There was nothing he could think of, unless…unless Santiago had been right about the fire at the Planter’s Ball last night. The entire incident was still under investigation, but given the thoroughness of the burn damage on the corpses found on the property, and the lack of survivors, it was assumed to be an attack on the Linfield Cartel. The prime suspect, according to Central’s Administration, was a local Witch coven with which the cartel had been competing in recent years. There was talk of dispatching the Auditors to find the Witches, assuming the Hegemony’s own forces could not locate them and deliver retribution. Santiago had been agitated during the morning briefing, however, insisting that his gut told him that the attackers were in fact from another cartel.
If that was the case…
Daniel Morgan didn’t have an opportunity to finish the thought, because it took both hands and his full strength to avoid slamming face-first into the dashboard of the suddenly immobile golf cart.
“What the hell, Mauricio?”
“I don’t know,” the boy said, pushing the start button repeatedly. “The engine died, and the brakes locked up. I don’t know why!”
“Forget it,” Daniel said, stepping from the golf cart with his Colt at the ready. “We’ll just have to get out of here on foot.”
“But, sir…”
“Move it, son. We don’t have time for debate.”
“Right away, sir,” Mauricio responded crisply, pausing to gather and ready his LaRue OBR Tactical – a modern variant on the AR-15 platform of which he was very proud, though the various shades of green-and-grey plastic always made it look like a toy to Daniel. He checked the clip, charged the rifle, then followed Daniel into the brush. “My father and the convoy have arrived at the gate, sir, but it appears to have lost power. The guards are not present, and they cannot activate the gate mechanism manually.”
The bad feeling in Daniel Morgan’s gut grew worse as he made his way through scrub oak and mesquite.
“Climb the fence,” he snarled. “Cut the gate. Tell them to do what they need to do. I want support and an evac, sooner rather than later.”
“Right, sir,” Mauricio affirmed, resuming a hushed Spanish conversation over his headset – which cut off suddenly, in mid-word.
“What’s wrong?”
Daniel already had an idea, and he wasn’t waiting for an answer. He set the best pace his arthritic knees could handle, and the boy barreled along next to him, rifle at the ready.
“Comms are down,” Mauricio said, tapping his earpiece futilely. “No idea what the problem is.”
“Our enemies,” Daniel Morgan snapped, wishing he had the time to stop and scan his surroundings, but with scant hundreds of meters separating him from escape, he didn’t think it was worth the delay. “That is the problem.”
“I don’t know, sir,” Mauricio said uncertainly. “The channel is secure, and the comm gear is hardened. I don’t see how…”
“Worry about it later. We need to get out of here, first.”
“Right, sir. I’ll take point.”
The boy brushed ahead of him, blazing a path through the small trees and undergrowth, checking behind him occasionally and slowing his pace so that Daniel could keep up. His breath was shallow, and the bad feeling in his gut had been replaced with an ache in his chest, where he had a bypass and a pacemaker installed a few years ago. The doctors had found an irregularity during the installation of the cardiac shunt, which apparently could have killed him if they had not. Since then, he had barely noticed it, even when he exerted himself, sailing or on the golf course. But now his chest was burning, and his left arm was tingling.
“Hold on,” Daniel Morgan commanded, coming to a stop and resting his hand against a slim willow tree. “I need a minute.”
Mauricio’s eyes widened, and he almost shook his head, before he remembered his place. His brown eyes scanned the scrub behind them with a frenetic intensity.
“Are you certain, sir? They could be very close, now.”
“Yes,” Daniel panted, his vision swimming and his legs shaking. “I need to catch my breath.”
“Right, sir,” Mauricio said, crouching behind him and flipping open the scope mounted on the LaRue. It was an expensive toy – a thermal imager, Israeli design, not available even on the military market yet – but the ability to sight through meters of vegetation made it a worthwhile investment at that particular moment. “Sir, I think I see…”
Mauricio trailed off, and he turned the rifle on its side and started to fiddle with the scope.
“What? What is it, son?”
Daniel gasped out the words. His lips were numb, and the fire in his chest was almost unbearable. He was hyperventilating, and only his grip on the tree kept him from falling over.
“The scope went dead, sir. Maybe the battery, or…”
Mauricio cried out, tearing the earpiece from his ear and tossing it away. Daniel didn’t have to ask why. Even at a slight distance, he could hear the squealing of feedback being emitted by the tiny speaker.
Daniel Morgan wanted to use his protocol, to try to locate their attackers, but the pain in his chest and arm made it out of the question. It was all he could do to keep breathing.
Mauricio tore the thermal imager from the rifle and scanned the terrain behind them using the iron sights, looking for any unnatural movement or flashes of color, but the steady breeze caused too much motion in the grasses and the tree branches to be certain of anything. He spent the better part of a minute panning across the area behind them in a fruitless search for the pursuers.
When he turned around to check on Daniel Morgan, the old man was already on the ground, lying on his side with his face in the dirt. Mauricio cried out and bent over him, rolled him onto his back and took his wrist to check his pulse. The old man’s mouth moved like a fish out of water, as if he were trying to sound out words that he couldn’t say. His pulse was ragged and irregular, and Mauricio could only watch helplessly as it petered out.
***
Vivik left before class ended, so Alex never had a chance to speak with him. Alex asked around, but no one had seen him leave, or could say where he might have gone.
It would have to wait. Alex returned to Eerie, who was still gathering up her books.
“Wanna get lunch?”
“I can’t,” Eerie explained, picking up her ever-present knitting basket. “I’m supposed to do a session with Rebecca, then I have Biology.”
“Too bad. Hey, is Vivik in your class?”
Eerie considered for an unreasonably long period of time, but Alex just waited. He knew that the Changeling struggled to communicate, particularly when she was asked to recall a name or a face. He suspected that most people looked roughly similar to her.
“No,” she decided, shaking her head. “Not so far.”
“Okay. We’re still on for tonight, right?”
“Yes,” Eerie said, hinting again at a smile. “I haven’t changed my mind.”
“Good. I’ll come by around nine. Alright?”
“Yes,” Eerie said, going up on her toes to brush his cheek with her lips.
Alex just watched her leave, not moving until the door closed behind her. Then he realized he still had his hand on his cheek, and dropped it, hurriedly collecting his books and heading for the door.
He caught Katya outside the dining hall. Anastasia and Timor must have had other plans, because they were nowhere to be seen, a fact for which he was grateful. Even if Anastasia was again to be his benefactor, that didn’t mean he wanted to deal with her taunting while he ironed out the final details.
“Hey, Katya, wait up!”
Katya paused, holding the door for him.
“What’s up, Alex? Hungry?”
“I guess,” he said, ducking into the air-conditioned vastness of the mostly empty dining hall and dumping his books on available table. “Wanted to check in with you.”
He followed Katya to the cafeteria line and took a tray and a place in line.
<
br /> “About what?”
Katya looked over the entrees with a seriousness that she seemed to reserve solely for food, before selecting some sort of spinach wrap and a dish of sweet potato fries.
“About tonight,” Alex said, leaning close so he could lower his voice. “You know.”
He grabbed a ham sandwich on wheat without much thought, then added a green salad liberally supplemented with croutons and green olives.
“Oh yeah,” Katya said, taking a piece of a pound cake from the dessert counter, and then, after a short deliberation, a small dish of chocolate-dipped biscotti. “That thing.”
Alex skipped desert but grabbed coffee, then followed Katya to their table.
“Yeah. Kind of a big deal to me, you know.” He took the seat beside her, so he wouldn’t need to raise his voice. That attracted curious glances from the various students in the dining hall, but he ignored them. Gossip was inevitable in a closed environment like the Academy, and Alex had learned not to let it bother him. Katya was largely indifferent to outside opinion, and presently more concerned with lunch than her reputation. “Is everything still good? This is still gonna happen, right?”
“Yeah,” Katya said, talking around her wrap. “Good to go. Ana set it all up.”
She finished her bite, wiped her mouth with a napkin, then bent to fish through her book bag. She slid an old-fashioned brass key along the table to him, along with a folded piece of notebook paper, further titillating their nosey onlookers. Alex silenced them with a glare, taking advantage of the newfound reputation that entering the Program provided. He figured he might as well get some sort of benefit from his time in the combat track. He had suffered enough for it, after all.
“What’s this?”
Alex unfolded the paper and scanned the neatly penned, all-caps text inside.
“Directions and a key to the front door,” Katya explained, returning to her lunch. “For your little date. That shit was hard to come by. Remember, you owe us for this, okay? This is no small favor.”
“No,” Alex said, refolding the paper and pocketing it, along with the key. “I owe you, Katya. I don’t owe the Black Sun anything – and if they disagree, I’m happy to have them try to collect on it. You, on the other hand, have been a good friend, and I appreciate it.”
Katya glanced up from her fries, which she always ate with a fork and knife. She looked surprised and maybe a little embarrassed.
“Don’t act all grown up and mature with me,” she muttered, chewing. “Ana might not see it quite the same way, you know.”
“I don’t care,” Alex said, almost giddy at the prospect of the evening. “You’re sure that no one will be there, right?”
Katya nodded.
“Yeah. Nobody even knows about it but Rebecca, and she’s going to be busy this evening. There’s big meeting over at Administration. Don’t know what it’s about, but all the players are going to be there – Anastasia included. You are free and clear till midnight. Just make sure to clean up after yourselves. Don’t leave anything behind that will tip Rebecca off that someone was there, okay? And lock the door behind you.”
“I will,” Alex said, forcing himself to take a bite of the sandwich that he was too excited to have any interest in. “How did you find out about this place, anyway?”
“Back when Rebecca was out of commission,” Katya said, shrugging as if it weren’t important, “Ana figured out all sorts of things she was keeping secret. Don’t ask me how, ’cause I don’t know. Anastasia liked the idea of the place herself – she’s into that Japanese shit, you know – and she wrangled a copy of the key. Not sure how. Perk of being at the top of the food chain, I suppose.”
“I guess so. Hey, Katya? You talk to Vivik recently?”
“What? No,” Katya said, rolling her eyes while she finished the end of her wrap. “Why would I? It’s not as if we are friends…”
“Yeah,” Alex said moodily, pushing the salad around with his fork. “I know the feeling.”
***
William Tran wasn’t sure what to make of it, when he first saw the woman in the road.
He had insisted on driving his own car home from the wedding, as was his usual practice. He didn’t have to, of course. In fact, his security probably would have preferred it if he had not. But Tran was not in the business of making security guards happy. He was in the business of running the Nebel Cartel, one of the older satellite cartels firmly in the orbit of the Black Sun, and that meant he could drive his own damn car.
He hadn’t wanted to attend the wedding in the first place, and had only done so as a favor to the CEO of VEL Industries, the largest of the corporations under the cartel’s control. Bringing Cynthia and the kids had seemed like a good way to kill two birds with one stone – she had been complaining lately that he wasn’t spending enough time with the family, and she relished the opportunity to wear a pair of the expensive shoes that she bought at depressingly regular intervals. It wasn’t the intolerable affair he had expected – the champagne was good, the live band had played jazz standards, including a healthy dose of Ella Fitzgerald, and the presumably happy couple had the good sense to provide a separate and supervised space with catering for the children.
Mildly buzzed, but definitely not inebriated, William Tran could only question his sanity when the woman in the hooded jacket appeared in the freeway in front of him in her patent leather shoes and fur-lined coat. She was standing in the fast lane of Interstate 405 in Santa Ana, in the midst of moderately heavy evening traffic. He blinked hard, half-expecting the world to right itself by the time he opened his eyes. Then his wife screamed, and William hit the brakes hard, knowing perfectly well that he would come up short, throwing an arm out to protect his wife from the impact.
The car skidded partway onto the paved area beside the center divider, but it did not roll. There was no impact, no body to go under the car or in through the windshield. Behind him, he could hear his children screaming, but that was out of fear, not pain. He turned around to check on them anyway.
The woman was sitting in his backseat, between his two-year-old daughter and his six-year-old son, her arms thrown casually around both of them. Her chestnut hair hung in tight curls, disappearing into the hood of her jacket, which was lined with silver fur.
“What is this? Who are you?”
“Not important, though this might have been slightly more satisfying had you recognized me.” The woman’s tone was distasteful, her hands running over his daughter’s sparse hair, speaking so rapidly that it was difficult to make out the words. He caught a flash of the ring she wore on her middle finger, a rose gold band with a dull stone that looked a bit like amber, and for some reason, it seemed familiar, but he couldn’t place it. “You always ask the wrong questions. And now it’s too late. Always the same, so many years away and it never changes. Why would my name matter? I am not important. What is important is how you die.”
“Tell me, then,” Tran said, through gritted teeth, his hands sparkling with kinetic energy. “Tell me how it is that I die.”
“Badly,” she said, frowning and seizing his son’s arm, twisting it so that he cried out and struggled futilely in her grip. “You always die badly. Did you know that? Perhaps I told you this already?”
“I have never met you,” Tran said carefully, weighing his options and playing for time, eyeing the headlights in the rearview mirror, “so this is the first I have heard of it.”
“Sorry. I’ve been so busy lately, I’m starting to lose track,” she said, silencing the boy with her finger to his lips. “You are the head of the Nebel Cartel, are you not? The survivor of many attempts on your life, as I understand.”
William Tran winced and activated his emergency blinkers, while drivers honked and traffic snarled.
“I have been fortunate,” he responded tersely. “These things do happen.”
“Don’t they just? I admire your poise and confidence, even if it is feigned. For the sake of your children, I imag
ine?”
William shook his head, wondering if his protocol would be enough, where the car full of guards that followed him everywhere was, and why they hadn’t responded.
“In that sense,” she said, taking a stainless steel revolver from inside of her coat and laying it flat in her lap, his son shrinking away as far as the car would allow, “I think you are quite fortunate.”
He spared a look out of the window to his left. Traffic crawled by, and the driver of the Toyota truck that passed him gave him the finger, though they couldn’t see anything through his the deeply tinted windows of his armored Mercedes. There was no sign of his security.
“Tell me,” he said softly, sparing a glance at his wife, white-faced but features composed, waiting for him to give the signal. “How am I lucky?”
“Your death will throw your cartel into disarray, and cause years of infighting and retribution. At least you don’t have to worry about something happening to your little ones.”
All of a sudden, a memory came back to him. The ring. He had seen a similar one before, in the Great Hall, on the hand of David Thule.
He risked a glance out the window, hoping to see the similarly armored Mercedes that should have been trailing his own – or even the police, for God’s sake – but all he saw were blinking turn signals and angry drivers. The woman followed his gaze and smiled.
“Your guards? Dead. Already dead. Eliminated by Brennan Thule, my cousin – surely you remember him? He can do fascinating things with cars these days, thanks to all the computer-controlled elements.”
A glimmer of hope. The longer he kept her talking, the better his chances were.
“Is there anything I can offer, in exchange for my life?”
“Oh, I’m fine, thank you,” the woman said, laughing, her words coming rapid-fire, one on the heels of the next. “It’s kind of you to offer, though.”
The Far Shores (The Central Series) Page 20