The Elgin Deceptions (Sunken City Capers Book 2)

by Jeffrey A. Ballard

  The alley has some fire scaffolding on the upper floors, a dumpster, some side entrances. I test one of the side doors—it’s unlocked. “Found a good spot,” I say to Puo and Liáng.

  “Liáng,” I say, “hide in the dumpster. I’ll hide in the side entrance there. We’ll put the pinger between us. I’ll draw its attention when it descends on the pinger, you stun it from behind.”

  “Understood,” Liáng says. He situates himself inside the dumpster and then reaches into the equipment bag to hand me one of two stunners on a four-foot pole.

  “Puo,” I ask, “how we doing?”

  “Squiddie’s still on the other side of stadium,” Puo says.

  “That squiddie was never heading over here was it?” I ask. “You were just trying to get me to shut up.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Puo says innocently. “It looked like it to me.”

  Liar.

  Liáng hands me the large, soup-can-sized cylindrical pinger.

  I swim toward the unlocked side door and set the pinger down outside the door. “About to go active,” I say to Puo. “Keep an eye on all squiddies in the area.”

  “Roger that,” Puo says. “Standing by for you to go active.”

  I flip the switch and set it down.

  The pinger isn’t technically a pinger. It’s an active source that’s designed to mimic the kinds of sounds that interest a squiddie without necessarily reporting in. Sounds like rubble settling, or objects hitting the surface.

  The pinger alternates making its noises as I get in position on the other side of the unlocked door.

  The plan is simple. Lure the squiddie down here, zap it with the stunners, drag it to shore. Not all plans need to be eloquent to be effective.

  Puo says nearly immediately, “Looks like the squiddie picked it up. It’s headed in your direction.”

  “For real this time?” I ask.

  “Oh, yeah,” Puo says in his dry, nervous voice. “ETA in … two minutes, sixteen seconds.”

  “Liáng,” I ask, “get ready.”

  “I’m ready,” Liáng says.

  I check to make sure my stunner is on. It looks like an oversized bottle rocket, a thick cylindrical package attached to a long, thin tube. Except the long, thin tube is made out of rigid aluminum and the thick cylindrical package is a Puo invention that looks like a cattle prod but emits a scrambling, localized magnetic field where it connects, not an electrical shock—since I don’t fancy being electrocuted when I use it.

  The waves crashing fifty feet overhead travel down, a kind of soft lullaby in the dark, blue-pixelated alleyway. Coldness seeps in around my neck, where the suit is thinnest. The rest of my body is comfortably warm. The suit smells of rubber and seawater.

  “Squiddie is in your vicinity,” Puo whispers.

  I can’t see anything or hear anything beyond the active pinger.

  My fingertips tingle in anticipation. Or is that sweat sliding down them?

  Still no sight of it.

  “It’s right on top of you,” Puo whispers.

  A red arrow flashes in front of me to point upward. “Squiddie going active,” I whisper. “No visual.”

  My heart thuds in my chest.

  Puo whispers, “It’s hanging out above the alleyway. It’s not descending.”

  Damn. The pinger is still making noise, but it’s not drawing the squiddie in. How long before the squiddie recognizes the sounds aren’t natural? Or will it just dismiss the sounds as nothing and move off?

  We need that squiddie.

  “Liáng,” I say, “time to do something stupid.”

  To Puo I say, “Puo, watch for activity with the other squiddies.”

  “Why?” Puo rushes. “What are you—?”

  I push myself out into the alleyway and turn over on my back. “Hey squiddie, squiddie, squiddie! Abracadabra, you metal bastard!” Yelling of course does nothing, but it’s the spirit of the thing that counts.

  The squiddie is covered in blue pixels directly above the roofline over the pinger. Its many appendages extending out of its teardrop-shaped center swish around toward me.

  I kick my fins in the direction of the dumpster where Liáng is hiding.

  “It sent an alert—!” Puo yells

  The squiddie barrels down the alleyway toward me.

  Screaming, I alter my panicked trajectory away from the dumpster so the squiddie will have its back to the dumpster.

  Centipede-segmented like appendages lash out toward me.

  I shove the stunner with two hands at the wiggling mass descending on me.

  It connects at the armpit of one of the appendages.

  The appendage goes limp. The squiddie rolls away from it.

  Another appendage shoots down blindingly fast and grabs my left calf.

  “OWW!” It feels like someone took a bat to my calf and is now shoving it downward.

  “Isa—!” Puo screams.

  It reverses direction and jerks me upward by the leg.

  “Fuck! It’s got me by the leg!”

  I try to use the stunner again, but the squiddie’s gotten wise. It swats the stunner away with a forceful smack that reverberates in my hands.

  It’s got me. It’s pulling me upward—

  Oh, God. I can feel cold water seeping onto my throbbing leg. It punctured my suit.

  Suddenly the squiddie’s grip on me goes lax, and I snatch my leg back.

  Liáng’s stunner is smack on the spherical part of the teardrop-shaped center of the squiddie.

  The squiddie stops its terrifying motions and reverses course, falling toward the bottom. And I happen to be under it.

  I quickly kick to get myself out of the way. Cold water leaks in through the tear in my suit, searing my open leg wound.

  “Squiddie is down,” Liáng tries to say calmly, but you can tell his heart is pumping.

  “I’m free,” I say.

  Puo’s response is a relieved exhale followed by a rushed, “You need to get the heck out of there. Every squiddie in a two-mile radius is zooming your way. The authorities have been alerted.”

  “Roger, that,” I say. “Liáng, the DPVs.”

  Liáng sprints over to the dumpster.

  “Puo,” I say, “I don’t want to alarm you, but—”

  “What now—?” Puo asks worried.

  “My suit has been punctured in the leg. Water is leaking in.”

  “Can you breathe okay?” Puo asks.

  “Yeah,” I say. “It was just on my leg.” The breathing system is airtight to my helmet.

  “Soooo … what?” Puo asks, all his concern gone. “You’re just cold?”

  Liáng retrieves the equipment bag and two DPVs—the hand-held propeller devices that look like a thick pair of motorcycle handlebars but with enclosed propellers. The squiddie is too large for either one of us to carry alone, but strung between the two DPVs we can drag it to Wembley Island.

  “Yeah, Puo!” I say. “Hypothermia!” Yeesh. You’d think there’d be a little concern there. “And it throbs where the squiddie grabbed me.”

  I work with Liáng to string the lifeless squiddie between us in a fish net.

  “Roger, that,” Puo says. “I’ll get some band-aids and have Liáng kiss your boo-boo when you get back—”

  “Puo—!” I start.

  But Puo cuts me off. “You need to get the heck out of there. They’re almost there.”

  Liáng and I start up the DPVs and hang on. The DPVs strain against the squiddie, but we increase our buoyancy and lift up with our muscles. Once the squiddie is off the bottom of the alleyway, we start to move forward, picking up speed.

  We glide back up the street, adjusting our buoyancy as we go to keep the squiddie from slamming into the paved street. Once we’re near the surface we turn into one of the row houses with the brick fence sticking up out of the water.

  “The first one is at the alleyway,” Puo says.

  I stand up in the yard and jog up the s
teps of the two-story row house. I push open the front door. There’s about a foot and a half of standing, frigid water in the house. Just deep enough to leak into my suit.

  Liáng and I work as quietly as we can to pull the squiddie into the house.

  “We’re in,” I say to Puo.

  “Roger that,” Puo says. “Get the squiddie upstairs and sit tight. I’ll see you in the morning. Behave yourselves,” he adds.

  I grind my teeth at Puo. That last line is a bit too reminiscent of our jobs with Winn. Puo is going to have to get disabused, vehemently and quickly, of the notion of doing that again.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE NEXT DAY, around noon, I’m toweling off after a long, luxurious hot shower in the steam-filled upstairs master bathroom at the house in Hampstead. By the time Puo got to us in the morning on Wembley Island, I was shivering near constantly.

  Freaking Puo. Not worried at all about me and hypothermia.

  Wembley Island was crawling with authorities within hours. They used the island as a base to conduct their investigation under the water. Searching the island was secondary—they were doing it, but weren’t dedicating enough manpower to it to do it fast enough.

  There were so many vehicles coming in and out of Wembley Island at that point, I think Puo may have been able to just drop down and pick us up without any subterfuge. As it was, he acted as a food delivery truck ordered by some unknown cop and brought them hot coffee and breakfast sandwiches—isn’t that nice of us?

  But the bastard didn’t even freaking save me some hot coffee! Freaking Puo!

  I blow-dry my hair, enjoying at first the fresh blasts of hot air. It soon starts to get a little warm in the small space—don’t let the term “master” in master bathroom fool you. It’s a closet with a stand-alone shower, a toilet and a single-sink vanity shoved in it with taupe walls. But after the night I just had, I force myself to enjoy the growing heat, a mini-sauna. I slip into olive-green cargo pants and a long-sleeve black sweater and step out of the bathroom into the master bedroom.

  Puo is waiting for me sitting on my bed facing the bathroom.

  Great.

  “You got lucky,” Puo greets me with. His face is serious.

  “I get lucky a lot,” I say defensively from the bathroom door. There’s nowhere to go in the sparse, but similarly painted taupe bedroom.

  “What the heck was that?” Puo asks not letting up.

  “What?”

  “That leap-out-in-front-of-a-squiddie suicidal stupidity. Are you suicidal?” He asks that last question seriously.

  “No!” I answer, getting annoyed. “The squiddie wasn’t coming down. I had to do something. What would you have suggested?”

  “How about trying another time? How about waving the stunner around past the door to get its attention?”

  The stunner idea makes my mouth drop. I stare at him for a brief second. “Well, you didn’t suggest those things!”

  “You didn’t give me a chance! You didn’t give anyone a chance! You just leapt out there like a selfish idiot.”

  “Selfish?” I yell at him.

  “Yes, Isa! Selfish! What would happen to us if you got arrested, or killed?” Puo’s chest is rising and falling, causing the bare metal bed frame to creak in rhythm. Red blooms on his cheeks.

  I can’t think of anything to respond to him with when he’s all worked up like this. And the creaking of the bed frame suddenly reminds me strongly of my bedroom back in the Seattle Isles. It too was sparse when Winn shared it with me. No bed frame. No furniture. Cheap plastic stacking drawers—kinda like the ones that double as nightstands on one side of the bed Puo’s sitting on.

  “Look—” he says more calmly, pulling me back into the present.

  “Ugh. You’re not going to tell me a story are you?” Puo likes to tell stories with morals, or at least what he thinks are morals, to them.

  “No!” He looks annoyed, but plows on, “You’ve been … different ever since Winn left—”

  “Damn it! Not this again.”

  “Yes, this again! You refuse to even acknowledge anything has changed.” He pauses here for me to retort, but I don’t give him the satisfaction. “It’s like whenever something reminds you of him, you get reckless. Whenever you’re in the anti-gravity suits—”

  No. Those are just plain fun.

  “—And last night when Liáng mentioned Huángdì de wàikē yīshēng. You then suddenly decide to jump out at a squiddie.”

  Puo’s mention of Liáng reminds me of his dumbass line about Liáng kissing my boo-boo, but I bite my tongue. Somehow I think unloading on him will play into Puo’s whole corner-store psychology diagnosis. So instead I correct him, “I don’t even know whatever that comic book thing is.”

  Puo stares at me. “Huángdì de wàikē yīshēng is a comic book about a surgeon. Sound like anyone we know?”

  Winn was a surgeon that fell in with us after a malpractice suit left him with no alternative but crime. When I don’t respond, not trusting myself to speak, he says, “You do this. You have this weird selective memory. Like you’re trying to erase all memories of Winn.”

  I use the opportunity to pick up my wet dirty clothes from the night before off the floor, pointedly ignoring him.

  Puo watches me for several seconds and then says, “Not going to talk to me, hunh?”

  “Yup,” I say. “It’s a new strategy. Analyze that.” Asshat.

  “I kinda like it,” Puo says. “I can finally get a word in edgewise and explain in far more detail what is going on with you—”

  “Oh, shut up.” I get a towel from the bathroom to wipe up the puddle of water that had formed around my crumpled clothes on the floor. “What have you learned from the squiddie?”

  “That you and Liáng successfully scrambled its electronics. It was dead-on-arrival. I can’t do anything with it.”

  I stop my cleaning. “Whadda ya mean?” My leg still stings, damn it.

  Puo explains, “Where Liáng struck the squiddie was right over the SFID chip. That chip is one of several that acts a lynch pin. Once scrambled, there’s no putting humpty-dumpty back together again.”

  “Can you order a new one?” I ask.

  Puo leans back a bit and smiles at me.

  “What?”

  “Nuthin’,” he says with a little smile.

  “What!”

  “Look at you,” he says. “Ordering something, instead of planning some elaborate job or game. I think Winn rubbed off on you.”

  “Puo—” I start, my heart lurching in my throat. “Can you just … let it go? I just don’t want to hear about him right now.”

  Puo screws up his mouth and looks like he’s moving his tongue around inside his mouth. “All right,” he finally says. “Yes, we can order another chip, but it’s not straightforward—”

  My first thought is that Liáng should be here to hear this if we need to buy something. My second thought is what Puo would make of me asking for Liáng to be here.

  Puo switches topics seamlessly, apparently reading my mind. “—I already talked to Liáng. He’s on board.” He gives me a small knowing smile for anticipating me and switches back to his explanation. “The company that makes the chips will only sell them to government agencies, so I have to spoof an order, which is actually a lot easier with the squiddie in hand.”

  “So you put the order in?” I ask, suspecting I already know the answer.

  “Yup,” Puo says.

  “Good,” I say, feeling suddenly drained. “Anything else?” I ask, dismissing him. “I’m going to lie down for a bit.”

  “No,” Puo says quietly. The box springs creak as he gets up from the bed. He makes to say something else, but shuts his mouth and rubs at his face as he leaves.

  “Wait,” I say, “When does the acoustic dampening material get here?”

  Puo says, “This afternoon.”

  “Okay.” I pull back the sand-colored cotton bed sheets. I don’t normally nap, but it just seems l
ike less effort right now than going downstairs and dealing with Puo and his constant reminders of Winn.

  The bedroom door clicks shut as I lie down, the sound echoing in the empty room.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I WALK downstairs groggy and bleary-eyed six hours later. It’s now dark out and early evening. I think I could’ve slept longer, but I became paranoid about screwing up my sleep schedule.

  I hear slow classical music as I head down the cold bare wooden steps. But the music has a distinctly Asian feel to it. There’s a mournful erhu woven throughout along with something else I can’t place.

  The stairs empty out on the first floor foyer; the family room is to my left and empty, while the sitting room (with no furniture) is to my right and contains the source of the music.

  Liáng is streaming music from his pocket tablet that he set on the fireplace mantel. He also built a small wood fire in the yellowing brick fireplace. Red flames lick the dark-purple bark of the logs. Small cackles fill the gaps in the classical music.

  Liáng momentarily has his back to me and is moving throughout the room, pretending to dance with a nonexistent partner. His back is straight, and he holds his hands high; his left hand would be on the back of his partner’s shoulder and his right hand is held out. It takes a second in the fog of my nap, but I recognize a waltz. He stops when he sees me.

  “It’s pretty,” I say. I can’t help a small yawn escaping. “What is it?” I step into the room and make a beeline for the fire. It’s chilly in the house. I’m still in my cargo pants and sweater but the cold seems to seep into everything in October in England.

  “It’s the Chinese Waltz,” Liáng says. After a second’s consideration, he asks, “Would you like to dance? To help me practice,” he adds when he sees my questioning look.

  The throbbing on my leg has subsided to a dull ache that reminds me it’s there every time I take a step with it. “Sure.” Why not?

  “Have you waltzed before?” Liáng asks.

  “It’s been awhile.”

  I step into the middle of the room, and Liáng comes to stand about half a pace away in front of me. I hold out my left hand and rest my right hand on his muscled back. Whoa—he’s got to have like zero body fat. He directs my right hand higher up on his shoulder, and I feel suddenly like I was in junior high trying to cop a feel or something—oh yeah, baby, nice middle back.