Mad Maudlin

by Mercedes Lackey

  If Marley Bell were still alive.

  Well, why don't we just go see? Ria said to herself. There must be a few laws in this town I haven't broken yet. And after all, Mr. Wheatley has invited me so very nicely to come to tea . . .

  She pulled out her PDA and her phone and began making calls.

  * * *

  Michael Myers was not his real name, of course, and Ria had never decided whether his choosing as his nom de ombre the name of a fictional Hollywood horror movie villain was an encouraging spark of whimsy or a warning sign of actual psychosis.

  In the intelligence community, maybe the two things were identical.

  Michael's was the third name on her list. There'd been some items in Threshold's files too sensitive to pass on even to Nathaniel Babcock. Things with international consequences.

  It would have been simpler to bury them and forget them, but Ria couldn't bring herself to do that. Eventually the question of how to pass them on safely had led to Michael. The partnership had worked out before, which was why she was trusting him now.

  She supposed he must have an office somewhere. She'd never bothered to try to find it. Tonight they were meeting at a place called Xavier's, a trendy District "drinkeateria" located near Capitol Hill. Xavier's was well-supplied with pseudo-Victorian stained glass, blond oak veneer, and even a few ferns. It was the sort of place to which the tragically hip repaired to meet and mate, as anonymous and impersonal as a paper cup. The perfect place to play spy.

  Michael reveled in the trappings—or at least pretended he did. Ria was never sure. Michael did everything with utter sincerity, and believed in everything he did.

  "You look like a cut-rate Bogie," she said as he sat down.

  Raindrops starred the brim of the grey fedora and the shoulders of the tan trench coat of the man who settled into the booth opposite her. Dark hair, dark eyes, middle forties, lightly tinted glasses that he didn't really need. Michael worked very hard at looking just like everyone else. He could be an accountant, a bank manager, possibly even (although that might be stretching things) a dentist.

  He wasn't.

  "I'm much better looking. And I don't smoke. Which means I'll never die—of lung cancer, at any rate. It's good to see you again, Ria. Or should I say, 'Ilsa'? We really should meet less often."

  Usually Michael kept the front of his mind—the interior monologue most people ran without knowing it—crammed with meaningless chatter. Ria had never quite decided whether that was because Michael suspected the existence of telepathy, or because there were a lot of things in Michael's world that he simply preferred not to dwell on. But tonight was different. She'd skimmed his mind out of habit—a bad habit, but hers—and tonight his thoughts were clear and easy to read.

  Years of practice enabled her to smile, to carry on as if she'd heard nothing.

  "I have something for you. Then I want you to do me a large number of favors. Then we won't see each other again, Michael," Ria said.

  No matter what happened this evening, that much was true. And Michael would help her because he didn't care about his future any more, and because it would amuse him to do so, for some reason buried too deep for her to quite catch.

  Michael was dying.

  It was one of those wildfire cancers that ripped through the system too fast for surgery or drugs. He knew. His bosses did not, but he knew that wouldn't be true for much longer. She could see his plans clearly in his mind: vacation—Greece, Michael had always liked Greece; time the arrival of the documentation of his condition for when it wouldn't matter any more and make sure the body was found so there'd be no loose ends to worry anyone unduly. He wouldn't have to do it this way, except for the fact that he'd lose his passport when he retired; that was just the way it was. And he wanted to see the sun rise over the isles one more time. . . . "The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece! Where burning Sappho loved and sung . . ."

  With a wrench, Ria cut the connection to his thoughts. More proof that eavesdroppers never hear anything they like.

  "Favors," Michael said, smiling as if he didn't have a care in the world. "Well. I'm from the government, and they say that means I'm here to help you. So what do you have for me?"

  * * *

  Over drinks and dinner, Ria explained about Wheatley and the PDI; giving him the information she'd originally been intending to bring to the meeting.

  "You already mentioned this to Babcock over at the Fibbies, and to a dear boy among the Christians In Action who told you his name was David, didn't you?" Michael said.

  "I thought I'd share the joy," Ria said dryly.

  "But I'm sure you saved the best for me," Michael said encouragingly.

  "Today some of Wheatley's goons broke into my suite over at the Watergate and bugged the place thoroughly, though I can't prove it—anybody with a dollar and a dream can buy that kind of equipment these days." She sighed. "There's a certain piquant irony to that which I will probably appreciate in a few years, though I doubt it even dawned on Wheatley. But better yet, I'm fairly sure he's kidnapped a civilian and is holding him hostage somewhere—my best guess would be that it's in his offices here in Washington. So I thought I'd go look," Ria said.

  Michael regarded her for a few moments in rapt contemplative silence. "By yourself?" was all he said.

  "No. I was going to bring along a couple of experts."

  "This would be—ahem!—to assist you in engaging in an illegal search of the premises of one of our intelligence agencies?" Michael seemed to be having some difficulty keeping a straight face, but to his credit, he managed it.

  "I'd prefer it if it weren't completely illegal," Ria said demurely. "So if you could arrange for a warrant, and to deputize me and two other people as U.S. Federal Marshals—or whatever you prefer—that would certainly make things easier," Ria said blandly.

  "I see. And you would want all of this when?"

  Ria checked her watch. "By eleven o'clock tonight."

  Michael leaned forward, completely serious now. "Just who is it that's gone missing, Ria?"

  "A young man named Marley Bell—the blameless and only surviving scion of a fine old Baltimore family, if that makes any difference. Bell disappeared ten days ago. My sources say that Wheatley is convinced that Bell can help him locate these Spookies he's fixated on." She raised an eyebrow. "Whether or not this is pertinent, I don't know, but I believe that Wheatley is so fixated on his figments of the imagination that he'd ignore an al Qaeda operative driving a tanker full of jet fuel towards the Senate if he thought he saw a goblin across the street."

  "And how sure are you that this Bell is squirreled away somewhere in the PDI's offices?" Michael asked.

  "According to what I could dig up on them, they don't have a lot of secondary locations and safe houses. If he's anywhere, he's there." Simple logic told her that much. If he could have been located by magic, Moonlight would have told me exactly where he was—which means he's either behind heavy-duty shielding, or dead. And the only place with magical shielding that I can think of is the PDI headquarters.

  "What if he's already dead?" Michael asked pragmatically.

  She shrugged; Bell was just a name and a photograph to her. His value was that his abduction proved Wheatley had gone way over the top. "Then I'm sure Wheatley's documented it. And I'm sure you don't care just how you get access to those files."

  "And why are you not leaving this to the professionals?" Michael asked.

  "Call me a thrill-seeker."

  Michael smiled grimly. "I could call you a lot of things, Ria, but 'thrill-seeker' would be fairly low on the list. I take it you've done something like this before?"

  She gave him a long look, and a hard one. "More often than you'd think."

  He blinked first. "I'll have to take your word for that. All right. Let's just say your interests and some other people's coincide on this one. But there's a condition. I'm going in with you."

  * * *

  At two o'clock, earlier that same day, Kayla w
as in Oriana Dunaway's waiting room.

  She could have called, but she hadn't been able to sit still. She wanted to do something—anything—to find Eric, but all the things she could think of just somehow seemed to add to the disaster. Telling Ria, for example. Tell her what? That they'd misplaced Eric? Ria would lose it big-time.

  "You're Kayla Smith, aren't you? I'm Dr. Dunaway."

  A slender blonde woman came out into the waiting room. To Kayla's relief, she didn't offer to shake hands.

  Kayla stood up. Dr. Dunaway shook her head, forestalling Kayla's first question. "No, I haven't heard anything new. But maybe if you could tell me a little more about the situation, I could offer a few suggestions. Why don't you come into the kitchen? This is my lunch hour, so I'll have to eat while we talk."

  * * *

  "—so you say that Eric's elvensteed doesn't believe that Eric has gone Underhill, but can't locate him here in our world, nor can his apprentice?"

  "Yeah, that's about it," Kayla said, sipping her iced tea.

  The kitchen of Dr. Dunaway's apartment was a high-tech marvel in chrome and white that looked more suited to surgery than cooking. Kayla sat at the counter across from Dr. Dunaway. Dr. Dunaway was eating a salad. She'd offered Kayla some, but Kayla was too keyed up to eat.

  "And the spirit bound into Hosea's instrument says that Eric isn't dead?"

  Kayla nodded, taking a deep breath and willing herself to remain calm. Yelling wouldn't help matters, but Dr. Dunaway's dispassionate calm was almost unbearable. It was as if she didn't care what happened to Eric.

  Get a grip, Smith. Of course she cares. But it's her business not to get involved. She's a shrink. She couldn't help people if she got all involved in their stuff.

  "Well, then. Let us consider what we do know. We know that Eric is unavailable to his elvensteed, which would know if he was simply dead, or had been taken into Elfhame. We therefore must assume until we know otherwise that Eric is alive and still in this world, and is for some reason unable to give his name to the admitting physician at any hospital or psychiatric facility in the area, since I've checked with the area hospitals and no patient has been admitted under that name in the last seventy-two hours."

  Kayla nodded. "And he isn't in jail. A friend of mine checked that for me. Or . . ."

  "Or the city morgue?" Oriana finished for her, very gently. Kayla nodded. Toni had checked that too, even though Lady Day seemed to be certain that Eric wasn't dead.

  "Well, it's good to know that all the obvious possibilities have been covered. But let's consider how he could be in the hospital without our knowing. I think the most likely thing is that he is in the hospital system somewhere as a John Doe admission. If he disappeared just after he left you, he wouldn't have been carrying any identification, there would be no way for anyone to learn his name from his personal effects, assuming he were admitted to a hospital in a state of unconsciousness. Furthermore, if he was unconscious when admitted, there is a one hundred percent chance that anyone who had found him first stripped him of anything valuable, which would include any ID he was carrying. So the next thing you'll need to do is search for all the John Doe emergency admissions that match his physical description. Tedious, but not impossible."

  Kayla stared at Dr. Dunaway in confusion. "But . . . if somebody just hit him over the head . . . Lady Day would still know where he was."

  "My dear child," Dr. Dunaway said chidingly, "an enchanted motorcycle is hardly the most powerful magician at work in the world. If Eric has been placed under a spell of concealment . . . or if, for some reason, he has concealed himself . . . he could be quite difficult to track by magic. But the physical is harder to conceal than the ethereal in most cases. If his body remains in New York, it can be found."

  And if it isn't . . . ?

  It was time to stop kidding herself and make those phone calls.

  * * *

  Ria had wanted to go in alone—or at the very least, go in with someone like Michael, whom she wouldn't have to take responsibility for. But she needed someone human with her, watching her back, because the PDI's toys wouldn't work on humans. Wheatley's people had the ability to render themselves completely invisible to the Sidhe—and she had no idea how well their equipment would work on someone who was half-Elven. Live-fire conditions were not the time to find out, either.

  She'd tried to reach Eric this afternoon when she'd first decided to break in to the PDI, but he wasn't answering either of his phones, which was annoying. When she'd checked in at her office, Anita said that Kayla was trying to reach her, but Ria let that one slide—even if somebody was dead (unlikely), that problem would have to wait until tomorrow. She needed all her attention focused here.

  If she couldn't have Eric to watch her back, that left a paid professional. And a very short list.

  * * *

  "I'm so glad you could make it on such short notice," Ria said.

  The hotel room was downtown, only a few blocks from tonight's destination. She'd rented it this afternoon without trouble—there were a few perks to carrying a Centurion AmEx—and it was as secure as sorcery could make it. There were two other people in the room.

  One of them Ria had met before. His name was Raine Logan. He was only a few inches taller than she was, but he carried himself as if he were six feet tall. His black hair was brushed straight back from a deep widow's peak, and he had the trim, sculpted body of someone who worked out with weights for more than show. Logan had worked for Gotham Security up until about a year ago, when he'd quit to go into business for himself. Gotham Security was the best private security agency in the field, and Logan had been one of their best operatives.

  The woman with him was his opposite in every way save her air of utter competence: tall, fashion-model slender, with a frizzy halo of carrot-red hair and a dementedly cheerful grin. She wore yellow-tinted, aviator-shaped glasses that did little to conceal the spray of pale gold freckles across her cheekbones. Both of them wore jeans, sneakers, and dark nylon windbreakers over black T-shirts that concealed the latest generation in Kevlar vests.

  "Well, gosh, you're Ria Llewellyn, and all," the redhead said, widening her eyes. "I mean, gee, we saw your picture in Time and everything."

  Nobody, Ria thought, could possibly be this feather-witted. Still, she gave the kid points for a good act. It probably even fooled some people.

  "I want to be very clear on the fact that what I'm asking you both to do is illegal," Ria said carefully.

  "So you said," Logan observed. "We're here. Melody stays with the ride."

  "That's the plan," Ria said. She didn't bother to ask if Melody was good. She'd specified good. "This time, you're not here to protect me. You're here to protect this man once we find him"—she brought out the best of the photos of Marley Bell and passed it to Logan—"assuming we find him. His name is Marley Bell. If I'm not with you when we leave, get him out, drive him to this address"—a second slip of paper—"and hand him over to whoever's there. Naturally, I expect to be with you. But if it comes down to a choice, choose Bell."

  Logan passed the photo and the paper to Melody, who studied both carefully.

  "And after that?" he asked.

  "Disappear if you can. If you can't, you'll have LlewellCo's full backing. I've made the arrangements. Your contact will be Jonathan Sterling at LlewellCo West."

  Because if I'm not with you, I'll either be dead, in custody, or finding out just what the PDI's position is on human-Elven hybrids.

  "We'll be meeting a man there," Ria went on. "His name is Michael. He's getting us in, but other than that, he's running an independent operation. If he gets in trouble, don't wait for him, don't cover him."

  "Understood. Time to armor up, then," Logan said. He picked up the case at his feet and opened it onto the table.

  He pulled out a light Kevlar vest and passed it to Ria. She slipped it on, pulling the straps until it fit snugly.

  "Radios." He set earpieces, throat mikes, and transmitters on the
table. Ria picked up one set and put it on, peeling the adhesive off the pickup and placing it against her throat.

  "Thermite pencils. Should open most locks. Night goggles. You won't want to turn on any lights. And these are for you." He lifted a layer of padding out of the case, removed two weapons and passed them to Ria. "Your preference, I believe."

  A .38 snubnose revolver—a Colt Bulldog—and a Desert Eagle .60 caliber. The one was easy to conceal, with reasonable stopping power against most normal humans. The other could bring down a horse or stop a car.

  Holsters, spare magazines, and speedloaders followed.

  "Thanks," Ria said, smiling tightly. "I didn't think I was going to need these to lobby my representatives."

  She slipped the Desert Eagle into its holster and stood to press the holster against the Velcro patch at the back of the Kevlar vest. It was heavy—the gun weighed almost nine pounds loaded—but it held. Her coat would cover the lump it made. And she shouldn't need to get to it in too much of a hurry. The Bulldog and the spare ammo could go in her pockets.

  Logan was already armed—Ria knew he favored the Desert Eagle as well—and while Ria didn't see any weaponry about Melody's person, that didn't mean it wasn't there. She picked up her coat and stowed the last of the equipment in its pockets.

  "Let's go."

  * * *

  Their "ride" looked like a showroom stock Lincoln Navigator—black, with tinted windows. Ria didn't ask to see any of the optional extras, but she assumed it had them. Logan was thorough, and she hadn't been coy when she'd told him her needs.

  "I'll need a car and a driver. The driver has to be the very best at high speed evasive driving, and know Washington and the surrounding area. The car has to be capable of going off-road, over rough terrain, outrun the local law, stop everything up to an assault weapon—and frankly, I'd prefer up to light antitank, but I won't ask for miracles—blend in, and seat four."

  "Do you want a Blaupunkt player with that?" was all Logan had said.

  * * *

  Michael was waiting for them at the address Ria had specified. He'd changed his trench coat for a blue nylon bomber jacket and baseball cap and a pair of tinted shooter's glasses. He was wearing fatigues.