“Now. What can we do for you?” he asked pleasantly. It was still difficult to keep an eye on his young guest—baffling, that, as Roderick could detect no magic, though the force acting upon him certainly wasn’t physical. Still, whatever power the young man had of avoiding the eye, it would do him little good in a small locked room.
“You can let me go. I’ve done nothing wrong,” the lad—little more than a boy, really, even by human standards—said sullenly.
“Au contraire. You were on the verge of annoying one of our guests, and you just tried to kill me, as well you know. Best make a clean breast of things, lad. If you’re in trouble, we can help you.”
“Help us? We’ve had more than enough of your kind of help! I— I have nothing to say.” The lad backed away, putting the table in the center of the room between them. His expression was hard to read through the mirrorshades, but he sounded terrified.
As well he might, did he have dealings with the Dark Court, Roderick thought philosophically. Still, that didn’t mean he had to bring his vendetta here.
“Nothing to say? Let me help you,” Roderick said. He cast a simple glamourie, one that would make the young man see him as a trusted friend.
Nothing happened.
Roderick frowned, moving toward the boy, who recoiled. “I’ll call the police!”
“From here? A good trick, that. I rather think you ought to tell me who you are, first—and if you canna do that, then you’ll have to show me.”
He cornered the boy quickly, and plucked the glasses from his face. As Roderick touched them, he felt a tingle of not-quite-magic, from the glasses and the suit as well. It was they which held the interference to his spells, not the lad. Possibly not a private vendetta, then.
Ruthlessly—and with little cooperation—he searched the boy, removing all loose objects from his person. No other weapons, and not much in the way of the gadgetry and paperwork humans carried with them everywhere they went. He tossed the items to the table and looked through the wallet.
“Well, now, Travis Booker, what business is it that you have with the Sidhe?”
“The what?” Travis clung to one hope only—that the months of hypnotic conditioning he’d undergone would protect him from the Spookie’s alien psionics. Without his special glasses, the Spookie looked like anyone else—a big blond bodybuilder type, well over six feet—but Travis knew better. It was one of them—the enemy—and now Travis was a prisoner in an undeclared war. He owed it to humanity to reveal as little as possible about who and what he was. Only the PS detector he was wearing could possibly implicate the PDI, and its components would fuse if it were taken from him; it was designed to self-destruct within a few minutes if its ambient temperature dropped below 98.6. He pulled it off and tossed it to the table. “There. You’ve got everything. Now can I go? I’ll leave—I won’t make any trouble for you.”
“You’ve already made a certain amount of trouble, young Travis. Why not spare us both the rest? You already seem to know a bit more about us than would ease my mind, but we’ve always been on good terms with your folk. What business do you have with that lady? I warn you, she’s no one to be trifled with, but if she’s done you harm, perhaps we can mend it.”
“Is she your queen?” Travis asked, probing for information even though it did not look as if he’d ever be able to use it. They had so little hard information about the Spookies that any crumb was valuable. He asked what business I had with the Shi—is that a personal name, or a tribal designation? Oh, Lord, if I could only sit him down and ask him some questions. But Travis—and the other field agents—had seen the morgue photos of people who’d tried that, their bodies burned almost beyond recognition by a combination of hard radiation and corrosive poison. By nature and inclination, Spookies were merciless predators, using their mental power to trick and destroy their prey.
But weirdly, his question only made the Spookie laugh. “My queen? Not bloody likely, young Travis. Nay, she’s nowt but trouble for your kind and mine, if she takes it into her head to make it. But she’s here peacefully, and so should you be.”
“I . . . all right. I won’t make any trouble.” Could escape be this easy? The briefing book said that Spookies didn’t think like humans. Maybe a promise—even if one he had no intention of keeping—would be enough to get him out of here.
“Now how am I to believe you, when a moment ago you were so hot at hand?” the Spookie protested, smiling his inhuman smile. “Perhaps if you were to tell me all about yourself, we could come to some accommodation.”
The Spookie looked into his eyes, and Travis found himself unable to look away. He felt a pressure in his head, as if the air had grown suddenly dense, holding his skull in a soft yet merciless grip. But the conditioning held, and he said nothing.
The Spookie sighed, pretending disappointment. “Ah, Travis, you’re being less than forthcoming with me, aren’t you, coming here as you have with armor and weapons? Still, we can settle this peaceably, can we not?”
“Kill me, you mean?” the young cockerel blustered, still full of fight.
Roderick sighed inwardly. Too much television, that’s what it was. Everybody thought that violence settled things, as if it didn’t just put off the trouble to a future time. And the lad seemed to be able to resist all Roderick’s encouragements to confide in him—worrisome, but a certain percentage of humans were naturally resistant to mind-magic, and Travis might be one of that happy few.
Ah, weel, there’s more ways to skin a cat than by buttering it with parsnips.
If the lad couldn’t be induced to tell why he was here, surely making him forget all he’d seen would serve nearly as good a purpose? Let him hunt elsewhere—in vain—for his vengeance.
“Kill you?” Roderick asked. “Nay, you’ll live out your years in quiet content. But you’ll trouble us no more, Travis Booker.”
It had taken a great deal of Power to set the spell, to wipe the lad’s mind clean of the day’s events and cast him into slumber, but in the end, Master Roderick was well satisfied with his work. When Travis lay asleep on the floor, he examined the items on the table, but found nothing odd about them, and tucked them back into Travis’s pockets. As for the suit itself, perhaps he’d been mistaken, for the heavy cloth held no trace of magic or spellcraft that Roderick could sense—and in any event, he could hardly take it and leave young Travis to foot it home in socks and smallclothes, now, could he? But the strange glasses—and the lethal little weapon—would remain here. Roderick would show them to Prince Gelert, and see if his lord could make any more of them than he had. But young Travis would trouble them no more.
And the puir laddie had broken his wristwatch, as well, for it lay cold and dark and unresponsive in Roderick’s hand. He shrugged, and buckled it back onto Travis’s wrist. Now to put him in a cab, the slumber spell timed to lift as Travis reached the hotel whose key had been among his things. With any luck at all, he’d just think he’d fallen asleep on the way to his destination, and with a little time, the boy’s own mind would create a plausible tale to fill in the missing hours.
Another crisis solved. But I do wish I knew what had set him on.
THIRTEEN:
YESTERDAY UPON
THE STAIR
The Las Vegas Convention Center was the largest single-level convention facility in the United States, containing 1.9 million square feet in its 102 meeting rooms and 12 exhibit halls—so the literature in the package she and Kory had received at check-in said—and after a morning spent trying to find the displays of the people she’d talked to last night, Beth Kentraine was inclined to believe it. This was the first day of Comdex, and the place was crammed with convention-goers.
It wasn’t that she’d never been to a trade show before. When she’d still had a mundane job in television (though that time now seemed as if it belonged to someone else’s life), Beth had attended ShoWest and a number of other conventions, some of them even held in this very place. But Comdex outstripped them all—
there were hundreds of vendors, offering everything to do with computers that was even imaginable, including products that wouldn’t reach the wider market for years, if ever. In just the short walk from the main entrance, Beth had seen wraparound computer monitors as wide as a Cinerama screen, 19-inch screens that you could hang on the wall like a picture, laptops that would fit in your purse but whose monitor and keyboard unfolded to the size of a desktop system. She’d seen servers the size of shoeboxes, computers so small the CPU was built into the keyboard, solar-powered computers, and computers on which you could surf the net from the heart of the Amazon jungle, no phone lines, electricity, or cables required.
It was dizzying.
Their first stop was Haram Technologies. Haram’s business was shielding and buffering equipment, and they were picking up the Faraday Cage here. It had been Azrael who’d suggested they just order the stuff and pick it up at Comdex. For one thing, everyone they would want to deal with would be here. For another, if the components were shipped to Comdex as part of the trade show paraphernalia and then sold off the floor, there’d be no detailed paper trail leading back to who bought them. And that, Beth considered, was a very useful thing.
The sales rep at Haram had the slightly-unbelievable name of Mike Fright. He and Beth quickly checked over the component list for the cage (the directions said it was easily assembled; Beth personally doubted that), and Beth paid with a certified check drawn on the Elfhame Misthold account. The equipment would be shipped to the Tir-na-Og at the end of the show—just as well, as it came in a crate weighing several hundred pounds.
Their next stop was a small Seattle-based company called Orion Power and Light, where they took delivery of solar charging arrays and LION battery packs to run both the Faraday Cage and the computer system that would be set up inside it. The two booths were a serious distance apart, and Beth and Kory still had several more stops to make—computer, monitor, printer, software—before they’d have taken care of their shopping list. They could carry some of the smaller items with them, but the cage and the batteries were too heavy.
It was while they were looking for Hesperus Microsystems that Beth realized that the same guy had been behind them, just a few feet away, every time she’d looked for the last forty minutes. Even in a trade show full of eccentrics he was easy to spot—how many people wore business suits in that shade of green? He looked as if he’d mugged a sofa to get it.
“Kory,” she said, stopping to nudge him. “See that man? Over there? The one in the green suit? Don’t let him see you looking. I think he’s following us.”
Kory glanced carefully behind him, but saw nothing. Men in suits aplenty, of course, but none of them in any of the colors humans might call green. He glanced at Beth, worried.
“I see nothing,” he said.
“Well, I know he’s following us,” she muttered crossly.
She looked worried, and Kory was worried as well. He’d had no idea this Comdex would be so big—and Beth hated crowds. No wonder she looked so drawn and fretful. He thought of suggesting that she go back to the hotel and leave him to complete their shopping, but he knew that Beth did not entirely trust him to be on his own in the World Above—and to be fair, Kory did not entirely trust himself either. Much as he loved the human world, it was an extraordinarily vast and complicated place, and the penalties for being revealed to be other than what one seemed were great.
But at the same time, he wasn’t sure there was any present danger to concern himself with. It was true that there were still warrants out for Beth’s arrest, but as Kory understood it, the hunters were not actively looking for her, and unless she ran afoul of one of their security databases, or returned to the San Francisco Bay Area, she should be safe from their hunt. The last time they had been captured, it had left Beth with a legacy of panic attacks, and it was possible that one had been triggered by the crowds surrounding them now. The press of people here even made Kory edgy—in comparison to human lands, Underhill was sparsely populated, and a quarter of a million of anything gathered together in one place was a sight one of the Seleighe Sidhe might expect never to see even in the course of his long life. In the World Above, of course, such gatherings were commonplace, but that didn’t make Kory any more used to them.
“Do you see him now?” Beth demanded. “Look!”
Once more Kory looked where she pointed, and once more saw nothing.
“I see the booth where we are to pick up the computer,” he offered, pointing in his turn.
“Good. The sooner we get this over with the better. I just wish he weren’t following us. Whoever he is.”
Kory looked again, hoping to see what she saw, and still saw nothing.
It could be worse. They could be wearing black. Sean Collins had heard all the MIB jokes he cared to since joining the PDI’s field teams. At least the conspiracy nuts weren’t looking for guys in green. Not yet, anyway.
The whole unit had been on alert since the incident with Booker yesterday. According to the tracking software, Travis’d left the airport, gone to one of the casinos on the Strip, and then gone back to his hotel. Unfortunately Booker couldn’t explain why he’d done any of those things, because Booker didn’t remember doing any of them. He didn’t remember anything at all that had happened yesterday, or where he’d left his weapon and his optics. He had no idea why his PS detector had melted down. In short, Booker’d had a Close Encounter, and now they were all on alert. Sean had flown in from Washington last night, about the time the local shop reeled Booker in and found out what had happened. Now he and his team were looking for an answer the size of a needle in a countywide haystack, with precious little notion of where to start.
The others were checking out the casinos, but Sean had decided to cover the trade show almost on a whim—if Spookies were hitting Vegas now, it stood to reason that it might be linked with the other big event hitting town. He was wearing his PS detector, but not consulting it. The special optics would tag a Spookie just as fast—their special filtering technology cut through Spookie illusions as if they weren’t there.
To his surprise, he hit paydirt almost immediately. A tall blond man with a redheaded woman, both dressed Corporate Casual. She was human, he wasn’t. Sean wondered if she knew the truth about her companion. Best to bring them both in, just in case, but priority one, as always, was a live Spookie capture.
He phoned to bring the rest of his team in—the fact that they were in the neighborhood at all was the one lucky break they had from whatever had happened to Booker—and waited for them to get here. Meanwhile, he stuck close.
Beth was furious. Kory’s air of gentle bewilderment was all too obvious: he didn’t see the guy in the green suit with the green-tinted mirrorshades. He thought she was having visions, or some damn thing—but she wasn’t, and she didn’t dare point the guy out openly for fear of letting him know she knew he was there.
But why was he following them? There was no way for the government to know she and Kory were here, for one thing, even if they did know what ID they were traveling under. Sure, you had to show ID every time you boarded a plane, these days, but they’d used a Gate to get here.
And for another, he didn’t really look like a Fed.
Maybe he thinks we’re somebody else. The thought made her smile humorlessly. No matter who he thought they were, the moment he arrested them and ran their prints through VICAP, her outstanding warrants would show up—and she wasn’t sure what Kory’s fingerprints would look like. Elven glamouries and spells couldn’t do a lot to fool machines, only the people who ran them.
But the green man wasn’t going to arrest them. Not if Beth had anything to say to the matter. :Bredana? Can you hear me?:
There was a long wait—seconds—before she felt the elvensteed’s faint reply. Bredana and Mach Five were at Elfhame Misthold, but they were stabled in the World Above precisely in case Beth or Kory needed to Call them. :Come here—quietly—and bring Mach Five with you. I think we may need a quick ex
it.:
She felt the faint tickle of the elvensteed’s assent. San Francisco was at least eight hours away by car, and while the ’steeds could duck back Underhill to make their way here swiftly, she couldn’t count on them to be here much inside of half an hour—twenty minutes if they really pushed things. She knew Kory would think she was just being paranoid to summon them—or, worse, that she was seeing little (or big) green men who weren’t there. To be honest, she’d spent enough time jumping at shadows before they’d gone Underhill to live to give him good reason. But this time it was different.
He is there. I do see him.
Why can’t Kory?
They reached the Hesperus Microsystems booth, and Beth pulled Kory past it. No sense in giving the Man In Green their whole itinerary. It was bad enough that their watchers would be able to find out everything they’d already bought—and while the information couldn’t help them, nor could they trace the equipment once it had been taken Underhill—Beth resented giving up any information to her persecutors.
She stopped a few booths down from Hesperus, in front of a booth that seemed to be selling very large concave mirrors. She could see herself and Kory in them, weirdly distorted.
And she could see the green guy.
“Look,” she said, in a teeth-gritted voice. “There. Look in the mirror. See him? Behind the booth with the yellow banner.”
“I see him,” Kory said.
Relief washed through her. Oh, thank the Mother! I wasn’t completely sure I wasn’t losing my mind. “He’s the one that’s been following us since we got here.”
Kory turned slightly, pretending an interest in the booths on the opposite side of the aisle, and looked behind him. His hand closed over Beth’s, and she could feel his shock.
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