Digital Knight

by Ryk E. Spoor

  "That would be extremely good evidence," Morgan said quickly, "were your statements entirely accurate. They are, however, not quite correct. It is true, sir, that there are very few things capable of sensing the Wolves, but as Master Jason's device demonstrates, it is not entirely impossible. In point of fact, there are a few examples in Master Verne's experience of human beings and others who had the true Sight—they were not seeing through the disguise, so much as sensing an outcome of events, watching the very flow of time in the short term. From my experience with Lady Sylvia, I am convinced that this is, in fact, how she senses your people."

  Baker's gun hand wavered slightly. He was listening.

  "And also," I said, "Syl's been living in Morgantown for years. No such killings ever took place there, and hell, during Virigar's visit there were so many Wolves around that I just can't imagine one of these Maelkodan things being able to restrain itself; instead of Verne killing Wolves in a warehouse, he would've gotten there to find a wonderful display gallery of statues and a Maelkodan so juiced up it'd be telekinesing city blocks for fun."

  Slowly, Baker lowered the gun and raised his head cautiously. Looking at Syl, I saw what he did in her eyes; mild amusement, relief, and a trace of sympathy. "Well, even a Mirrorkiller would've thought two or three times about trying that with the King nearby, but I guess y'all have a point." He sighed. "Damn, but it would've been a simple solution."

  "The simple solutions rarely work out," I said, relaxing. "Now that we've got an idea of what we're up against, let's get to work finding the damn thing before it kills anyone else."

  59

  "Baker, what do you think about this?"

  He looked up from his desk and took the sheet of paper from me. "Hmm. Ayup, I was wondering about that."

  "Three disappearances in the same general time period. One of them from your department. Think maybe the Maelkodan might be responsible?"

  He frowned. "Problem is . . . why the hell are these guys disappearing, but the others standing out in plain sight? It ain't like hiding just some of its victims is going to put us off the trail, the thing'd have to hide all of 'em. Or at least all the Wolf victims, anyways."

  I nodded. "It's a puzzler, that. But I'm still putting these guys down as possible victims. Are these people all Wolves?"

  He glanced at the names again. "Yep. All of 'em."

  "I'll make that 'probable' victims, then. In this town you've made clear you people work together and talk to each other, and so they wouldn't go running off without a word to anyone . . . and I can't offhand think of easy accidental ways to kill you people off."

  "S'trewth," he agreed.

  "Any progress on movements?"

  "Damn little," he growled, obviously frustrated. "Karl Weimar, easy enough—we know he busted in on you, then left, talked with a couple others, then said he was heading back to talk to you people again. Timing makes it likely he got nailed at that point. Mansfield, well, he was all over town the last few days, bein' one of our contact men and all. Since he was killed at home, though, that don't tell us much. Same for the other victims—looks to me like the killer's picking vulnerable times and places, not waitin' to ambush a sucker who gets close."

  "Which means we'll need to trace movements of people who might be the killer, rather than tracing the victims' movements."

  He nodded. "O'course, without some decent suspects, that'll be a mite difficult. Can't run a trace on everyone."

  "How about the correlation with recent arrivals?"

  "Aside from you and your wife, you mean? Ain't looking very promising neither. If I give it about a month for new arrivals—assuming the thing decided to take a couple weeks to settle in an' decide how it wanted to start the killing—we've got about eight possibles. Problem is that so far it looks like at least half of 'em have ironclad alibis for Mansfield's murder, an' the rest might be a problem for some o' the others."

  "Damn." It was starting to look like the creature might be hiding somewhere in its actual guise, not living among the regular citizens. While in theory that might make it easier to find because of the limitation of how many isolated, hidden areas there might be, in practice the thing could just pop out in its unknown "default" guise whenever it needed something, and since that default still wasn't known, no one would think twice about its appearance. Baker and I agreed that we might get somewhere by seeing if a stranger had been seen in the general area often enough—that is, if our monster was at all interested in living the civilized life, it had to be picking up its cokes and chips somewhere, and even if it varied the routine, after a few weeks it had to be repeating locations. If we were lucky, someone would remember that. If it wasn't into the comforts of the twentieth century, we might be in for a long, hard search.

  "How about your end?"

  I shrugged. "Depends on how the thing got here. So far we haven't found any probable entry times or points, but hell, we don't know if it slithered here under its own power, walked in as a human being, or got shipped here as a Ronco Peel-O-Matic in a little cardboard box."

  "Maybe not, Wood, but ya are missing the point."

  I was always open to suggestions. "And the point being . . . ?"

  "Well, if'n we're right about this thing not bein' active until now, that means someone basically woke it up—either it just hatched, or someone found it trapped somewhere and let it out."

  Maybe it was all the paper-pushing, but I didn't quite see what he meant. "So?"

  He gave me a "stupid human" look. "So, big shot, there's damn few places you'd be able to have a Mirrorkiller—egg or suspended—hangin' around to be found. It'd have to be some place where the coverup job on the Old Civilization wasn't quite complete—real heavily defended vaults, places like that. Now, I ain't up on the geography of that time, but you got friends who are. I'd ask them."

  I smacked my forehead. "Okay, thanks, I deserved that. Of course. I suppose the Greek legends came from one that was released in a similar fashion?"

  Baker shrugged. "Probably. I don't know firsthand, but makes sense; seem to remember something of an alert on one of the things being on the loose 'bout two, three millennia back or so, but I was in Asia most o' that time. Ask your friends, they oughtta know."

  I gave a tiny shiver. Just when I was half-forgetting what he was, something would happen to bring it home. Verne always had that otherworldly air about him, courtesy of the movie-vampire image which he happened to fit and his own immense dignity; Baker, on the other hand, was as down-to-business a Southern cop as you could imagine, and hearing that drawling voice casually mentioning a memory from before the time of Christ was still unnerving. "Okay, I'll get on it. Add in those disappearances and see if it gets anything new on the timing end."

  "Will do."

  60

  "That few?"

  Morgan nodded. "Ten is the largest number of reasonable sites that Master Verne can think of. You have been told the power involved, Master Jason. You must understand, the demonic forces did their very best—at the direction of their ruler—to eradicate every trace of the original civilization, and Atla'a Alandar apparently suffered a similar fate." He unrolled a set of maps and began to lay them out on the floor of our hotel room. "Seven of them are, of course, at the locations of the Seven Towers; these were the bulwarks of Atlantaea's defenses, and even in destruction may have continued to defend at least something in their immediate area from complete eradication."

  "Odd," I said. "I'd have expected that such areas would have been the focus of specific clean-up efforts."

  "They most likely were, sir. However, according to Master Verne, the Towers' very nature made them difficult to completely destroy; even in destruction, it seems, they might have cloaked some material from detection."

  I studied the maps and started marking off the locations on the globe. It was a bit of a jolt to notice that instead of all exotic, faraway places, one of them appeared to be somewhere in the vicinity of Cape Cod. The rest of the ten locales were scattered
around the globe, ranging from somewhere out in the middle of the South Atlantic ocean to Germany.

  "Now that you have this information, sir, do you have any idea what you will do with it?"

  "Yep. That much I knew as soon as I asked. Obviously this Maelkodan thing wasn't mobile on its own before now, and I'll bet money that even immobile it wasn't anywhere with easy access." I was using my laptop to access my home machine and set up the search criteria, tapping in the commands and specs. "So someone just dug it up, or in the case of the ones in the ocean, maybe dredged it up."

  I waited for that set of commands to be acknowledged, entered the next. "So what I'm doing is setting up a bunch of search parameters to locate, first, any expeditions or events that might have uncovered something unusual in the ten areas you've given me. In the case of deep-ocean sites, that'd have to be major scientific expeditions—no one goes down fifteen thousand feet in a casual dive, let me tell you. In land or shallow-water situations, there's more potential for casual digs and dives that might happen to turn up something that Man Was Not Meant to Know."

  "I see," said Morgan. "And after that?"

  "Then I tie this in with law enforcement files."

  "Why law enforcement, Jason?" Sylvie asked, looking over my shoulder.

  "Think about the scenario. By far the most likely is this: Jane Doe finds something unusual—maybe it looks like an artifact, a fossil egg, whatever—on a dive or a dig. So the Maelkodan either wakes up right then, or it wakes up after she's brought the thing home or to the university or on board the ship. In any case, when it wakes up, what does it do? Barring some ridiculous coincidence involving its default human form looking just like one of the people present, it can't just slip out unnoticed, even assuming no one was looking when it woke up, hatched, whatever. Even if it does slip out, the finders are now missing part or all of their interesting find."

  "Very clever, sir."

  "Yes, I see, Jason. Either you'll have someone who disappeared, someone who got killed, or some item or artifact stolen or disappeared."

  "Right. Now, if it was incredibly lucky, there might have been a Werewolf available when it popped out, and it then could have assumed a known form to the people there. But even so, that person would have had to leave the area and end up here—or rather, it would likely have said it was going to some particular locale but ended up coming here to lose possible pursuit. Either way, it's likely that someone would be looking for them by now unless the person in question was in the habit of just dropping out of sight for weeks at a time."

  "How long do you think it will take to do this?"

  "Now that I've put in the parameters? A few hours, maybe, depending on how much stuff there is that makes a close fit."

  Morgan shook his head in amazement. "I still find myself shocked at the speed of such things, Master Jason. However, are you not making a bit of an assumption that what you are looking for is indeed online?"

  "To an extent, certainly, but news services generally carry most of the kind of thing I'm looking for. If we come up completely dry, we'll have to try something else, but let me give my machines a chance." I pulled out a deck of cards. "Anyone for a game?"

  A couple hours later, I was glad we were playing for pennies. I'm not a complete putz at cards, but I'd forgotten that Morgan was probably older than the Sheriff. He was clearly trouncing both of us. "I should've suggested a game of Magic," I muttered as I shuffled and began to deal. "One-eyed jacks and the suicide king are wild."

  "My geeky husband, you forget that you'd be the only one with a deck," Syl said, checking the cards as I dealt them.

  "Couldn't lose then, could I?"

  "Actually, Lady Sylvia, I happen to have a very nice red-black deck," Morgan said, causing Sylvia to boggle and me to chortle. "Although I confess to not going by tournament rules and hardly being up-to-date on my cards."

  "No problem, Morgan, it's not like I'm a fanatic who has time to keep up—" my laptop played a small fanfare. "Oh, goody—I mean, oh, darn, I guess I'll have to sit this one out," I said, dropping my cards on the table.

  The others dropped theirs, too and Morgan collected his small but significant winnings. I keyed in my go-ahead and data began to scroll across the screen.

  "Anything?" Syl asked.

  "Excavation in Chile . . . nope, nothing there . . . dredging . . . possible, but . . . digging for old Indian relics in New York, nothing promising there . . . well, well, what have we here?"

  I highlighted the article and brought it up. "Doctor J. I. O'Connell of the University of Oxford Archaeology Department led a team of researchers in the past few months on a survey of supposed underwater ruins off the coast of Cuba and other Caribbean islands. Their purpose was to find an accessible site and see if they could uncover anything in these ruins which would verify their age and origin."

  "Looks quite promising, Master Jason."

  I grinned. "Yep. And the physical nearness is encouraging. I mean, if you're in Mongolia and are looking for some Wolves for lunch, I'd presume it'd be a lot easier to head for somewhere in China. But if you're in the Caribbean, you head for the good old USA." I keyed in a request for a search on more information on O'Connell, this recent expedition, where he might be presenting the results, and so on.

  A few seconds later the results popped up. One carried the red flag signifying it was a law-enforcement file. "I'll be damned." I said. "Look at this."

  Syl read aloud. "Missing Persons report: James I. O'Connell."

  "I believe we have a winner," I said grimly.

  "Even more so, sir," Morgan said, pointing to the bottom of the list.

  From the screen, I read: "Underwater archaeology team hopes to present results at conference in Florida."

  A double-click brought up the entire article, which was an interview with Dr. O'Connell and a few of his students. In it, O'Connell indicated that he hoped to present at least a preliminary review of the results at the UAR (Underwater Archaeological Researchers) local conference in Florida. " 'This is all very tentative,' O'Connell said with a grin, 'since we don't know our exact timetable yet, let alone if we're going to have any decent results to present. Still, I've given them tentative notification so they'll be ready.' " I read from the article. I looked up at the others. "Bingo. A few calls, and we'll know exactly how and when our little friend entered the country."

  A quick Web search found the UAR page (I had to go back and specify, after encountering the acronym in use by things as diverse as a Mac networking program, a UK asset recovery agency, and Russian architects) and a listing of their event schedule. A chill went down my spine as I read:

  "Local Archaeology Conference: September 22–25, Venice, Florida."

  61

  I listened to the ring tone. Again. Again.

  "Hello?"

  The London-accented voice was that of a young woman.

  "Could I speak to Mandy Gennaro, please?" I said, making sure I was reading the right name.

  "Speaking. Who is this?"

  "Ms. Gennaro, my name is Jason Wood."

  "Not the—"

  "Yes, the," I said. I revised my estimate of how many people knew my name; given how much the Morgantown event had forced the revision of people's security systems, it might be that I was currently a household name in the civilized world. I wasn't sure what to think about that. "I'd like to ask you a few questions, if you have a few minutes."

  "Hold on!" I heard footsteps hurry away, a clatter, then footsteps returning. "Sorry, had something on to cook. Is this about the Professor?"

  "In part, certainly. I know the police have already gone over everything with you, so I'll try to make it quick."

  "How are you involved, Mr. Wood?"

  "It's rather complicated to explain. In a nutshell, I've gotten involved in an investigation here in the States which may be connected with Dr. O'Connell's disappearance in some way."

  "Right, then. Go ahead."

  I ran through a short list of questions, es
tablishing that she knew O'Connell quite well, having had him as her advisor for the past three years, and that she had been his right-hand person on the expedition.

  "So you were very familiar with the sites, then?"

  She had a nice laugh. "No, no. I was in charge because I'd done underwater investigations before—in the Mediterranean, an old Greek merchantman. So I understood a lot more of the limitations and requirements than most of the students. You don't really grasp the dangers unless you've been down in the muck yourself, you see."

  "Was all the equipment yours? The University's, I mean?"

  "Oh, lordy no. 'Twas a joint project, you understand—your own National Geographic Society helped sponsor it, and we had a few others to help. Submersibles and so on, they aren't cheap, not even for a big university."

  "I understand that Dr. O'Connell vanished at the airport."

  She hesitated. "It did seem that way . . ."

  It was an obvious opening. " . . . but?"

  "Is this confidential?" she asked suddenly.

  "Well, I'm not a lawyer or priest—I can't be protected under law against talking—but I won't say anything about this conversation that I don't have to legally to anyone not directly involved in the investigation I'm doing," I answered. "If you want to verify that I am who I say I am, I can give you some numbers to call to verify my bona fides."

  "Oh, no, no. It's just that the issue's a bit touchy now, and the police are still being a bit hush-hush about it all," she answered. "Here it is. The night he disappeared, he left in a bit of a hurry—left some last-minute notes about how he wanted the materials handled and so on, but that he'd had a sudden personal emergency and had to leave immediately. Now, he got himself plane tickets out, right there at the airport, but he never actually left."