And as for what Threshold had done with all that LlewellCo cash . . .
“Since when does a pharmaceutical company need a private army?” she demanded into the telephone. “These invoices are ludicrous! We’ve been shovelling money at them for five years and all we’ve gotten have been glowing promises—I want to know exactly what Threshold’s been doing with its time and my money and I want to know yesterday.”
Baker and Hardesty were behind this. Only someone high up in LlewellCo could have covered things up for this long. Well, the two of them were going to be looking for new jobs by the time the sun set in California, Ria vowed.
As for Threshold’s CEO, Robert Lintel . . .
Jonathan’s people in Computer Security had gotten into the Threshold computers without trouble—no surprise, as most of them were former outlaw hackers, working for LlewellCo as an alternative to jail. According to what they’d pulled out of the files so far—the data would take weeks to sift thoroughly—Lintel had been running a black books research program for almost as long as he’d been running Threshold, something about triggering psychic powers in humans through the use of psychotropic drug cocktails.
And it looks like he got far enough with it to go to field trials. I am going to crucify him for this—and anyone else I can get my hands on!
She paced furiously, but she knew there was no point in coming down on Threshold until she had absolute proof. It would be too easy for them to start dumping records at the first sign of discovery—although, to Ria’s fury, someone seemed to have anticipated her there as well.
Lintel certainly hadn’t been doing the research himself—not with nothing more than a Harvard MBA—but whoever the production-end brains of the outfit had been, he or she seemed to have jumped ship, because there was no evidence of him or his research notes anywhere in the Threshold mainframe. If Mr. X had gone to that much trouble to remove all trace of his former employment, it was probably because he was on the run. Which meant that he was out of the picture for the moment, and out of reach.
But I’ll find you, wherever you are. And when I do, you’ll wish you’d gone down with Threshold!
She glanced at her watch, then over at the man sitting silently on the couch. Logan looked like some kind of hyperrealistic sculpture of a sleeping man, not that he was asleep. From time to time she surprised him watching her, as if he were quietly assessing the situation. She wasn’t sure why she’d kept him with her, but now she was glad she had.
“I’m going downtown to break into a lab,” she said. “I own it, but that probably won’t count for much just at the moment. I’ll need some serious backup.”
“How serious?” Logan asked. He got to his feet and stretched, working out the kinks of a long sleepless night.
“They won’t have tanks,” she thought, thinking back to the scene in the Park. “Aside from that, assume the worst.”
While the team was assembled, Ria went off to change. This assault would require armor of a different sort.
They arrived at Threshold just after the morning shift. The Guardians still had the key-card someone had dropped in Central Park, but Ria didn’t need it. She went in through the front door.
“Good morning. I’m Ria Llewellyn. I own this company. If you want to have a job by tonight, you’ll keep your hands off that phone and buzz us through,” she said, her voice dangerous.
The receptionist took one look at Ria and the five men with her and pressed the button. Ria went directly to the top floor, and forced her way past a second receptionist and Lintel’s private secretary.
But all for nothing. Lintel wasn’t there. And from the look of the place, he wasn’t coming back.
Ria swore feelingly. She’d been sure she’d get here in time to nail the slimy bastard. Lintel had too much invested in Threshold to just go slinking off leaving his turf undefended!
“Ma’am?”
The bodyguard she’d posted outside the door to watch the secretary came inside, dragging someone by the scruff of the neck. The victim was wearing a white lab coat, and looked absolutely terrified.
“I caught him coming out of the elevator, heading for Lintel’s office. When he saw me he tried to bolt.”
“Bring him over here,” Ria said, leaning back against Lintel’s desk. Because she thought she’d be facing a corporate raider this morning, she’d dressed to match: a dark green Dior skirted suit with matching pumps. Dagger optional.
It didn’t take much in the way of Talent to read the man’s mind. His name was Beirkoff, and he’d been one of the group in Central Park last night. He’d also been Lintel’s inside man on the black budget op that Lintel had been running, and now that he realized Lintel was gone, Beirkoff knew he’d been cut off and left to twist in the wind. He’d be willing to do anything to save his skin.
“Lose something?” Ria asked mockingly. “Your safety net, perhaps?” Beirkoff’s face went grey, and for a moment, the bodyguard’s fist in his collar was the only thing holding him up. The details of the project flashed through his mind—an underground testing lab, some cells, too many people dead. . . .
“Mr. Beirkoff, you have exactly one chance to save your life and your freedom,” Ria said, getting to her feet and leaning toward him. “Take me down to the Black Labs and tell me everything you know about T-6/157.”
There was a slot for a key-card on the inside wall of the Executive Elevator, and three unmarked buttons below it. Ria’d found the card in Lintel’s desk, once she’d broken the lock. Beirkoff slid it into place and pressed the third button.
Beirkoff hadn’t been good at forming coherent sentences, but Ria’d had no trouble getting most of the story by skimming the surface of his thoughts. Unfortunately, he had no idea what had happened after Eric had vanished from the Park, nor what Lintel might be up to right now. Lintel had sent him home for the night, and when he’d come back this morning, he’d walked straight into Ria.
The level the elevator opened onto showed every sign of having been hastily vacated. Doors stood open, files lay on the floor.
“Search it,” Ria said crisply. Sorcerous telepathy wasn’t admissible in court, and even direct testimony wouldn’t really hold up well against a high-priced lawyer. She needed hard evidence to hang Lintel with.
She got it when Beirkoff took her down to the holding cells. A man in a white lab coat—Beirkoff’s thoughts identified him as Dr. Ramchandra, the only other on-the-books Threshold employee with Black Level clearance—lay dead in the hallway, shot neatly through the chest. Beirkoff was horrified, and Ria suspected that he’d never seen anyone freshly dead before. Like so many yuppies, his only encounters with death were via the media, or perhaps the sanitized and beautified body of a friend or relative after the mortuary professionals had made it acceptable. Ria thought back to the battle in Griffith Park. She’d seen violent death in every possible aspect. Bored with his horror, she moved on.
All of the cells were full, and all of the occupants were dead as well. They looked like the mummies from the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was hard to believe they’d ever been human.
“They were the ones who survived,” Beirkoff said from behind her in a shaken voice. “If the stuff didn’t kill them on the first shot and you gave them a second dose, it was like they just . . . burned out.”
“There’s no one here,” Logan said, coming back down the hall. He glanced at Ramchandra’s body and then back at Ria, his expression unchanging. “But there’s a lab back there that looks like somebody used it to cook up a major batch of something that isn’t there now.”
“Campbell did the cooking,” Beirkoff said, recovering more by the minute. “She got the stuff as far as field trials and then she took off. But Mr. Lintel made sure she made up a big batch before she split.”
And Campbell was the only one who knew the recipe, though any competent chemist could probably reconstruct it from a large enough sample, Ria read in his mind. Campbell. Jeanette Campbell. I’ll remember
that name. Someday soon, Jeanette Campbell, you and I are going to have a short but interesting talk.
It was time to call the cops and bust this situation wide open. A part of her couldn’t help noting that this whole thing was going to be a media bonus for LlewellCo—valiant chairwoman discovers illegal research going on in one of her subsidiaries, does a Bernstein and Woodward, and turns the results over to the cops. She’d be a Movie of the Week for sure. She’d also be tied up in red tape and meetings for the next year, and Ria had other things to do just at the moment. She turned to Lintel’s flunky.
“Listen to me, Beirkoff. You’d like to stay out of prison, right?”
Beirkoff nodded, obviously more terrified right now of Ria than of the dead body lying on the floor or the wrath of the absent Robert Lintel.
“You have exactly one hope of doing that. You are going to call the cops and report what you found here, and tell them the following story: You came to me with your suspicions. I sent you down here with a security team and orders to notify the authorities if you found anything. I wasn’t here today. In fact, I’ve never been here at all. There will be a lawyer here in an hour to handle LlewellCo’s involvement, but you won’t wait for him. You’re going to give the police full cooperation.
“Play it this way and you come out smelling like a rose. Cross me, and I guarantee that LlewellCo—and I personally—will do everything in our power to make the brief remainder of your sordid existence a living hell.”
“Yes, sir! Yes, ma’am! I mean—yes. I can do that,” Beirkoff babbled.
“Good. I’m out of here. The rest of you, stay here and keep Mr. Beirkoff honest.”
When she stepped out on the street again, the contrast was as great as if she’d stepped through a Portal into Underhill. It was one of those bright winter days that sometimes came in December, the kind that made you think that New York was a nice place to be after all.
But right now it wasn’t a nice place for somebody. Because somewhere out there right now, Robert Lintel was trying to turn ordinary humans into mages using a drug that had a one hundred percent net fatality rate.
And he and Eric were on a collision course.
Eric drew himself up and did his level best to channel Dharinel in a bad mood. The elven mage didn’t suffer fools gladly at the best of times, and that damn-your-eyes arrogance was the only thing that would save Eric now.
“It took you long enough to get here!” he snarled at the gnomish Unseleighe lackey in his best imitation of a pissed-off elven noble, leaking a little magic past his shields to reinforce the effect. “Take me to your Lord—at once, do you hear!”
And they said spending all that time at RenFaires would never be good for anything. . . .
“Yes, High Lord. Urla hears and obeys. At once, High Lord!” The creature knelt, pulling the cap from its head and kneading it between enormous gnarled hands. Its wetness left brownish smears on Urla’s skin. Eric had a sick feeling that he knew what it had been soaked with. Blood.
Not one of the good guys. That’s for sure.
But for once Faire shtick wasn’t just a way of amusing travelers and filling his pockets. This time he was playing for his life. His bluff had worked so far—it was a safe bet that any of the Lesser creatures he encountered would owe fealty to some High Lord or another, and even the Unseleighe Lords followed certain rules—which was more than Eric could say for this Urla. He knew that Lady Day would find him eventually, no matter where he went in Underhill. But until she did, Eric was more or less trapped here, though rather less than more.
“Get up—get up!” he said haughtily, waving the hand that didn’t hold his flute. “I don’t have time for this nonsense!”
The redcap crawled backward submissively before springing to its feet. Bowing and gesturing, it began to lead Eric through the forest. He took the time to take his flute apart and put it back in its case in his messenger bag before following. He didn’t know what he might encounter along the way, and he didn’t want to lose the instrument.
Urla led him onward through the empty forest until they came to an enormous tree. Its trunk was easily thirty feet around, and like many trees this old and large, its lower trunk was hollow. Eric followed Urla through the gap in the trunk, and when they came out the other side, the forest was gone.
The place Eric found himself in now wasn’t nearly as nice. For one thing, it stank. He and Urla were standing on a hummock of grass in what seemed to be the center of a large swamp. Between the hummocks, the swamp water glowed a faint toxic green, simmering languidly as bubbles of gas worked their way to the surface and popped with an evil smacking sound. The illumination here was dimmer than the light of the forest and had a reddish cast. Thick mist hung from trees festooned with fleshy pale blossoms that gave off a nauseatingly sweet scent, as if they were rotting instead of blooming. Eric’s skin crawled; he was in Unseleighe territory now, and no mistake about it. He could see large bat-winged things flying slowly through the distance, and as he stood gazing around himself, a terrible scream split the air—whether of predator or prey, he didn’t know.
Urla looked up at him to see his reaction, beady eyes glittering. Eric glared back as arrogantly as he could manage, and the bluff seemed to work. The redcap hurried off, bounding from island to island of dry land. The islands were yards apart, distances Eric couldn’t jump, and he’d have to be crazy to step down into the water. This was obviously some kind of test.
He summoned his power—he didn’t need his flute here, or even music, but unbidden, a few bars of an old Simon and Garfunkel song skirled through his brain as he wove the magic. Like a bridge over VERY troubled waters. . . .
Silvery mist rose out of the swamp and coalesced, following the redcap’s trail. Eric stepped out onto it cautiously. It gave slightly beneath his feet, like the surface of a waterbed, but it held him comfortingly far above the surface of the swamp. He stepped out onto the bridge and followed Urla dry-footed across the bog.
The exit Portal here was in a bank of mist. Eric knew enough about Underhill geography to know that the shortest distance between two points wasn’t necessarily in a straight line. Navigating Underhill was more like solving a maze, one where every turn could take you half a dozen different places. The Unseleighe were a paranoid lot, defending their territories by making them hard to find, and even harder to enter.
Urla walked into the mist and Eric followed cautiously. He didn’t trust the redcap at all, and Urla would certainly think it was a great joke to lead Eric into danger, but he didn’t think the creature was trying to lead him into a trap. Not yet, anyway.
This time Eric found himself in utter darkness on the far side of the Portal, and quickly summoned a ball of elf-light. By its pale bluish illumination he could see that there was grass beneath his feet, short and trampled as if herds of animals had been running across it. A chill monotonous wind blew steadily, making him shudder more than shiver as he looked around. He was in the middle of a broad and featureless plain that seemed to stretch a thousand miles in every direction. When he looked up, there were no stars.
“I’m losing patience,” Eric warned, in what he hoped was the approved Unseleighe style. It seemed to be what Urla expected, because the redcap grovelled again, swearing to the Great Lord that they were almost there, indeed, their destination was mere instants away. The redcap turned away and began to trot across the plain, picking up speed until Eric was hard-pressed to keep up with it. Without the elf-light he’d summoned, he would have been unable to follow at all.
A couple of times the ground shook silently as if something huge and heavy were running across it—though Eric saw nothing—and a couple of times he almost thought he’d heard something over the droning of the ceaseless wind, but he didn’t dare stop to listen for fear of losing his guide. Bard or not, he had a notion that it would not be a good idea to be lost in this particular realm at the mercy of whatever it was that lived here. The swamp had been bad, but there was something almost honest ab
out its malignity. This was a lot creepier.
At last they came to a henge: two black rough-hewn standing stones supporting a third laid across their tops. The three stones were the size of Greyhound buses, and seemed to be made out of some fine-grained stone. Basalt, Eric dredged up from a dark corner of memory. Like in H. P. Lovecraft. I just hope whoever lives here isn’t a fan of the classics.
Urla trotted between the menhirs and vanished. Having no other real choice, Eric followed. As he’d expected, the landscape changed again. Now there was light. He stopped, blinking as his eyes adjusted.
Wait. I know this place.
He stood now in the wood that he’d dreamed of before—the black and silver wood where the winter-bare trees looked as if they were made of black and polished bone, and the ground was covered with a thick treacherous white mist. Urla was obviously on familiar ground now, for he moved more slowly than before—as if he didn’t relish getting to his destination. Neither did Eric. Such a direct route to his destination indicated that whoever lived here felt he had little to fear from invaders, and that much confidence meant something old, powerful . . . and dangerous.
Dangerous enough to think invading New York would be a cakewalk. Oh, boy, Banyon. You sure know how to pick your enemies. . . .
In the distance, shining through the trees like a baleful moth-green moon, was the goblin tower of Eric’s vision, but oddly, instead of worrying him further, he found himself with a treacherous desire to laugh.
Whoa! Who does the decorating here? Skeletor? That place looks more like Castle Greyskull than any place has a right to. This place was beyond over-the-top: it was just too grim and too gothic for him to be able to take it seriously—as if a Hollywood set designer had done a makeover on Hell.
You’d better take it seriously, Banyon. Because THEY sure are, and I bet Unseleighe Sidhe don’t have much of a sense of humor. . . .
A Host of Furious Fancies Page 30