Malcolm and Ives 02 - Trouble With Air and Magic

by Patricia Rice

  She looked up at Pippa. “Your American branch, they have lost the value of teaching family how to use our abilities. Family is all. In the old country, we know each other. Malcolms learn to take care of each other. We are family now.” She glanced at Oz and sniffed. “You, too.”

  Dorrie hid her smile behind her hand. Grandmother liked to keep the men in the family in their places. Oz looked miffed, but he didn’t know that he’d just been offered her grandmother’s highest mark of esteem—a place in the Ling family.

  Amazingly, he recovered quickly, bowing and taking a seat beside his wife. “You do me honor, Ling Fai. I accept your welcome gratefully.”

  He even used the family name in correct order. Dorrie wished Conan were here to watch his powerful brother and her delicate grandmother circle each other like wary samurai. She needed to memorize every word so she could relate the entire conversation, complete with bows and sniffs and glares.

  And just realizing there was no one else in the world who would understand as well as Conan, she knew she was in deep trouble.

  “You have spoken to me of this Librarian,” Ling Fai said stiffly. “If she is helping you, she is one of us. It becomes necessary that we find her.” She turned to Dorrie. “You, you tell me my Mei was murdered by the Vile Beasts and that they may now be after you. It is possible. Why did you not tell me this sooner?”

  “I was twelve and you didn’t ask,” Dorrie said simply, without accusation. “No one told me about villains, so I thought the police had locked them up. It was only later that I heard a little about the legends.”

  “Your father would not let us explain,” Grandmother said with a sniff. “He thought to keep you safe with ignorance. I will tell you the story now,” Grandmother said, folding her slim hands in her lap.

  “To obtain an education was everything to our family. The communists offered this in return for our services. Many, many people wanted to believe they were doing the right thing, even some among our family, who gave away our secrets. After that, we were harassed and followed, jailed and tortured, subjected to the most vile of experiments.”

  Dorrie swallowed and thought of the negative vibrations exuded by the Adams Engineering plant. She couldn’t imagine anyone surviving in a place like that if they were at all susceptible to chi energy, as she was.

  Grandmother nodded, as if she followed her thoughts. “Many of us escaped in the fifties. Feng Po-po was one. She was a scientist who had worked in those laboratories. She knew what many of us were capable of. She married a general in the U.S. army and had four sons.”

  Feng Po-po? The man who had killed her mother claimed a family name of Feng. Dorrie held her breath as her grandmother opened the genealogy book and flipped pages.

  Not finding what she sought, Ling Fai tapped her nail on a page. “Feng Po-po is not in here. She died when her sons were still young. General Adams remarried.” She pointed to another name. “To this one, a Malcolm teacher who lived here all her life.”

  Dorrie was debating the significance of the Adams name when her grandmother glared straight at her. “Your father did not think this significant. He called the Vile Beasts an old feud. And for years, this has seemed to be so. But General Adams’ oldest son by Feng Po-po is the one who murdered your mother.”

  The others gasped. Dorrie sat still and let the knowledge wash over her.

  If General Adams owned any part of Adams Engineering, she’d whacked the hornet’s nest.

  Chapter 28

  Once he’d hacked through the lax security of the Cayman Island bank, Conan set up the sting with a few keystrokes. Greed and a guilty conscience were easy marks. If he was wrong and this wasn’t about greed or revenge, then the sting wouldn’t work, and he’d have to take another tack. But his bet was on Dorrie’s instincts that someone in the office hated her.

  He believed in instinct. He understood the subconscious connections that the mind made between surf and wind that created a world class surfer. He had a proper respect for the earth’s forces like gravity. He might not see them, but he knew they existed. Even though a chair looked solid, he’d taken physics and knew all matter was created of energy. He didn’t know how Dorrie differentiated between all the variations, but he could accept that she could to some degree.

  What he wasn’t totally buying was this dim mak business. He’d hunted down references, but like all paranormal events, evidence was lacking. Very few people actually claimed they killed anyone, after all.

  Dorrie’s tales about communist spies gave him cold shivers though. He wasn’t authorized in international skullduggery. The military would chew him up and spit him out if he started spying on the Chinese. And his military contracts paid for this house.

  Still, the Librarian had warned about a Chinese predator. Dorrie was about as far from a predator as he could comprehend. International creeps, it had to be. Damn.

  While his emails were filtering to their destination, Conan sat back and stretched his legs and contemplated the changes Dorrie had made to his office. From this new desk position, he could see anyone who came up his stairs now. Not that anyone came up without warning, but he supposed it was a friendlier position.

  His shelves looked… He studied the continuity of colors and their unusual neatness. Harmonious was the only word he could summon. He liked the waves of black and green mixing with the multi-hued center and ending with oranges and reds. He even felt inspired to pick up the small stacks of papers he’d created recently and file them where they belonged.

  He could add some artwork, if he had any clue what kind to buy. He’d ask Dorrie.

  Which was a dangerous thought. Once women started nesting, they expected to move in. He shifted uncomfortably and sat up the instant his email pinged him.

  Message delivered.

  Conan grinned and picked up his phone. The bank had just notified the account’s owner that all the funds had been transferred back to the foundation with the authorization of Ryan Franklin. Someone would be sweating bullets.

  He called Dorrie’s father. He didn’t mind sticking his neck out and interfering when it was his job. This was the fun part.

  “Where’s my daughter?” Ryan Franklin yelled the instant he picked up the phone. “My insurance agent says…house condemned…I can’t reach my damned daughter!”

  “Blood pressure, calm down,” Conan reminded him. “I told you, I have Dorrie. She’s fine. She’s having a powwow with her grandmother as we speak. Your concern right now is for your foundation. You have a thief who appears to be framing Dorrie, and a pending PR nightmare on your hands. I’ve just sent the stolen cash back to your coffers. I refuse to let Dorrie set foot in that office until the crook is nailed, so either I go over there and see who’s clearing out their desks, or you should.”

  Funereal silence. Conan threw a dart at the board over the stairwell. He didn’t have a medical degree, but he’d seen men in wheelchairs get around perfectly fine. Franklin’s speech was a little slurred, but he had no difficulty making himself clear. Conan’s bet was that pride alone prevented him from leaving his cozy little suite where hired nurses waited on him hand and foot.

  “Meet me here,” Franklin growled. “This place has a limo.”

  “Works for me. See you in thirty.”

  Conan was headed for the car when his phone buzzed. He checked the text message. The Librarian. The only message was 118.

  ***

  Dorrie rubbed her temple, attempting to hold on to her whirling thoughts. Her mother might have been killed for knowing too much about the Adams family —Dorrie grimaced at the theatrical appellation Oz had given the villains.

  She was too grief-stricken and terrified to wrap her mind around real life monsters. Mei would never have overtly threatened the Fengs. The reverse was highly possible if the Fengs were hunting for Malcolm talents.

  If the Feng brothers had in any way threatened her children, Mei would have immediately reported them to the police. And then set energy arrows around their
shop to bring them down. She hadn’t hexed them. She’d feng shuied them. Apropos.

  Feng Po-po, their scientist mother, was the one who had known about people with extra abilities. She was dead. She would almost certainly have told the general about her research, but whether her husband believed it or not was impossible to know. But if his sons had come after Mei… They very possibly had access to Po-po’s research.

  How had their Malcolm stepmother factored in? No way of knowing.

  If Grandmother Ling knew of Feng Po-po, then Po-po could have known the Ling family. Which meant anyone connected to her might have known about Dorrie and Bo. Or at least suspected them. But what on earth could anyone hope to do with unwilling test subjects?

  Someone had tried to kidnap Bo’s kids. And shot at Amy—to keep her from protecting them? In hopes of forcing her to reveal where they were? Why now?

  Because the eldest Feng son was out of prison and wanted revenge? Or wanted to see if Bo’s kids could do what Bo did?

  Oz’s phone buzzed and he glanced at the message with a frown. “One hundred eighteen?”

  Dorrie looked up from the charts Pippa and Ling Fai were creating. The uneasy energy pouring off her host was as much warning as his words. “The Librarian?” she asked.

  “Conan. He forwarded this from the Librarian. First thirty-five, then one-one-eight. What the devil is she trying to tell us?”

  “GPS coordinates,” Dorrie said excitedly. “Check Google. Conan had a message some time ago saying Mojave with Dst added. See if that correlates.”

  Everyone in the room stared at her. Since her mother’s death, she’d been accustomed to keeping her own counsel. She had no more idea what the mysterious Librarian was trying to convey than anyone else, but if she was using GPS coordinates… Dorrie tried not to choke on a surge of hope.

  She was surrounded by people she trusted, who believed in her. She knew Conan didn’t want to raise hopes about their brothers, but she simply couldn’t withhold vital information just to shield the Oswins from more pain. Not if there was any hope at all that she had correctly interpreted her instincts.

  “Bo,” she explained. “He’s a human GPS. Maybe Bo is sending his coordinates to your Librarian. I don’t know how. He’s not psychic. But somehow,” she said with a plea for them to believe.

  “Bo?” Pippa asked.

  Grandmother Ling was already folding up the charts and waiting expectantly while Oz poked numbers into his phone.

  “James Ling Bo Franklin, my brother. He was the helicopter pilot flying with Magnus Oswin when it went down.” Dorrie folded her hands in her lap and waited to see what happened. She had no idea what to do next, but her heart was pounding harder than if she’d fallen off a cliff again. Bo was alive. She knew it. She could feel it. He was out there in the desert. Please, let this be the key they needed.

  Oz held up the screen of his phone to his wife. Pippa looked shocked.

  “The Mojave airport is 35 degrees latitude, 118 degrees longitude,” Oz reported in a controlled voice that didn’t quite hide his disbelief.

  “Those aren’t precise coordinates,” Dorrie reminded him. “We don’t know how the numbers are being relayed. When Bo plays his GPS game, there are all sorts of other numbers involved plus things like west or north to indicate distance from that intersection. But it’s a starting place.” Her pulse accelerated. Was he really believing her? Was it possible?

  “We were told the helicopter went down at sea,” Oz said, narrowing his eyes and glaring at her. “Do you know something we don’t?”

  “Bo’s energy isn’t gone,” she said simply. “I don’t know how else to explain it. We’re connected. I feel him. When my mother died, I felt her energy threads being ripped from the fabric of my life. But Bo’s threads are still there. We were told there were no bodies, that they’re still searching for the wreckage. Something is wrong. But I have utterly no idea how or why or what to do.”

  “Then Magnus could still be alive?” Oz almost shouted, starting to his feet, until Pippa tugged him down again.

  “We can’t just drive out to Mojave and start asking questions,” Pippa said, holding Oz’s arm. “I have no magic song to lure them out of hiding, if that’s what they’re doing. We don’t even know for certain the numbers mean what you think.”

  Magic song? Dorrie didn’t question. Siren voice, magic song, got it.

  “Find General Adams, and then you will know,” Ling Fai said. “It is his son who killed my Mei. It was his sons’ mother who worked with the Vile Ones. They know what we are.”

  “But why would they want to kill anyone?” Pippa asked.

  “Perhaps they only wish to kill Dorrie, so they may keep Bo,” her grandmother said, as if such things were perfectly normal.

  Killing her might almost make sense. Since Feng Li was appealing his conviction, he knew Dorrie was a witness and could put him back in jail.

  But if they wanted Bo’s GPS abilities and had learned that she and Conan had been looking into their company… Keeping quiet about her own gift had definitely made her expendable.

  “If the general’s sons are trying to kidnap Bo’s kids, we need to put Bo’s family somewhere safe before we do anything,” Dorrie warned.

  “And you,” Oz added.

  Oh, no, hiding wasn’t what she wanted to do anymore. Dorrie glared at all of them. “Not on your life. I’m the one who can sense Bo’s energy. I’m the one who can find him. And I’m the one who can shoot down the sons of bitches with my bare hands.”

  Her audience looked shocked, but she damned well didn’t care. She’d had to lose nearly everything she loved to reach this point. She had little left to lose, but she would take precautions. “Have Conan verify that my mother’s murderer is still in the house where he’s supposed to be.”

  ***

  Ryan Franklin refused to allow Conan to push his chair off the elevator. He flipped a switch on the chair and roared into FF’s foyer. The receptionist nearly fell backward in surprise, then jumped hurriedly to her feet. “Welcome back, Mr. Franklin!”

  Strolling beside the wheelchair while Dorrie’s father greeted employees swarming from the back, Conan punched in the phone number of the disposable phone he’d left with Dorrie. When she cautiously answered, he relaxed. He hated leaving her alone. Who knew what she’d be up to when he wasn’t looking?

  The realization that the thefts and the foundation probably had nothing to do with shooters and kidnappers was an ever-present problem nagging at the back of his mind, but until he proved it, he couldn’t move forward.

  “I’m with your father at the office. I’ve sent FF’s money back to their bank accounts with a note from your father attached. I’m hoping for fireworks. Can you see these shots from the video camera?” He punched up the camera on his iPhone and aimed it at her father first. Dorrie exclaimed in surprise. Conan continued strolling into the office, leaving Franklin behind.

  In one cubicle, the blond, plump bookkeeper named Tillie was worriedly showing an older woman something on her screen. “A supervisor?” Conan asked, giving Dorrie a shot of what he was seeing.

  “Tillie is a first-class bookkeeper,” Dorrie replied. “She would see the deposit first and call in management. That’s the accounting department supervisor with her. All proper and aboveboard. Where’s Zimmer?”

  “I’m looking for Zimmer. Presumably he has access to the account and can see the deposit, too?”

  “Just a minute,” Dorrie said, “and I’ll borrow Pippa’s phone and call Tillie.”

  Conan watched as Tillie picked up the receiver. When both women glanced up at him, he grinned and kept on walking.

  “They have the deposit,” Dorrie said into his ear. It was like having his own personal elf sitting on his shoulder. He was kind of enjoying it. “Watch your back,” she warned. “I think they’re calling security. Is your Fred Liu around?”

  “He or one of his men will be in the building. I’ll tell them to keep an eye on your father. He i
nsisted on coming, and he’s our weak spot.”

  Conan figured if Dorrie really could send energy arrows, she’d be knocking him over about now for placing her father in jeopardy. Apparently, phones weren’t a good conveyor of dim mak. He used his spare phone to text Fred while keeping the video open for Dorrie.

  As Conan strolled down the glass corridor, he could see a gray suit and balding head leaning over Dorrie’s desk in the cubicle at the end of the hall. Baldie appeared to be fiddling with the computer’s wires. Dang, such a predictable anticlimax. He’d really wanted to catch a Chinese predator.

  Conan turned the camera so Dorrie could see as well. “Anything you want me to ask Zimmer?”

  “Like what the hell he’s doing at my desk?” she asked in a voice dripping sarcasm.

  “Looks like he’s trying to fry your computer system. Want to shoot some arrows at him?” he said mockingly, gesturing with his head when he saw Fred Liu’s man arrive through a rear door.

  “Consider yourself smacked,” she told him. “How can he fry a computer system? And why would he?”

  Conan leaned against the sunny wall of windows, crossing his ankles as the security man worked his way through the cubicles. “I’m assuming he’s created paperwork proving you stole the money, and he figures taking out the computers will cover up any trail.”

  “So Zimmer really is our thief?” she asked in wonder. “Does that make any sense? Should I call my dad and tell him to get down there and watch the spectacle?”

  “Let’s wait to see if he has a weapon.” Conan watched Tillie’s expression turn to one of horror as the servers crashed.

  Instead of keeping his back to the office to hide what he was doing, Zimmer really should have been sitting at Dorrie’s nicely arranged desk, watching the door. Then he’d have seen Conan and the security guard and maybe had time to run. Probably not, though. The treasurer was old and the cubicle farm was a maze.