‘Most generalists aren’t nearly as powerful as you.’ He was back at his frying pan, cracking eggs into it. Ceri said nothing, concentrating on her food. ‘When I was investigating you I ran into a stone wall with your security services. One guy did say that your Ministry for Supernatural Affairs was pushing things in the background. They were very determined not to let you be extradited, even if the Home Office wanted to.’
‘I’m pretty integral to the power generation experiment we’ve got planned,’ Ceri said, though his comment worried her. How much did the Ministry know about her? And who knew it?
‘Huh, well, that’s an explanation. What are you planning to do today?’
Grateful for the change of subject, Ceri said, ‘Nita’s going to head up to New York to check over the hotel where this award thing is happening. We’ll join her tonight. Lily and I are going to do a little groundwork with your neighbours.’
‘My neighbours?’ He turned and brought his own plate over, sitting down across the table from her.
‘Uh-huh. If Mrs Maclusky is so keen on keeping an eye on things, we’re going to get her to keep an eye on things for us.’
‘Maclusky’s a gossip,’ Hoffman said. ‘If you want to know who’s having an affair with the gardener, she’s your woman. I’m not sure about getting her to pay more attention to us.’
Ceri smiled at him. ‘You’d be amazed what being friendly can get you,’ she said.
~~~
Mrs Maclusky was about sixty, dumpy with an enormous bosom, and a face like a kindly old granny crossed with a Rottweiler. She scurried into the little store at the end of the street trying really hard to make it look like she was just wandering in for groceries and not following Ceri and Lily. She was following them; they had gone to a lot of trouble to make sure she saw them leaving Hoffman’s house so they were certainly hoping she was.
They were playing the “foreigners in a strange land” card fairly heavily. ‘Cookies are like biscuits, right?’ Lily said as they wandered down an isle of them. ‘We could get some biscuits to go with tea.’
‘They don’t have tea here,’ Ceri said. ‘Just those bag-on-a-string things.’
‘That’s sort of tea.’
‘Sort of.’
‘Oh! You’re British?’ Mrs Maclusky said from behind them. ‘My grandfather came over from Scotland before the Shattering, you know?’ Her accent was moderately thick, but not so harsh as to be indecipherable.
‘I didn’t, but hello,’ Ceri said. ‘I’m Keris, this is Shelley. We’re on holiday.’
‘On holiday and you came here?!’ She sounded distinctly surprised. ‘Wouldn’t you be better off in New York or Washington?’
‘Oh yes, but Ed Hoffman’s my cousin and we just had to stop off and see him.’
‘I wish I could visit my family, but it costs so much for transatlantic travel.’
Ceri nodded. ‘It does, but I just love travelling.’ Lying was getting easier; Ceri wondered whether she should worry about that.
‘Besides, the boat over was really great,’ Lily enthused. Her hair was now black and pulled back into as severe a ponytail as they could manage; she had absolutely refused to be blonde. As with Ceri, the altered hair did strange things to the shape of her face; she looked less cute and more severe. Ceri had had to stop herself worshipping her in the bedroom.
‘Well I hope your cousin is taking good care of you,’ Mrs Maclusky said. ‘I know he’s in the Secret Service and they’re busy people.’
‘He’s taking us on a little sightseeing trip,’ Lily said.
‘We’re leaving tonight,’ Ceri added. ‘Going up to New York for a day or two before he has to be back at work.’
‘Well I’ll be sure to keep an eye on his house while he’s away.’ She was terribly solicitous about it; not that she would not have been doing it anyway. ‘There’s bad people about these days. Why I saw a bunch of hoodlums maybe three days ago. Cruising down the street in a big, black Town Car like they owned the place. And I just bet they had guns in there with them. I know the type. Gangsters! Mister Hoffman wasn’t home then and they were paying a lot of attention to his house.’
Ceri and Lily glanced at each other. ‘Gangsters,’ Ceri said. ‘That sounds terrible. Ed is an agent. Maybe they were after him. It’d be really great if you could keep an eye out…’
‘Phyllis, dear, Phyllis Maclusky. I’ll be sure to do that. You try the chocolate chip cookies now. They’re the best.’ She turned and scurried off. She had new gossip to spread.
Lily picked up a pack of chocolate chip cookies and dropped them into her basket. ‘Gangsters?’ she said.
‘Gangsters with badges,’ Ceri replied. ‘We’d better tell Ed.’
Baltimore Washington Parkway near Maryland City
‘Yes,’ Hoffman said, ‘we’ve got a tail.’
Ceri glanced back through the rear window of Hoffman’s black Chrysler. ‘The red sports car?’
‘That’s the one. It’s been with us since we got out of the Beltway ring.’
‘Where’s the next junction? And are we turning off or staying on?’
Hoffman consulted his navigation console. ‘About five miles ahead. We can go either way… turning off might be better.’
‘Okay,’ Ceri said, ‘head out into the middle lane, move back in just before the off ramp and do it as smoothly as possible.’ She turned again, concentrating on the minds in the car keeping a respectful distance from them to the rear. Her eyes closed…
‘Off-ramp’s coming up,’ Hoffman said and Ceri nodded absently, not really paying attention. She felt the car sliding right, a slightly disconcerting sensation since she did not like cars at the best of times and this one was moving all wrong. Stupid foreigners with their stupid driving on the wrong side of the road… ‘Well damn!’ Hoffman exclaimed. ‘They’re not following.’
‘They’re following what they think is us,’ Ceri said. ‘By the time they realise they’re hallucinating we should be well out of the way, I hope.’ She settled back down in the back of the car, trying to avoid watching the world flying past the car windows.
‘You don’t have to hide down there like that,’ Hoffman said. ‘I doubt anyone’ll recognise you.’
‘It’s not that,’ Ceri mumbled.
‘She doesn’t like being in a car,’ Lily said. She turned in her seat, looking back at Ceri. ‘You’re not as green as usual, and you don’t seem as anxious.’
‘Nita didn’t crash,’ Ceri replied, shrugging. ‘I guess I’m doing the whole cure through exposure thing. There’s not much I can do about it so I’m going to have to learn to put up with it. I still prefer trains… well, sort of.’
‘You really don’t like travelling,’ Hoffman commented.
‘My parents were killed in a car accident,’ Ceri said. ‘At least… I’ve always thought it was an accident. Anyway, after that I was a virtual recluse and I’d get anxiety attacks whenever I had to travel any distance. Lily got me over the recluse part…’
‘I helped,’ Lily said.
‘Lily got me over the recluse part,’ Ceri repeated with a little extra firmness, ‘and I guess I have been acclimatising myself more and more to travel. Half a continent in a battered pick-up driven by a CIA agent is kind of a drastic way of overcoming a phobia.’
‘So have you?’ Hoffman asked. ‘Overcome the phobia, that is.’
‘Not entirely.’
‘Well, we’re dropping the car off outside the city and taking the last part by train. That might help.’
‘Maybe,’ Ceri replied. Not sounding convinced.
Queens, New York, February 26th
When the main airport in New York was moved from Newark to La Guardia in the late eighties, the city had put in a gleaming new monorail train system from Manhattan, through Queens, to the airfield. From the raised platform of the 82nd Street station you could actually see the glow of lights shining on the skin of one of the big trans-oceanic sky-ships. And it had been way more comfortab
le than the car, or even the tubes back in London.
On the other hand, Queens did not look like a great place to spend your time. Manhattan had seen large amounts of rebuilding since the Shattering. It was an ultra-modern city the way London was not. Apparently a lot of destruction was occasionally a good thing, though Ceri suspected the occupants of the region had not thought that way at the time. Here in the outskirts, however, the housing was basic and looked pre-War. There were signs of construction going on; “gentrification” was the term people used. Ceri thought it likely that the poor families in this area would be looking for somewhere new to live within the decade.
It was, however, a great place to not be noticed. The hotel Nita had booked them into was not large, and it was very basic, but no one seemed to be keen on acknowledging that the new guests even existed, never mind who they were. The rooms were adjacent, with a connecting door, and a slightly embarrassed Ed Hoffman.
‘Three rooms would’ve looked weird,’ Nita explained, ‘and there wasn’t one with three beds. I know I’m hot, but surely you can manage a night in a bed with me without too much trouble?’
‘You might be used to sleeping with strange men, or women,’ Hoffman replied, ‘but I’m not. I’ll sleep on the couch.’
‘Don’t be an idiot,’ Nita said. ‘We’ve got a long, hard day tomorrow. You need a good night’s sleep and I don’t snore.’ She looked through the connecting door into Ceri and Lily’s room and grinned. ‘Lily’s already undressing so we’ll save the briefing until tomorrow.’
Hoffman looked up without thinking and got a good view of Lily, naked from the waist up, walking past the door. He looked away quickly. Unfortunately, the logic of the situation won out. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘but wear something.’
Nita grinned. ‘You must be the first man I’ve ever slept with who’s said that.’
~~~
‘The ceremony is taking place in the Kennedy Rooms at the Grand View Hotel,’ Nita said. She was standing in front of a map she had fixed to the wall, and she indicated a spot near the middle of the island Manhattan was on. ‘It’s opposite the Museum of Natural History, right on the edge of Central Park. Fifteen floors above ground, two below including an underground car park. The Kennedy Rooms are on the ground floor with multiple points of egress making it easy to rush Levy out in a hurry if they have to.’
Hoffman was busy examining a sketch map Nita had made of the hotel’s ground floor. ‘They’ll have a primary route through the rear fire door,’ he said. ‘That gives them fast access to the stairs down to the car park. The alternate will be through this door here, down the staff corridor, and through the kitchens.’
Nita nodded. ‘Kind of what I figured, but I’m glad the expert agrees. Given that, we have about three points we can hit him at with reasonable probability of getting away. We just have to decide what we’re going to hit him with.’
‘I want information,’ Ceri said, ‘and him feeling unsafe anywhere he can be got at by magic.’
‘He’ll hole up at Black Fields,’ Hoffman said.
‘Uh-huh, and if he’s there with Wilson, he’s unlikely to try anything,’ Ceri explained. ‘The protection detail, what are we dealing with?’
‘Ten men in the immediate area, another fifteen on perimeter watch,’ Hoffman said. ‘Two counter-magic specialists, two defensive magic specialists, three offensive. The rest may have some talent, but they’re there as agents not as practitioners. They’ll also have local police handling external security and SWAT teams on standby.’
Ceri nodded, her eyes on the sketch map. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘how does this sound?’
Manhattan
Three women walking in through the staff entrance chatting about the club they had been to the night before drew no more attention than any of the other several dozen staff filing in through the same door. They were stopped by two agents who went over them with magic detection wands and found nothing, because Ceri was masking the enchantment on the ankle chains she and Lily were wearing, as well as Lily’s aura.
Once through to the staff changing room they took off their coats and hung them on some spare pegs. Each was dressed in a knee-length black dress which Nita had identified as the outfit the female staff would be wearing to the award ceremony.
‘This is way too easy,’ Lily said under her breath as they headed through into the Kennedy Rooms.
‘I wasn’t expecting problems if Ceri could get us through the door,’ Nita replied. ‘It’ll get far more interesting once the VP arrives. Just look like you know what you’re doing and no one will bother you.’
‘We are both waitresses,’ Ceri pointed out.
‘Well, try to remember, Lily,’ Nita said, smirking, ‘you’re not working for tips so no aura.’
‘But… all the rich people,’ Lily said, mock-plaintively.
Ceri giggled. ‘Try to restrain yourself.’
‘Temptation,’ Lily said sadly, ‘my one weakness.’
‘And there I thought that was me,’ Ceri replied. ‘All right, spread out.’ They each went their separate ways and soon they were just waitresses, busy around the tables.
~~~
Levy’s entourage arrived through one of the side doors at exactly eight pm. Four men and a woman appeared, spreading out immediately to ensure the path was clear to the VP’s table near the stage. There were twenty-eight tables in all, but Levy’s was smaller than the others; when everyone was sat down, the VP applauded to his place by the assembled high and mighty, it was apparent that Levy and his wife were sitting among the richest and highest ranking in the room. On the other hand, no one at the table was anywhere near as attractive as Angelica.
Ceri’s Sight would set off no detection spells the agents might be using so she blinked it on and turned her gaze on Angelica. It did not really tell her much. There was no sign of corruption along a highly developed Chakral median. A practitioner then, and a strong one. There was something a little strange about her structure, but Ceri could not figure out what it was. There seemed to be… too much energy about her, but what that meant was anyone’s guess.
Food was served, the three women making sure they were not sent to the VP’s table at any point, and the room filled with the chatter of people enjoying good food and wine. Ceri watched the agents. There were two at each of the primary and secondary evacuation doors, none of them practitioners, which would make life easier. The remaining six were magicians, and they situated themselves near the table, but not too near. One was pacted; the spider web of filaments around his Chakral median spreading out from his Anahata node, where his soul bridged the medians. Ceri was beginning to suspect that that meant an angelic pact.
The dinner over, the staff arranged themselves around the edge of the room in case anyone needed anything, and a middle-aged man in a very expensive looking tuxedo got up from the VP’s table to climb onto the stage. There was a lectern with a microphone, and speakers around the room hummed as he turned it on.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, his voice enveloping the room. The audience fell silent, turning toward the stage with smiles and what appeared to be general good humour. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, good evening and welcome to the seventh annual Pitman-Kelley Thaumatology Scholarship Awards.’ Ceri almost giggled; she could not get away from academic thaumatology. ‘In a short while our guest of honour, Vice President Joshua Levy, will be presenting this year’s award of a full scholarship to MIT’s thaumatology department, but first we’re going to have a speech from Walter Kelley, CEO of Pitman-Kelly Thaumic Technologies.’
Kelley was a rotund man in his fifties. Balding with a hawk-like face. Ceri had heard of Pitman-Kelley; they were the American equivalent of MagiTech in Britain, but with a far narrower base. Pitman-Kelley were basically military contractors, the primary magic-technology supplier to the US government. Kelley had been sat right beside Angelica.
‘Good evening,’ Kelley said in a rumbling voice. ‘We’ve had an interesting year both commerc
ially and academically, as I’m sure most of you already know, and I think the year to come is going to be just as exciting.’ He did not sound particularly excited, but that seemed to be the way his personality came out. ‘Just over a year ago we had the first proof of the existence of the Null Thaumiton and the repercussions of that continue to keep the academic community hopping. It’s also keeping businessmen like me interested. Pitman-Kelley has licensed the high-output generator technology developed by MagiTech in Great Britain from the work done by the British team who made the discovery.’ That was something Ceri did not know. ‘The potential uses of this technology are considerable. The prototype of our first device is helping to keep the President safe right now, and production models will be going into service with the Army in the next few weeks.’ He cracked a half smile. ‘Of course, I can’t tell you what they will be powering, but suffice it to say that everyone can feel much safer in their beds because of them.’
There was a rumble of laughter from the audience and Kelley waited for it to die away before going on. ‘This year the Massive Thaumic Collider came online at MIT, partially funded by Pitman-Kelley. That brings us the possibility that we may see evidence of the thaumino this coming year. Most of you won’t be familiar with this particle, but it’s the key to discovering the nature of the Super-magic field.’ Ceri let herself smile a little; Kelley did not know that Cheryl had already discovered the thing. ‘Some think that Super-magic governs the magic field strength of the world. Further research in this area may give us the evidence we need to finally determine why the Shattering happened, and what actually happened when it did.’
He shuffled his notes and glanced over at Levy. ‘That kind of research requires great minds, and that’s why Pitman-Kelley awards a scholarship each year to one promising young thaumatologist who would otherwise not be able to follow their calling. This year it goes to a young man who shows amazing promise in theoretical thaumatology. He’s from Salem, Massachusetts, historically not a good place to profess an interest in magic, but he has certainly done his home town proud by winning over our judges with his considerable, largely self-taught, knowledge of thaumatology theory. With that said, I’d like to ask Vice President Levy to come up here and present this young man with his award.’
Thaumatology 07 - Eagle's Shadow Page 16