The Dragon Conspiracy

by Lisa Shearin

  Kenji accepted it with a sharp nod and a fierce grin directed at Yasha. “Want to watch me wring data out of this thing until is squeals for its motherboard?”

  For the first time since we broke into Eddie’s apartment, Yasha Kazakov smiled.

  * * *

  There was one thing Eddie’s laptop refused to squeal—the name of the thief.

  “There should be e-mails between Eddie and this white-cat-petting evil genius,” Kenji spat. The fierce grin was history once he’d scored a big goose egg tracking down the identity of the baby gorgon’s keeper. “What’d they do, write letters?”

  We’d pulled up chairs around Kenji’s main workstation, taking what time we could to sit down.

  “Some people don’t trust e-mail when they’re trying to destroy the world,” Ian said. “Apparently the last stupid thing Eddie did was piss off a gorgon. He’s gotten a little smarter since then.”

  “He left his laptop and a ton of printouts in his apartment,” I pointed out.

  “I said a little.”

  “Could there be another computer?” Yasha asked.

  “There could be,” Kenji said, “but I doubt it. Other than missing e-mail between Eddie and the cat-petting Bond villain, this laptop’s got everything you’d expect a guy to have, including links to some truly twisted porn sites. Good thing Eddie’s a gorgon now; I wouldn’t want to look him in the eye again. What we do have is an extensive search for boat rentals along the lower section of the East River. It looks like Eddie decided on one place in particular. There’s also orders for a generator, work lights, search for wholesale meat distributors, and order confirmations on camping gear, including water purification tablets.”

  I grimaced at the thing that stood out to me. “Meat?”

  “Wherever they are, they’re feeding something that likes raw meat and a lot of it, and I don’t think it’s the kitty cat.”

  “That would be harpies,” Ian said. “They’re carrion feeders.”

  Kenji referenced the screen. “Ten sides of beef worth of carrion?”

  I whistled.

  “It just means that there’s probably more than harpies guarding those diamonds and Ben,” Ian said, “or at least more than three harpies.”

  “We couldn’t handle the three that came at us this morning,” I said. Jeez, had it only been this morning?

  Ian leaned forward, scanning the screen. “All of that adds up to someplace you can only get to by boat, or it would be faster and have less chance of being seen, with no electricity, questionable or no shelter, iffy water—”

  “And no Chinese takeout for harpies,” Yasha said.

  We all looked at him.

  The Russian werewolf gave us a weak grin. “I try for laughs, too. It is best medicine, no?”

  Screw the workplace hands-off policy; this guy was getting a hug. I stood up, used both arms, and I still couldn’t get around the big guy’s shoulders. “We’re gonna stop this,” I said against the top of his head. “It’s not going to happen.”

  “Damn right it’s not,” Ian said. “The guy with the cat is gonna pay for even thinking about doing this.”

  “It’d stand to reason that Eddie would have gotten a boat from a rental place that was close to his destination,” Kenji said, “but it doesn’t mean that the closest potential location would be the lair.”

  “Lair?” I asked.

  “We’ve got an evil mastermind bent on supernatural world domination or destruction, right?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “IMO, that warrants the use of ‘lair.’”

  I couldn’t argue with that logic.

  Ian leaned forward. “Where’s the boat rental place he used?”

  “Near South Street Seaport,” Kenji said while calling it up on Google Maps.

  “Give me a broader view.”

  Kenji did and the East River came into view, along with a chunk of Brooklyn and Queens.

  “I’m still pretty new in town,” I said. “Are we seeing any likely lair candidates?”

  “Entirely too many candidates,” Ian said. “There are a lot of abandoned buildings, big and small, all up and down the Brooklyn waterfront, starting with the Red Hook Grain Terminal. Fifty-four circular grain silos and more for your hiding and lairing pleasure, closed since 1965. Then there’s the ironic candidate. The Red Hook Warehouses on Imlay Street. Built in 1913; closed 1983. There’re two of them. Christie’s bought one and turned it into a high-tech, high-security art storage facility. The other is still empty.”

  “Ben’s employer,” I said.

  “Uh-huh. And there are a couple of islands about twelve miles to the north. You’ve got Riker’s, which I think we can safely eliminate due to the prison. Then there’s North and South Brother Islands. South Brother doesn’t have any buildings, meaning it also doesn’t have anywhere to hide. North Brother was uninhabited until 1885, when a hospital was built there for people with contagious diseases.”

  “That one’s got a big ol’ dose of irony, too.”

  Ian nodded. “Typhoid Mary was an unwilling guest there for twenty years. Some people say between the patients who died there and the steamship fire victims, the island is haunted.”

  “Steamship fire?”

  “In 1904, the General Slocum caught fire in the East River near there. Over a thousand people, mostly women and children on their way to a church picnic, died either by fire or drowning. The ship’s fire hoses were rotten, the lifeboats tied in place, and the life jackets were rotted cork and canvas. I read somewhere that the manufacturer brought the jackets up to the minimum weight requirements by putting iron bars inside. Mothers were strapping their children in and throwing them overboard only to have them sink, not float. The General Slocum beached on North Brother, and a lot of the bodies washed up there. Said to be the largest loss of life in New York until 9/11.”

  Holy crap.

  “The hospital was used for various purposes over the years, the last being a youth heroin treatment facility that closed in 1963 due to abuses and corruption. The island’s been off-limits to the public ever since.”

  Kenji’s phone rang. He picked it up and answered. “Yes, sir. They’re here. I’ll tell them.”

  “That was Moreau,” he said. “Meeting, right now, main conference room. All of us.”

  19

  SPI’S big conference room looked like a miniature version of the Security Council Room at the UN. There was even a big, U-shaped table in the center.

  Bob Fitzwilliam and Rob Stanton were the codirectors of SPI New York’s Research department. They were the go-to guys for esoteric, obscure, and occult knowledge, legends, and myths, which SPI calls history—all the lowdown on creatures of the night and critters of the day.

  Bob and Rob were the kind of guys who believed in hitting you with the bad news first, then presenting options or solutions to make it not seem like the end of the world. This time the bad news actually was the end of the world, and there wasn’t any way the boys could spin that to make it sound better.

  Their team of analysts hadn’t needed to go through all of Eddie’s papers with a fine-toothed comb. A quick review had confirmed the theory they’d come up with in their own research into the diamonds that made up the Dragon Eggs.

  I’d really hoped my and Ian’s theory would be so far out there that it’d give you a nosebleed. No such luck. We were right on the money—for the basics.

  There was more.

  Yes, it was worse.

  And it had started almost a hundred years ago.

  Rob shared my love of history. He’d already told Vivienne Sagadraco the shortened version of what he’d discovered in the letters we’d found at Eddie’s apartment. While the boss agreed that it was of monumental historical significance, our meeting needed to stick to what the Dragon Eggs could do, not how far Viktor Kain had
been willing to go to get his hands on them.

  So right before the meeting, Rob told me what he’d found.

  In the early morning hours of July 17, 1918, the Romanov family was murdered.

  And Viktor Kain was responsible.

  In Imperial Russia under the tsars, real power was bestowed on the few and the favored.

  Viktor Kain wasn’t one of the few, and he’d never been anyone’s favorite, so he joined the many who were sowing the seeds of revolution. His flair for intimidation and ruthlessness, and his total hatred for the ruling class, gained the admiration of a young revolutionary—Vladimir Lenin.

  As Lenin’s star rose, so did Viktor Kain, though the dragon used an alias and was careful to keep his involvement deep in the shadows. He’d learned about the existence of the Dragon Eggs directly from a drunkenly boasting Grigori Rasputin—and when Viktor Kain had learned, he’d coveted.

  When Rasputin had failed to cure Alexei with the Dragon Eggs, and after the mad monk’s death, the Empress Alexandra had planned to put the diamonds into the royal treasury, but when it became apparent that their days of freedom were numbered and they would be taken from the capital, she kept the diamonds on her person at all times.

  When the royal family was taken into Bolshevik custody and removed from St. Petersburg, Viktor Kain knew that the empress had to have taken the Dragon Eggs with her. At this time, rescue by White Russian troops sympathetic to the tsar was a real possibility. Kain couldn’t risk the Romanovs being rescued and taken from Russia—and the Dragon Eggs along with them. He goaded Lenin into ordering the family executed, also telling him that the empress had taken some of the royal jewels with her. Kain offered to go to Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg to personally ensure that the execution orders were carried out, reclaim the “property of the people” in Lenin’s name, and return to Moscow with the Romanov jewels.

  During their imprisonment, Alexandra and her four daughters—the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia—had sewn the family diamonds and jewels into their corsets, thinking that their persons would not be searched; and should they be rescued, they would need the money to fund their life in exile.

  Viktor Kain had thought out his plan and considered every contingency. What he hadn’t factored in was White Russian troops getting entirely too close to Yekaterinburg. The possibility of the city being taken and the royal family rescued was too much to risk. The timetable for the executions was moved up.

  In the early morning hours of July 17, 1918—before Viktor Kain could get there—the Romanovs and their few servants were awakened and taken down to the cramped basement of Ipatiev House. The men on the firing squad were drunk, having been drinking vodka all night in an attempt to find the courage to kill the royal family. As a result, when the first shot was fired, any discipline they might have had went to hell and what was supposed to be an execution turned into a bloody slaughter.

  The bullets ricocheted off the diamond-lined corsets like modern bulletproof vests. The empress had been killed by a single bullet to the left side of her head, but her daughters survived the initial volley, and were finished off with dull bayonets, rifle butts, and bullets to the head.

  The superintendent of Ipatiev House, Yakov Yurovsky, was a jeweler and watchmaker by trade and on the night of the executions he was determined to find the Romanov diamonds—especially the Dragon Eggs.

  When the bodies were taken to the shallow mineshaft outside the city where they were to be stripped and buried, it became apparent why the daughters had been so difficult to kill. There were seventeen pounds of diamonds and other jewelry sewn into their corsets. Yurovsky caught his men pilfering the bodies, but had made them hand over what they’d stolen, telling them that they would be shot immediately if they failed to comply.

  The men handed over what they had stolen.

  No diamonds matching the description of the Dragon Eggs were ever found.

  It would take Viktor Kain nearly a hundred years to track down and gather them all again.

  “The elven Eye of Destiny neutralizes magic in all forms in the affected area,” Bob was telling those of us called to the meeting, which, in addition to the boss and Moreau, not surprisingly included the SPI’s monster hunter/commando commanders Sandra Niles and Roy Benoit. The combat boots were about to hit the pavement, or boat deck as the case might be.

  “This would include stripping the glamours from those supernaturals who use them to hide what they are from humans,” Bob continued.

  “How long will the effect last?” Vivienne Sagadraco asked.

  “Unknown. Elven gem mages are closely bonded with their stones, and have the stamina to prolong the effects as needed. It’s the same for the size of the affected area. Under normal circumstances, this could be anywhere from just a few feet away, to the length and width of a battlefield. The gem mage puts a little or a lot into the activation depending on how far they need the influence to extend.” Bob looked to Caera Filarion. “I understand Ben Sadler has been tested at a level ten.”

  “With no experience,” Caera said. “And even less control. He runs wide-open. The most accurate comparison would be one of the city’s water mains versus a tsunami—one controlled; the other a raw and deadly force of nature. As strong as Mr. Sadler’s gift is, he would only need to touch the diamonds. It’s possible that the thief wouldn’t even need to have his cooperation; he simply needs to be conscious. Clenched fingers can be opened, then forced closed again.”

  Roy Benoit swore under his breath. “The boy could even be hog-tied and fire up those rocks.”

  “From the Dragon Eggs’ reaction at the museum, we have no reason to believe otherwise.”

  “So our job is to separate Ben Sadler from those eggs and keep him that way.”

  “Yes.”

  “What if we can’t physically reach Mr. Sadler in time?” Sandra Niles addressed her question directly to Vivienne Sagadraco and no one else.

  The room was silent.

  Sandra was asking for permission to kill Ben Sadler.

  I found myself holding my breath even though I knew what the answer was; what it had to be. The life of one sacrificed for so many others. There was no choice, no question. I knew Sandra and Roy would give that order only as a last resort, but Sandra needed that command to come from the top.

  “Mr. Sadler is not an enemy combatant in this situation,” Vivienne Sagadraco said. “He is a captive. Our goal is and will always be the preservation and protection of innocent lives.” She paused. “That being said, we must prevent the activation of the Dragon Eggs by any means necessary. You have your orders.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  There it was.

  Vivienne Sagadraco didn’t need to say neutralize, eliminate, kill, sacrifice, or any number of ways to say put a bullet through Ben Sadler’s head if his hands come close to those diamonds. She didn’t have to. We all knew. Only a few of us had even met Ben, but the silence was for him—and the knowledge that it could be any agent in SPI who was being forced to use a lethal talent against their will. Kill orders were not given lightly, but when they had to be given, Vivienne Sagadraco would not flinch—at least not outwardly.

  “Mr. Fitzsimmons,” the boss said, breaking the silence. “Your report on the goblin diamond?”

  Bob had to drink some water before he could continue. “Both diamonds work for any and all supernaturals or humans infected by supernaturals. The Queen of Dreams will return humans infected by supernatural beings back to their human state. This includes vampirism, gorgonism, and those bitten by werewolves. As far as we know, there are no exceptions. And once enacted, the effects are irreversible.”

  Silence.

  Supernaturals stripped of their ability to hide what they were from their human neighbors; the undead instantly returned to mortal humans, but keeping all of the years, decades, or centuries that their mortal bodies
would have aged—turning them instantly into extreme old age, bones, or dust.

  Half of the people in this room would die at midnight.

  “And the five diamonds from this realm?” the boss asked.

  Bob cleared his throat. “Right. The other five diamonds do nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Well, not exactly nothing. They are stones of power, but unlike the other two, they lack a focus. Gems like these tend to be called cursed by humans because unfocused power is naturally destructive. Tonight the barriers between the dimensions will be at their thinnest, and the goblin and elven diamonds will be at their strongest. When activated, those five diamonds will act as power boosters or amplifiers for the goblin and elven diamonds. Based on what our colleagues from the goblin and elven courts have told us, one amplifying diamond would be enough of a boost to cover a ten-mile radius.”

  “Ten?” Roy Benoit said, dumbfounded.

  Bob took a little breath. It was clear he didn’t want to say what he had to say next. “Five diamonds would extend that influence to fifty miles.”

  Stunned didn’t even begin to describe the expressions I saw around that table.

  “I sincerely wish I could tell you that was all, but . . .”

  “Go on, Robert.” Vivienne Sagadraco was the very picture of calm. A woman who, like a sea captain, was prepared to go down with her ship.

  “There are ley lines involved. For those unfamiliar, a quick explanation. Ley lines are narrow, intersecting ‘streams’ that magnify magical and paranormal energies. There are a few in our immediate area.” Bob nodded to Rob, who touched the screen of the tablet on the table in front of him. A map of Manhattan and the surrounding area was projected on the wall. Bright blue laser-looking lines ran through the five boroughs every which way. Two lines were thicker than the others.

  Bob indicated the two thick lines. “One ley line runs north and south roughly along the East River. Another runs more east to west. The east/west ley line runs directly beneath this complex. It was one of the reasons why this location was chosen. Correct, Ms. Sagadraco?”