by Ryk E. Spoor
I sighed. Syl wasn’t coming over today—the Silver Stake had three shipments that needed to be classified, and she didn’t want to be faced with Verne right now anyway.
I glanced at an envelope on my desk—one which, under any other circumstances, would have me calling Syl for champagne and a very, very expensive dinner out. But it barely gave me a momentary smile. I sighed; putting the CD into a protective case, I put the case into my backpack. Time to send it off for delivery.
As I opened the front door, I saw a package lying on the doorstep. I picked it up, noting that it had no mailing stamps, return address, or postal marks of any kind.
Belatedly, it occurred to me that I might expect to start getting mail bombs soon. Well, if it was a bomb, it wasn’t motion-activated. I hefted it a couple of times. It was light; not much more than paper in here, I thought. There could be enough plastique in it to do serious damage, though. It didn’t take much high explosive to do a number on you.
I shrugged. Not likely to be a bomb, what the hell. I ripped it open.
No explosions. Looking inside, I saw an envelope and a sheet of paper. It was a note:
Jason, you have the goddamned devil’s luck. Here are the IDs. Destroy the disk. Since I know you’re too damn curious for your own good, I’ll let you in on this latest development: somehow, whatever you’re up to got the attention of one of my bosses and he caught me. Instead of shutting us down, he told me to make the IDs. Must be personal—he told me not to mention this to the other members of our group. So this one’s free. But I’d worry, if I were you. If HE thinks you’re involved in something important enough to let you off a felony charge without so much as a warning, you’re playing with nukes, not fire.
The Jammer
I stared at the package, then opened the envelope. Birth certificate…passport…driver’s license…Jesus, even documents showing he was proficient in woodworking and construction, as well as a Black Belt certification from Budoukai Tai Kwan Do in California. I looked closer. The passport was genuine—seal and all.
Who were these people? And what the hell had I gotten myself into now?
Chapter 44: Paternity and Possibility
“Senator MacLain?”
“This is Paula MacLain. Mr. Jason Wood?” The voice on the other end was as distinctive over the phone as it was in public address or on television: precise, educated, pleasant yet cool, that carried both authority and intelligence; it reminded me of Katharine Hepburn.
“Yes, ma’am. I don’t know if you know who I am—”
“Young man, if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be speaking to you.” There was a tinge of humor that took any sting out of the words. “In any case, a United States senator who isn’t aware of the recent events in Morgantown would be a sad example of a legislator, don’t you agree?”
“I certainly do, Senator. And I certainly didn’t mean to imply—”
“Don’t concern yourself with my feelings, Mr. Wood. I know when offense is intended and when it isn’t. Now that you and I have finally managed to connect, let’s waste no more time. What can I do for you? You were intriguingly uninformative to my staff.”
I took a deep breath. I’d decided to go for the most honest route I could, while tapdancing around the more dangerous areas. “Senator, a few weeks ago, a man walked into my office asking me for help in locating his family. To make a long story short, he originally comes from Vietnam. And the descriptions of his two children, and pictures made from those descriptions, match those of your adopted children in great detail.”
There was a long silence. I’d expected as much, given her history. Finally, “That…is quite remarkable, Mr. Wood. Am I to presume that you would like to find a way to confirm that they are, or are not, your client’s children? And that he would subsequently want to obtain custody of them, if they are indeed his children?” Her voice was carefully controlled, but not perfectly so; she wasn’t taking this as calmly as she’d like me to think.
“Basically correct, Senator. But we also don’t wish to distress the children, either by giving them false hopes or by forcing them to leave a stable home. What I was hoping was that we could permit someone you trust to take a sample for genetic comparison and do a paternity test.”
Senator MacLain was known for her quick decisions. “That much I will certainly do. But I must warn you and your client, Mr. Wood: I will never relinquish custody of my children unless I am absolutely certain that they will be happy and well-cared for, regardless of who is the blood parent. I love them both very much.”
I nodded, though she couldn’t see it. “Senator…we expected no less, and to be honest if you felt any differently you wouldn’t be a fit mother for them. It’s not going to be easy either way, but I assure you, I feel the same way. I’ll make that clear to my client.”
“I appreciate that, Mr. Wood. And I appreciate, now, the trouble you went to to keep this all confidential. Let me see…” I heard the sounds of tapping on a computer keyboard. “Ah. If you would be so kind as to have the sample sent to Dr. Julian Gray, 101 Main Street, Carmel, New York, he will see to the comparisons. I have no trouble with your obtaining the samples for him; falsifying genetic evidence would seem a bit beyond anyone’s capacities at the present time.”
“Indeed. Thank you very much for your time, Senator. Good-bye.”
Maybe not beyond anyone’s capacities, I thought as I hung up the phone, but certainly beyond mine.
The invoice for the State Police job finished printing. I stuffed it into the package along with the originals and enhanced versions. Sealing it up, I affixed the prewritten label and dumped it into my outbox.
So much for the simple part of my current life.
It had taken a couple of days to install my newest machine, a Lumiere Industries’ TERA-5. Without Verne’s money, I’d still be looking at the catalog, drooling, and thinking “maybe next decade.” Now that it was up and running, I’d given it the biggest assignment I had: sorting through all the recent satellite data that I’d been able to find, beg, borrow, or…acquire, and looking for various indications of hidden installations. So far, it had given me at least twenty positives, none of which had turned out promising. I was starting to wonder if there was a bug in the program; some of the positives were pretty far outside of the parameters of the installation as described by Kafan. There was one that might be a hidden POW camp—I’d forwarded that to one of the MIA-POW groups I knew about. I didn’t think those camps existed anymore, but maybe there was more than hearsay behind the rumors.
The TERA-5 was chugging away, meter by detailed meter on the map; this was going to take a while, even for the fastest commercially available general-purpose machine ever made. Although a machine specifically designed for map-comparison searching would be far faster, it be a lot more expensive, and next to useless for anything else; there’s always a catch somewhere. I preferred to wait a little longer and have a use for the machine later on as well. My only consolation was that only an intelligence agency likely had better equipment and programs for the job.
I thought about Verne. Given the situation with his health, I didn’t know what good this was going to do. Without Verne, we were helpless, even if I could locate the installation. I looked sadly down at the thick document on my desk. Verne’s will. Morgan as executor, Kafan and his family as major heirs, and, maybe not so surprisingly, me and Sylvie figuring prominently in it as well. There were also bequests to his efficient and often nearly invisible staff. The sight of the will told me more than I needed to know. Verne knew his time was up.
My friend was dying. It hit me hard all of a sudden. I collapsed into my chair, angry, sad, and frustrated all at once. He’d been the gateway through which a whole world of wonder opened up for me, and he said I’d helped him regain his faith. It wasn’t fair that it end like this, with him wasting away to nothing for no explainable reason.
And there was nothing I could do. Last night, he’d taken us through his house to show us all of its se
crets. “Just in case,” he said, but we knew there was no doubt in his mind. The place he called “the Heart,” built out of habit and tradition, only recently having been used by him for the purposes that it had existed…once more to become an unused cave when he died. All his papers, books, and tablets, here and elsewhere.
He’d found his lost son, I’d found his son’s children, and for what? He wouldn’t live long enough to see them reunited. Dammit! I slapped at the wall switch, killing the lights as I turned to leave.
Then I froze.
I remembered what I’d said to Verne months ago, when Virigar first arrived: “I don’t like coincidences. I don’t believe in them.”
What if my idea was still basically true?
There was just one possibility. I switched the lights back on, spun the chair around, and rebooted the terminal. It was a crazy idea…but no crazier than anything else that had been happening. Just a few things to check, and I’d know.
It took several hours—the data was hard to find—but finally my screen lit up with some critical pieces of information. I grabbed my gun, spare magazines, a small toolbox, and a large flashlight and sprinted out the door.
Chapter 45: That Future is Past
Morgan opened the door, startled as I pushed past him without so much as a “hello.” “Master Jason…?”
I looked around, shrugged, jogged into the living room and climbed up on a chair. Verne was in that room, staring at me curiously out of hollow eyes set in a leathery, lined face and framed by pure white hair. “J…Jason,” he said slowly, as I mumbled a curse to myself and dragged the chair over a bit, “what…are you doing?”
“Maybe making a fool of myself.”
I reached up and unscrewed one of the bulbs from the fixture and pulled the fixture itself towards me. It looked normal…
The other lights on the fixture went out. Morgan stood near the switch. “Perhaps, if you are intending on tinkering with the lighting, you may wish the electricity off, sir.”
“Thanks, Morgan,” I said absently. Pulling out a small screwdriver, I unfastened the interior baseplate of the fixture.
There. Underneath the base. “Morgan, you said it. Kill the electricity—all the electricity in the house! Now!”
“Sir…?” Morgan hesitated for a moment, then hurried off towards the basement and the main breakers. I switched on the flashlight; a moment later the house was plunged into darkness.
“What…what is going on, Jason?” Verne asked.
“I was right all along, Verne,” I said. Morgan entered; he had a much larger portable light. “Unless you bought that light in the last few days, you might even want to shut off that light. Go with candles.” I turned back to Verne. “It wasn’t magic. It was technology that was killing you. Every one of your lights—and maybe even some other devices—is fitted with a gadget that turns ordinary light into the kind of light that hurts you. My guess is it’s managing to get filaments to spike high enough temperatures to radiate UV somehow, along with everything else; cuts their lifetime down a lot, but they only need this to work for a few months. In the short term, it can’t damage you, but with enough exposure…”
“…yes,” Verne said slowly. “It…it becomes like a slow cancer, eating away at me. But even in the day, when I sleep in darkness?”
“Probably a device in your rooms does the same thing. If, as I suspect, it’s not just one wavelength of light but a combination of them, it probably can’t do enough in darkness to continue hurting you during the day, but it could slow your recovery so that you’d always be getting damaged more than you were healing during your rest, especially if the really critical wavelengths are combinations of ultraviolet and infrared.”
“How did you know?”
“There were a lot of clues, but the biggest one—which didn’t register until almost too late—was that the few times you were outside of your house, you actually started to look a tiny bit better. But when you and Sylvie couldn’t find anything, I was stumped…until I realized that coincidence is damn unlikely.”
We both thought for a moment. “I must confess, Jason, that I don’t quite understand,” Verne said finally. His voice was slightly steadier already, testament to the tremendous recuperative powers that were his, and I started to relax slightly. It looked like I might be right. I knew I was.
“Well, to kill you, someone would have to know what you are, exactly. Maybe one of your old enemies, right? Who else would know precisely how to kill you subtly, without alerting everyone you are close too? But this started just as Kafan showed up, so, to me, that’s not a coincidence.
“What if the lab that Raiakafan escaped from was being run by the same people who were your enemies, Verne?”
“Impossible,” Verne breathed. “After all this time…”
“But it would explain everything. And there’s evidence for it. Consider Raiakafan himself—if your enemies didn’t have a hand in this, how else? You survived all these years, they certainly could have. And another thing, one that’s bothered us both for quite a while: Klein. Where the hell did he come from? Only another vampire—of the kind made by one of your enemies—could create him. And what did he do? He set you up, that’s what—tried to get you killed off! Somebody knew where you were, and what you were! Somebody who knew that converting Klein would give them a weapon to trap you, and they damn near succeeded. If Virigar hadn’t shown up, I suspect there would have been another attack on your life.” I took another breath, then continued, “And look at the timing. Klein showed up sporting a new set of fangs, if my calendar’s right, a few weeks after Kafan whacked the good doctor. They knew who Kafan really was, and they knew where he was going.”
“Very good, Mr. Wood.”
I knew that voice. “And Ed Sommer’s business started about the same time. Funny thing, that, Ed. Digging into your background produced some fascinating blanks.”
Ed was holding a large-caliber gun—a .44, I guessed. While ordinary bullets wouldn’t hurt Verne and probably not Morgan, I suspected that he would not be using ordinary bullets. For me, of course, the point was moot; if you fired a wad of gum at the speed of a bullet it’d probably kill me. “I’ve gotta hand it to you, Mr. Wood. If we hadn’t been watching the house constantly over the past couple of days, you might have blown the whole thing. We wanted him,” he nodded at Verne, “to be unconscious before we actually moved.”
“How very convenient for you that I happened to decide on remodeling at just the right time.” Verne tried to deliver the lines in his usual measured, sure manner, but his weakening had gone far past the point where iron will could banish it.
“Convenient, but hardly necessary. Morgan, down on the floor. Once we’d tested to make sure that our precautions rendered us invisible to your casual inspection, the installation could have been made at any time. More dangerous, but no major enterprise is without risk. And after we began remodeling, the whole house was wired in more than one way. It would have been a lot easier if our…subcontract that sent Klein over had worked out, but hey, measure once, cut twice, right?” He smiled. “We learned a great deal recently. It does bother me about Kafan’s new identity. Why anyone would take that much interest in this case is a matter for concern. But not for you.” Ed shifted his aim directly to Morgan and, to my horror, began to squeeze the trigger.
Weakened and sick Verne might have been, but when it came to the life of his friend and oldest retainer all his supernal speed must have come back. There was movement, a blur that fogged the darkened air between Ed and Morgan for a split second; then Ed Sommer was hurled backwards into the front stairwell with an impact that shook the house. The gun vanished somewhere in the darkness.
The lights came back on; there must have been some of Ed’s people in the house. Caught in the light again, I could see Verne sag slightly.
From the stairwell came a curse, but it wasn’t the voice of a human being. A monstrous figure tore its way out of the wreckage, a hideous cross between man, liz
ard, and insect. Humanoid in form, scaled and clawed and with patches of spiked, glistening armor from which hung the tattered remains of Ed’s clothing. “A good final effort, Sh’ekatha,” the Ed-thing hissed. “But foredoomed to failure.”
While it was focused on Verne, I had time to draw my own gun. Its gaze shifted towards me just as I got a bead on it.
BlamBlamBlamBlamBlamBlamBlamBlamBlamBlam! I emptied the full ten rounds into the monstrosity. It staggered with the impact, and toppled backwards. “Run!” I shouted. Verne and Morgan were already moving. I ejected the empty magazine and slammed in a fresh one as I sprinted after them. A single glance had sufficed to show me that the bullets hadn’t done any notable damage. “Just once I’d like to find something I can shoot and kill, like any normal person!”
Verne staggered down the basement steps to be caught by something indescribable that tried to rip him apart. Morgan intervened, shoving the interloper through a nearby wall with unexpected strength. “Keep going, sir!” he said over his shoulder as he kept his attention on his adversary. Distantly, we could hear other things smashing; the rest of the household must be under attack now as well!
“Damn you, Jason!” I heard a voice roar as we pried open the door to the Heart. “This was supposed to be a subtle operation!” Massive feet thundered down the stairs behind us.
The door swung open; I shoved Verne through it and then stepped through myself, pulling the door shut as a huge shadow rushed towards us. I pulled the door shut and twisted the lock. The impact on the other side shook rock dust from the tunnel ceiling.
“It will not stop him for long, Jason,” Verne forced out.
“A little time’s better than none,” I gasped.
I’d seen the Heart a few days before, as a sort of postscript to Verne’s story. Here, things seemed quieter, like a summer forest in midafternoon; lazy, sleepy, silent. In the center of the large cavern, a perfectly circular pool of pure water shimmered in the light, blue as the vault of heaven. At the far side, a squat obelisk of black obsidian. The Mirror of the Sky and the Heartstone. Hanging on the far wall was some kind of sheath or casing.