal cameras.”
“When do you want to do this?” Fred asked, cracking his knuckles.
“Now’s as good a time as any,” I replied, tossing the butt of my cigar in the ashcan. “I’ve got to make one stop on the way in.”
“Lay on, Macduff,” Fred replied.
After a brief stop in the restroom, I led Fred through the byzantine labyrinth of the IT department. Denny’s cubicle squatted in the center, so he could joke about being the spider at the center of the Austin web. Unlike Other Dave, Denny had never been anything except legal in his behavior. Seriously, the man was so clean, legally, his police file probably squeaked when you touched it. He’d seen the movie Hackers his freshman year in college, and that had convinced him that his future lay in IT. Unfortunately, rather than the band of plucky outcasts led by Angelina Jolie, he’d picked Fisher Stevens as his role and sartorial model, and at forty-one years of age, he didn’t have the body for crushed velvet coats and gold lamé shirts. God in heaven, the man had worse taste than the Joker in clothing—Denny would buy thousand-plus-dollar, hand-tailored Italian suits in crushed velvet. At least he avoided the eye-searing colors and stuck to dark blues and blacks.
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