My grandma Jane had passed away three months ago, after a lengthy battle with cancer. Evelyn was one of the few people who had attended my grandmother’s small funeral, and she had also sent flowers and had even made me some casseroles, not that I had felt like eating them. Since I had hocked my refrigerator, I ended up donating the dishes to a homeless shelter. At least those folks had gotten some enjoyment out of Evelyn’s tasty cooking.
I gave the older woman a bright smile, trying to disguise the ache in my heart along with my ever-present exhaustion. “I’m okay. Grandma Jane had a good, long life. She’s in a better place now.”
I spouted the usual platitudes in a calm, steady voice, and Evelyn nodded in return. Sentimentality wasn’t exactly encouraged in Section agents, not even the information desk manager. We all knew the horrors lurking out there in the not-so-dark-and-distant corners of the world and that there was little time to dwell on our own problems and especially our own fraught emotions. Not if we wanted to stay ahead of the terrorists and criminals and prevent even more bad things from happening.
“Anyway, I should get going. Thanks for the info.”
“Why are you asking about that cleaner?” Evelyn said. “I thought you tended to steer clear of them. Especially given what happened to Jack.”
My jaw automatically clenched at the mention of Jack Locke, my father, but I forced myself to smile again, as if her words didn’t bother me. “No real reason. I saw the cleaner in the cafeteria and wanted to know who the new face was.”
Evelyn nodded again, seemingly accepting my explanation, but her eyes narrowed behind her glasses. Time to go before she became any more suspicious.
I said goodbye to her, then moved forward, grabbed the long black lanyard hanging from my neck, held out the attached white plastic keycard, and waved it at the reader. The light flashed green, and I pushed through the metal turnstile, walked over, and stepped into one of the elevators.
Instead of going up, I rode the elevator down to Section’s third floor. The old train station had seven sublevels, and each one housed a different Section department with a different personality.
Accounting was on one, while IT was on two. Both had pretty standard office setups, although the accountants loved their fancy espresso machines and hoarded their locked closets full of office supplies, while the IT folks were into more mellow herbal teas and building their own robots.
Analysts and charmers were housed on three, while cleaners were down on five. Both of those floors also had standard office setups, although the cleaners had a state-of-the-art gym and a pristine locker room to help with their training, while we analysts and charmers were lucky to have landline phones that didn’t crackle with too much static and moldy showers with weak streams of lukewarm water.
The weapons depot with its racks of guns, walls of gadgets, and closets filled with glamorous gowns was down on six, while seven was a parking garage for Section surveillance vans, cars, and other vehicles.
And then there was level four, right in the middle of it all, which featured offices for some of the Section higher-ups, like Maestro, along with interrogation rooms and cells where persons of interest and prisoners were kept until they were either released or transported to a black site for further questioning.
Crocodile Dundee Desmond was probably lurking somewhere on the fifth floor, ruthlessly plotting the best way to kill whatever paramortal target he’d been assigned to eliminate. Or maybe he was hitting on the unfortunate soul who’d been selected to be his liaison. Each cleaner was assigned one, and liaison was just a fancy name for a personal assistant. Some liaisons wrangled weapons and gadgets, while others saw to their respective cleaner’s housing and transportation needs. A liaison could even be called upon to go out into the field and help their cleaner execute certain mission objectives, sort of like a glorified superhero sidekick.
The elevator door pinged open, and I pushed away all thoughts of the cleaner and liaisons. He was someone else’s problem, and I had plenty of my own to manage.
I walked down a long corridor with bland gray walls, waved my plastic keycard over another reader, and waited for a set of bullet-and-magic-resistant-glass double doors to buzz open. I pushed through to the other side and stepped into a bullpen, a large open space filled with cubicles partitioned off with clear plastic walls.
People of all ages, shapes, sizes, and ethnicities perched, sprawled, and lounged in uncomfortable, squeaky office chairs inside the cubicles, just as they did in other bullpens on this level. Each area had the same basic equipment—a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse, a landline, and a place to plug in a Section-issued laptop. However, folks had added their own personal touches to their spaces, including family photos, sports posters, and pet calendars. Collections of everything from ceramic tortoises to crocheted otters to goofy stress balls shaped like witches and wizards also adorned the desks and cubicle walls.
I headed over to my desk on the right side of the bullpen. Unlike the others, my desk was devoid of decorations except for one thing—a small crystal mockingbird that had been a gift from my grandmother the day I had started working at Section. The figurine had a lot of sentimental value, but it also served as a visual reminder that things—and people—were very often not what they seemed in this spy business.
More stuff used to clutter my desk—some beloved old books, silver-framed family photos, even a couple of collectible superhero figurines in their original boxes—but I’d hocked them all after my grandmother had died. It truly was amazing the things you could sell online. I missed my knickknacks, though. I missed a lot of the things I’d sold over the past few months.
Miriam was sitting at her cubicle, which was right next to mine. She had long ago shoved her monitor to one side to make way for a freestanding lighted vanity mirror, along with a clear plastic organizer tray bristling with lipsticks, eye-shadow palettes, and bottles of foundation. Miriam loved beauty products as much as she did dating, and she was always trying some new lotion or cream in hopes of making herself look even more stunning than she already was.
In addition to the mirror and the makeup, her desk also featured a tall wooden jewelry box shaped like a castle. Most of the drawers were at least partially open and brimming with necklaces, rings, and bracelets. The gems winked at me like colorful eyes, as though they were watching my every move. Maybe they were. Like all charmers, Miriam had tiny cameras and microphones embedded in most of her jewelry so she could record every secret someone whispered to her in crystal-clear, high-definition video and audio.
A couple of bright silk scarves were draped over the top of her cubicle wall, and everything from little black cocktail dresses to lacy lingerie was neatly folded and tucked away in her desk drawers. Miriam could have gone down to the sixth-floor depot to gear up for her missions like the other charmers did, but she had told me more than once that she preferred to use her own makeup, jewelry, and clothes. I would have too, if I’d had access to all the designer labels she did.
I had often thought that Miriam must charm samples out of the luxury boutiques upstairs in the pedestrian mall to be able to afford such fine things on her not-so-fine government salary. Or perhaps she had a sugar daddy, past or present, she hadn’t told me about.
Miriam propped her elbow on the low wall that separated our cubicles and held out her hand, offering me a stick of gum wrapped in light pink paper. “Rosemint gum?” she asked. “It’s supposed to be great for nicotine withdrawal.”
Miriam was trying to quit smoking, a nasty habit that a Greek boyfriend had gotten her hooked on a couple of months ago, and all sorts of crumpled candy and lollipop wrappers littered her desk. The gum must have been her newest method to try to combat her cravings.
“No, thanks.” I didn’t care for the gum’s flavor, which was a disgusting mix of cloying rose and tangy mint. Plus, the pink wrapper reminded me of the words and numbers I still needed to chase down to finish my report.
Miriam shrugged, unwrapped the gum, and po
pped it into her mouth. Then she focused on her laptop and started typing, working on her own report. During lunch, Miriam had revealed that she was currently undercover as Coco Livingston, one of her many Section aliases. Coco, a trust-fund baby and notorious party girl, was cozying up to the wife of a South African diplomat she’d accidentally-on-purpose befriended at an embassy party last week in hopes of picking up information about the woman’s shady husband.
I glanced around the bullpen. Ronaldo, Helga, Mika, Kaimbe. The other analysts were dutifully typing away on their own laptops, so I looked past them. Two glassed-in offices were set into the back wall, one each for the analyst and charmer supervisors, with a large conference room nestled in the center, although all three doors were closed, and the lights were off in both offices. The cats were away, but the mice knew better than to play.
My gaze lingered on one of the offices, which was empty except for a bare desk with a single lonely chair sitting behind it. Gregory Jensen’s things had been boxed up and sent to his family a couple of days after his death, although no one had taken his brass nameplate off the door yet. But at Section, life went on, and there was little time to mourn the dead, especially if they’d been killed as the result of a tragic accident like Jensen had. So I sat down at my own desk, pulled my laptop out of my bag, and plugged it into the Section network.
Section 47 got its name from the fact that paramortals had forty-seven chromosomes, compared to regular mortals, who only had forty-six, or two pairs of twenty-three. That extra piece of our DNA gave us all kinds of interesting abilities. At least, that was the current scientific theory. For an organization that dealt with the magical and the mystical, Section higher-ups tried to explain a lot of it away with science, as though cold, hard facts somehow made it easier to wrap our minds around the terrible things that some paramortals did with their powers.
I didn’t particularly care where my magic came from or how it worked—just that I had it and that it continued to function at a high level.
Everyone in the bullpen had some sort of magical ability. Ronaldo and Helga were synth analysts like me who used their own unique types of synesthesia to comb through reports from undercover Section agents, looking for patterns and other actionable intelligence to pass up the food chain. Mika and Kaimbe were linguists, aka lingos, who could speak, read, and understand any language. They were responsible for interpreting and transcribing terrorist and criminal chatter, and trying to figure out the code words people used to communicate their dirty deeds to one another.
As a charmer, Miriam engaged in an active social calendar and kept track of the various foreign paramortals in town, both the legitimate diplomats and the ones who were really spies for their own countries. She was responsible for gathering personal intelligence—gossip, whispers, rumors, and information that came from the actual people she communicated with on a regular basis. A couple of other charmers also worked in our office, although they were all away on assignments right now.
Me? As a Section analyst, I, well, analyzed things. Banking, tax, and other monetary transaction records. Property sales. Biomagical patents. Purchases of art, jewelry, and other high-end, big-ticket items. Planes, trains, and automobiles. Even stupid cat videos on social media. Section referred to all those things and similar items as paper intelligence, as in anything that left a paper (or digital) trail that could be followed. So I watched, tracked, and analyzed dozens of bank accounts, businesses, modes of transportation, and social media accounts belonging to known paramortal terrorists and criminals to try to figure out where they were sending—and spending—their money and what bad, bad things they or their associates might be planning to do with it.
Basically, I was a numbers guru. Grandma Jane had also been a Section analyst, and she had taught me long ago that while people might lie, numbers never did. The money always goes somewhere had been one of her favorite catchphrases.
Ronaldo, Helga, Mika, and Kaimbe were absorbed in their own tasks, while Miriam was now on her landline, planning a girls’ lunch and shopping spree with that diplomat’s wife. I pulled my wireless earbuds out of my bag, synced them to my phone, and cued up some classical music to drown her out. Then I cracked open my laptop and got to work.
As an analyst, I was always checking up on one bad guy or another, but for the past three months, most of my time had been spent tracking the wheelings and dealings of Henrika Hyde. To the regular mortal world, Henrika was the founder and CEO of Hyde Engineering, a pharmaceutical company on the cutting edge of medical research in a variety of fields. But to Section 47, Henrika Hyde was a paramortal weapons maker who used her money, engineering degrees, and laboratories to create some truly horrific biomagical weapons.
Corrosive gases that melted human flesh and bones, but left wood, glass, and other objects completely untouched. Poisons that targeted specific bloodlines and genetic markers that would eliminate entire paramortal families at once. Powders and pills that would give people amazing highs, along with super speed and strength, even as the drugs melted their internal organs and turned their lungs into ice. Henrika Hyde had invented all those horrible things and many more.
A few months ago, an undercover Section agent had managed to infiltrate Henrika’s inner circle and had swiped some information on her many businesses. The agent had been found dead a few days later, with his bones liquefied inside his own body, even though his skin was still smooth and intact and showed no signs of outward trauma. But the stolen information had eventually been passed down to me, and I had been following the trail of corporate shell companies—and the millions of dollars that flowed through them—ever since.
Most of it was pretty standard stuff. Plant and office locations, safety protocols, employee personnel records, payrolls, tax breaks from local governments. Henrika Hyde was smart enough to keep her books mostly legit, but I had found a small anomaly among the thousands and thousands of pages of electronic documents and spreadsheets. For some reason, Henrika had started making hefty donations to the Halstead Foundation.
The foundation funded various charities, but its biggest, most public project was renovating the historic building that housed the Halstead Hotel on the outskirts of D.C. The building and hotel were both owned by the Halstead family, known for its collection of art and antiquities as well as precious jewels, many of which were on display in their hotels around the world.
That last fact was the one that interested me. Henrika wasn’t known to be a patron of historic buildings, but she absolutely loved jewels. She had bid on several rare gemstones at various auctions over the years, as well as designer necklaces, bracelets, and rings. I had never seen a photo of Henrika where she wasn’t wearing several carats’ worth of diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and more. I had often wondered if the jewels had something to do with Henrika’s magic, although no one seemed to know exactly what paramortal powers she had. Or maybe she just liked shiny things. Hard to tell, without more information.
Either way, I could understand why the Halstead family’s jewelry collection would interest Henrika, but her sudden benevolence in shelling out money to their charitable foundation mystified me. The donations had to be a bribe or payment for something. I just didn’t know what that something was yet.
I had filed a short, preliminary report about two months ago, suggesting further investigation into Henrika Hyde. My longer, second report last month had offered up even more reasons why Henrika merited watching, along with suggesting that Section find a way to arrest, hold, and interrogate her about all the biomagical weapons she had in the works.
But of course Gregory Jensen had said that my reports and conclusions were amateurish before presenting them as his own brilliant ideas at a recent interdepartmental meeting. He’d even presented my plan to grab Henrika as if it were his own. Lazy bastard.
And of course I couldn’t protest and claim it was all my work, not without coming off as being difficult and jealous, and having Jensen make my office life even more miserable. So I gro
und my teeth, kept quiet, and imagined stabbing my pen into Jensen’s smug face over and over again like he was a voodoo doll.
Now, I was determined to finish a third, even longer, updated, and much more detailed report before the new analyst supervisor was named. I wanted to start with a clean slate, and I was hoping my next boss would give me proper credit for my work and judge me on my own merits, instead of on my father’s reckless reputation.
I glanced through the documents and spreadsheets again, but I didn’t get any further than I had at lunch, so I put a few final touches on my report and emailed it to Trevor Donnelly, the charmer supervisor and my immediate boss at the moment. I got a bounce-back message saying Trevor was out of the office until tomorrow, but at least I had filed the report. It was off my desk and out of my hands.
A glance at my phone revealed that it was past five. Everyone else had already left the bullpen, including Miriam, although her desk was littered with rosemint gum wrappers. I crinkled my nose at the strong, sweet, minty scent hovering around her cubicle and resisted the urge to sweep the pink wrappers into the trash. Instead, I packed up my things and left.
I might be done with Section, but unfortunately, my workday was far from over.
* * *
I rode the elevator up to the ground floor, said good night to Evelyn, pushed through the glass revolving doors, and headed home.
Grandma Jane had owned and lived in an apartment a few blocks from the main Section building. I had moved in a few months before her death to take care of her, and I had inherited the apartment after she was gone. I trudged up three flights of stairs, crossed the hallway, and peered at the front door.
In addition to seeing mistakes and errors in documents and spreadsheets and physical dangers and hazards in my surroundings, my synesthesia also let me sense things that were askew, out of place, or just plain wrong. I reached out with my magic, but the door looked exactly the same as when I had left this morning. No telltale scratches marred the metal, and since no pink haze floated around the lock, it hadn’t been tampered with. I opened the door, then shut and locked it behind me.
A Sense of Danger Page 3