by Dakota Banks
“Maliha?”
Eliu. Glass. Oh no. Rosie and her babies.
“Are all of you in my apartment?”
“What? Yes.”
“Stay there. Lock the door. Put something heavy in front of it that you can see and hear if it moves across the floor.” Useless, useless. “Tell Hound to get the weapons out. The rocket-propelled grenade launchers, too.”
When Maliha had remodeled her public apartment, she’d put in a large gun safe and insisted that she train them all on every pistol and rifle in the safe. For Yanmeng, she also let him choose edged weapons and fighting sticks.
“Take shifts watching the door until I get there, at least two at a time. Amaro, watch the high-speed camera. If anything shows up that looks like a streak or a blurred figure, all of you get out of there.”
There was a short silence on his end of the phone this time. “Mogue’s coming after us now, isn’t he?”
“It’s just a hunch.”
“Hunch, bullshit! He said as much in his note, and anyway, it’s his pattern, start with the relatives and move up, just like he made Fynn experience the pain of all those deaths of people close to him.”
“I think maybe you should gather everybody there. Rosie, the kids, Alex, everybody.”
She heard Amaro cursing under his breath and Hound cursing loudly in the background. He’d figured out what was going on from Amaro’s side of the phone conversation.
“How about Randy?”
“Randy, yes. Do whatever you have to do to get her there and keep her there, at gunpoint if you have to. Tell Hound to fire the RPG as soon as whatever furniture you have in front of the door moves. As soon as it moves. Take care.”
“You too.”
Maliha called the number for her private jet’s pilot and told him to be ready to fly from Chicago to Winnipeg the next day. He thanked her for the advance notice, probably the most she’d ever given him.
She bought a ticket for a flight to Chicago. She tried to nap on the short flight so she’d be fresh when she got home. She couldn’t sleep, though. Every time she closed her eyes, she had a vision of opening her apartment door and finding a bloodbath. She told herself that Mogue wouldn’t do that—he’d want to drag it out and watch her suffer the effect of each individual death.
From the Chicago airport, she called Arnie and asked him to obtain a shuttle bus to take a dozen people to the airport together.
“Certainly, Ms. Winters. Is there luggage to be brought down now?”
“No. Don’t send anyone up. Absolutely do not try to open the door to my apartment. Either of them.” She hung up before he could react.
She got there, approached her door cautiously, and had Yanmeng ask her a couple of questions only she would know before opening the door. It was a practice she wanted them to put into place. Everyone was okay and ready to go.
Randy had been easily persuaded. It was a great adventure. She showed up at Maliha’s apartment with suitcases full of clothes. Once Randy got a look at Amaro, nothing could have dissuaded her from going along. Total, high-wattage attention from Amaro was just what she needed after her breakup with Dickhead. It would build up her confidence, and Maliha knew Amaro wouldn’t take advantage of her. With a wink at Maliha, Amaro put his arm around her and the two of them sat down on the sofa. He was in his element.
Maliha’s jet flew out of O’Hare full of people who’d been told various stories for coming, including three young children who might or might not have thought they were going to Disneyland. At every interaction point where other people were around, she used her continuous-aura viewing, making sure Mogue wasn’t among them. Her destination was outside the town of Yellowknife, in the Canadian Northwest Territories.
The jet landed in Winnipeg and she asked the pilot to hold it there for her—she’d be coming back through within the day. She hired a DeHavilland Twin Otter bush plane and loaded in passengers and luggage. Her safe house was underground near Great Slave Lake, which she’d always thought was appropriate, considering that she’d been a demon’s slave. She landed the plane expertly on its skis.
Next came acquiring the unique key that would allow them to enter the safe house. She had to have it with her all the time, so she could make a rapid entry into any of her safe houses around the world. The easiest way to do that was to have it under her skin. She asked everyone but Amaro to leave the plane. Not that she was shy, but she thought the procedure might gross out the children.
Probably not, these days.
The location of the key varied. The last time she’d used it, it had been above her left breast. This time it was on the inside of her left thigh. She brought out a small kit she had with her, stood up, unzipped her pants, and let them drop to the floor of the plane. As Amaro watched, she used a scalpel in the kit to make a neat slice about half an inch long in her thigh, then wiggled and squeezed the area with her fingers until a thin, bloody wafer slipped out. She caught it in her hand and gave it to Amaro along with a four-by-four dressing to wipe it clean of blood. She cleaned the blood off her thigh with supplies from the kit and put a couple of butterfly bandages over the cut. It was silly, due to her fast healing and the small size of the cut, but she’d taken to humoring Yanmeng when he was around, and he wanted her to do it.
Normally the wafer would just be inserted in a special lock compartment in the door, but in this case the door was covered with snow. She had to use a remote control. She handed the remote control device to Amaro and he dropped the chip into it.
“What do you do if you want to get in and don’t have that kit to get the key chip?”
“I usually have a knife on me I can use, and if I don’t, I have fingernails.” She held her hands out, fingers spread, like cat’s paws.
“Ew.”
Maliha shook her head. If he thinks that’s bad, then I have a lot of good horror stories for him. “You’re officially the remote man. Don’t let the kids get hold of it. It has a self timer that closes the door in three seconds unless you press here”—she showed him on the remote control—“and the door closes really fast. More than watch-your-fingers fast. You don’t want anybody casually sticking his head out to check the weather. Got it?”
“Got it.”
The press of a button on the remote brought to life a powerful mechanism that opened a sliding vault door in the side of a granite mountain. Amaro turned off the timer and they all trouped in.
With the six hours of daylight fading, she saw them installed in the mountain hideaway, secure from any attack except a direct atomic bomb strike. If Mogue could summon that, then there was nowhere she had prepared she could hide her friends from him. She had fallout shelters in key locations, but this mountain vault was the closest she had to a direct strike shelter, and it wasn’t nearly deep enough.
She’d used the place in the past as an asylum for political prisoners. It was spacious, two stories with a sleeping floor and a living floor, all outfitted for long-term comfort and safety.
The safe house was provisioned for twenty adults for several weeks, but she’d shopped extensively in Yellowknife for supplies for Rosie’s children, including her youngest, less than a year old. As in all of her remote refuges, an operations manual allowed her to feel confident that Hound and the others could manage the systems that ran the generator, ventilation, water, trash, heat, and lights. An emergency button opened the bombproof vault door from the inside, but once closed, no one was going to get them from the outside.
Maliha wanted to talk to Hound, Amaro, and Yanmeng before she left. She corralled them all in a bedroom.
“Don’t expect to hear from me often,” Maliha said. “I can call the phone here because it’s secure, but mostly I’ll be operating quietly and quickly. I’ll be using my old assassin techniques and you don’t really need to hear about that, anyway. Keep everybody calm in here and I’ll let you know when I’m successful.”
Her three friends exchanged looks that she couldn’t interpret. “What gives?�
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“You’re shutting us out. Do you need to work secretly?” said Yanmeng.
Maliha frowned. “If you want the job done and lives saved, then let me have a free hand.”
“What exactly does a free hand mean? How do you operate with your ‘old assassin techniques’?” Yanmeng wanted to know.
With no regrets, no looking back, and nobody getting in my way. Using any method to get what I want.
“Efficiently,” she said. Her voice was cold. Unconsciously, she’d taken an aggressive stance: feet spread apart, her right foot slightly in front of her left, her left hand inches away from the gun in her hidden waistband holster.
“Whoa, back off,” Hound said as he stepped in front of Yanmeng. “It was just a question. Shit, don’t get all Rambo on us.”
Maliha swung her arms to loosen them, and moved backward to sit on the bed. “What’s with all of you? This is no different from other missions we’ve worked on.”
Yanmeng shook his head. “Your attitude is different. You’re slipping back to the way you behaved when you were Ageless, and it seems like you…want to.”
What gives them the right…?
“How do you know how I behaved when I was Ageless?”
“Because you’ve told us,” Amaro said. “You also said that you never wanted to be that way again.”
“I can handle this. It’s temporary.” Maliha stood up and left the room, cutting off the conversation. It was time for her to leave.
She double-checked the interior with her aura vision, looking for the streak that signaled an Ageless presence. Satisfied, she had Amaro close the mountain door while she kept watch. She felt a sense of relief and a rush of guilt that she was able to do for her loved ones what she hadn’t done for Fynn’s.
Back in Chicago, Maliha felt she had to warn Jake. Mogue might have seen them together, and even though Jake was Ageless, he could be killed during a surprise attack from another Ageless person. She phoned him and asked if she could talk to him at his apartment.
“I have something to tell you,” she said. “What I’m working on involves an Ageless, and he’s shown himself to be brutal. He could be targeting people close to me, and that means he could be after you.”
Jake didn’t seem too alarmed about danger to himself. “Which one?”
“Mogue, although I think that’s just one of many names he uses.”
“Mogue,” he said. “You mean Rasputin. Your basic nightmare among demon’s slaves.”
“The Rasputin?”
“Yeah, that one. Did some foul things when he was alive, not much of a leap for him to become an assassin. You should stay away from him.”
“I’m doing my best to do that.”
“Tell me everything. Maybe I can help.”
“Do you mean you’d renounce your contract and work with me as a rogue?”
“Wouldn’t I be more useful dealing with Rasputin if I stayed Ageless?”
“When your demon said you could do what you wanted, I doubt if he meant kill the slaves of other demons. If you go after Rasputin…”
“You’re right. Idiptu would be very interested in what I was doing all of a sudden. Becoming rogue…I just don’t know.”
Here comes the familiar argument. “I’m so ancient that my scale would be impossible to balance.” I’ve got an answer for that one.
“I’m a lot older than you. My scale—”
“Should be easier to balance than mine,” Maliha said. “You told me you only killed for a couple of hundred years for Idiptu before he got tired of the whole thing.”
Jake stood up, turned his back to her and crossed his arms.
Something’s coming and he won’t face me to say it. She stood up nervously and held her breath.
“I did say that about Idiptu. It’s true, but it wasn’t the whole truth. After I stopped getting assignments, I didn’t stop killing until much later.”
How could he? Maliha let out her breath. How could he kill for…for fun?
He turned to face her. His eyes were moist and his whole body sagged like a whipped dog’s. “Give me a chance, Maliha. There are so many things…I love you. I don’t want to lose you. Whatever you’re thinking now, don’t let it be the end for us. I swear I didn’t want to hurt you like this.”
He reached out to her, but she took a step backward, suddenly aware that she didn’t know this lover of hers nearly well enough. She remembered what she’d thought about Mogue or Rasputin, whatever he wanted to call himself, not long ago. What happens if a demon snares someone who is already evil, a true sociopath? Give that person a hundred years or thousands of years of unfettered killing with no consequences and it’s a nightmare beyond imagining. Who’s to say Jake isn’t another Rasputin, just in a nicer package?
She could almost hear her heart breaking, like the tinkling of glass shattering in the cold center of her chest. She couldn’t think of a response.
“We’ll have to talk about it some other time. I’ve got work to do.”
She slammed the door and went for a run around the lake in McKinley Park. On her second time around at superhuman speed, she could finally put a few thoughts together.
There could be an explanation for this. He implied there was, but I don’t know where we could go from here. I can’t love a man who’s a wanton murderer. If this is it for us, I wish I’d said something better than “I have work to do.” I wish I’d thrown a plate at his head. Or sliced his neck with it.
Chapter Twenty-Three
She was on her way back from Jake’s house when her phone rang. She wasn’t going to answer it, since she was in no mood to talk, but when she saw that the call was a secure connection, she took it. It was Bernie, an information broker who lived in the Australian outback. She’d been to his place once, as probably one of the few human beings who’d set foot there.
She’d contacted a few outside sources that Rasputin would never suspect of working with her. With Fynn’s family and Ty and Claire gone because of her information search, she needed to go further afield. She knew Amaro was frustrated at his lack of success in locating the council members so far. His techniques, while usually effective, hadn’t come up with specifics.
Amaro doesn’t supplement his computer work by talking to real people. He doesn’t think to work that way.
Bernie had found one of the council members living in an underwater research station off the coast of Australia. She paid Bernie his usual fee by wire transfer, twenty-five thousand U.S. dollars now and an equal payment after “discovery.” That meant different things to different clients, but in Maliha’s case, it meant after she successfully located and killed Dr. Cort Maur.
Bernie was reliable. Maliha made plans to go to Australia. She begrudged the time it would cost her to get there and back—a full day each way. She had to go, though.
Maliha flew to Los Angeles and then to Sydney. In her mode of not calling attention to herself, she traveled as a last-minute addition to a tourist group bound for a fourteen-day guided tour in Australia. It nearly killed her. It turned out that she was the only one of the thirty tourists under sixty on the tour and consequently received an inordinate amount of attention from the traveling men. The women gave her the cold shoulder, which would have been okay with her, except that they speculated loudly on her background (a loose woman), why she was traveling to Australia (alternately to escape the law or to start a house of ill repute), and if those boobs were really hers (no) for the benefit of the men. The discussions inspired the men to pay even more attention to her.
Next time I’m not going to worry so much about attracting attention. If Rasputin wants to have it out right here on aisle 24, I think that would be better than traveling with this bunch.
On the longer leg of the flight Maliha checked in with her other sources. None of them had any news. She felt time pressure, and knew she couldn’t wait for things to drop into her lap. It was time to call in a debt, the biggest chip she had to play in the intelligence business.
It had been more than thirty years since she’d last seen Abiyram Heber, once a shadowy commander in Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. Now he lived quietly in retirement. Maliha had worked with him on several occasions and had once saved his life when a plan went awry. Abiyram still had a solid network of connections, and they weren’t confined to the Middle East, never had been. For a life-debt, he would do anything he could for her, and then his debt would be discharged. She needed information about the rest of the council and especially about the Leader.
It was six hours ahead where he was, making it late afternoon. He picked up on the first ring and inquired immediately about her safety. It was nice to know that somebody across the world had her back. She told him she would like to come to see him and he agreed.
Her itinerary was taking shape: get to Sydney, kill a man under water, visit Abiyram in the White City. The Black Ghost packed light on clothes, heavy on weapons. She was smiling with anticipation. Not because she was heading out to kill several bad guys—dealing death was no thrill to her—but because of the manner of her operation. She felt a freedom she hadn’t felt in a long time. With my friends stowed away I can operate with no attachments, no complications, as if I were still Ageless. Jake doesn’t need any protection from me.
Dr. Cort Maur lived and worked on a research station submerged in about ninety feet of water off the coast near the Queensland city of Mackay. It must have been a place where he felt secure, because after the first death among the council members, he had made no attempt to flee. Perhaps he believed he would be difficult to find, or that a hired killer wouldn’t be able to get to him in the research lab. Maliha thought it was entirely possible that there were feuds among the council members, differing private agendas, and Cort may not have been disappointed or frightened to see Laura go.
He may have welcomed it and assumed one of the others arranged it. After all, this is a weird bunch.
Maliha bought scuba equipment from three separate stores, making her purchases less expensive and less remarkable. Something she’d brought with her, since it was so specialized that it would be remembered, was an underwater GPS kit. Acting as a college student wanting to write a paper, she obtained the location of the research lab from the Australian Institute of Marine Science. They didn’t run the program because they had their own oceangoing research vessels, but kept tabs on other research in Australian waters.