Strange Magic

by Justin Gustainis

  Praise for the Morris & Chastain Investigations

  “Smart, sexy, and supernatural—Black Magic Woman goes for the throat and doesn’t let up until the very last page. I wish I’d written this book; it’s a hell of a ride.”

  Lilith Saintcrow, author of Working for the Devil and To Hell and Back, on Black Magic Woman

  “A very good book. I look forward to reading another one in the series.”

  Charlaine Harris, author of the True Blood series, on Black Magic Woman

  “A book that features an appearance from the Devil himself needs supernatural moments to go with a bang, and Evil Ways certainly delivers on this score!”

  Graeme’s Fantasy Book Review on Evil Ways

  “The pacing is guaranteed to hook readers in, while the supporting characters give the story depth and make it more than just an action-driven fantasy thrill-fest. Sympathy For The Devil has plenty of potential to entertain both thriller and urban fantasy fans alike.”

  Love Vampires on Sympathy For The Devil

  “Keep an eye on Justin Gustainis. You’ll be seeing more of him soon.”

  Jim Butcher, New York Times best selling author of the Dresden Files and Codex Alera series

  Also by Justin Gustainis

  Morris & Chastain Investigations

  Black Magic Woman

  Evil Ways

  Sympathy For The Devil

  Play With Fire

  Midnight At The Oasis

  The Haunted Scranton Series

  Hard Spell

  Evil Dark

  Stand Alone Novels

  The Hades Project

  First published 2015 by Solaris

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead,

  Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN: 978-1-84997-952-8

  Strange Magic copyright © Justin Gustainis 2015

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  This is for John Carroll,

  who knows why.

  “Those who foolishly sought to gain power by

  riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.”

  —John Fitzgerald Kennedy

  “Why, this is Hell. Nor am I out of it.”

  —Mephistopheles, in Doctor Faustus

  “Have you ever danced with the devil

  in the pale moonlight?”

  —The Joker

  Prologue

  White House Situation Room

  1420 hours

  “THE CALIPHATE HAS beheaded two more, Mister President.” CIA Director Augustus ‘Gus’ Hinton looked as grim as the news that he carried, although he was rarely confused with Little Mary Sunshine, even on those rare occasions when he came bearing good tidings. “The videos appeared online yesterday morning for about an hour, until somebody notified YouTube—then they were taken down, of course. The victims’ identities have been authenticated, as has the fact that the killings were… genuine.”

  President Robert Leffingwell leaned back in his leather chair and slowly rubbed the bridge of his nose with two fingers. “Who were they?”

  “Philip Martin Gardner, an aid worker from Cincinnati, believed abducted by Hamas in the Beqaa Valley about a year ago. We assume the Caliphate bought him from them—probably with a shipment of arms, which Hamas needs badly. The other victim was a British citizen, Lee Arthur Dunn. He was a sergeant assigned the UN peacekeeping force, disappeared in Syria something like eighteen months ago. It’s not known whether he was taken by the Caliphate directly, or was the object of another trade with some militant group operating in the area. They all claim to hate each other, but there’s a lot of cooperation in practical matters.”

  “I doubt that it matters now, especially to Sergeant Dunn,” Leffingwell said bleakly. “How many does that make so far?”

  Bradley Stevens looked up from the file he had open in front of him. Since being appointed Leffingwell’s National Security Advisor thirteen months earlier, he averaged four hours’ sleep a night, and looked it. “Nineteen confirmed since the Caliphate made their big move twenty-six months ago, Mister President. Four other beheadings have not been authenticated, but are considered ‘probable.’”

  “‘Probable’,” Leffingwell repeated, making a face as if it were a dirty word. “I know I’ve asked this before, but nobody’s come up with a satisfactory answer—what do these crazy fuckers want?”

  Jerrod Unger was Assistant Secretary of State for Middle Eastern Affairs and the ranking member from State present, since the Secretary was currently in Pakistan. He cleared his throat and said slowly, “They say they want all Western troops out of the Middle East.”

  “That’s not what I asked.” Leffingwell was tapping his fingers on the oak conference table. “Besides, nobody really expects that to happen, not even the Caliph himself, uh…” Leffingwell snapped his fingers a couple of times.

  “Razin Abbas,” Hinton said.

  “Yeah, Abbas,” Leffingwell said. “Even he’s not deluded enough to believe a total withdrawal’s a real possibility. The US cannot, and will not, simply abandon its military presence in such a crucial area of national interest—especially under duress.”

  “Well, he is and he isn’t, Mister President,” Stevens said. “Deluded, I mean. It may be that he believes the public beheadings of Westerners will cause public support for your military strategy to decline, in effect forcing you to withdraw our forces, or at least scale them back severely. Abbas is a student of history, sir. He’s aware of what happened in this country during the Vietnam War.”

  “Vietnam was before 9/11,” Leffingwell said. “And anyway, his atrocities are having the opposite effect on public opinion—right?” He glanced down the table, focusing on Hannah Rabinowitz, his Special Assistant for Political Affairs.

  “Yes, sir,” she said, not bothering to consult the sheaf of papers in front of her. “Support for military action—of any kind—was at 72 percent, as of yesterday. There’s no polling data yet to reflect the most recent atrocities, but based on trends, it will probably increase between three to seven percent. It might even get a bigger bump this time, since this is the first instance of two beheadings occurring on the same day—or, I should say, being released on the same day.”

  “Why does the notion of my popularity going up because men are having their heads lopped off make me kind of sick to my stomach?”

  Recognizing a rhetorical question when they heard one, the others present did not venture an answer. But at least one of them answered it within his own mind.

  Because you’re a fucking wimp, that’s why, Ted Burnett thought. Hell, three or four more beheadings, and we could probably get the Senate to declare war on those ragheads. Assuming that bunch of mental defectives could ever agree on anything.

  None of the disdain that Burnett was feeling even flickered across his face—he was too old a hand ever to portray what he was thinking. As the CIA’s Deputy Director for Operations, Burnett was the number two man at the agency. In theory, he shared that role with Leon Stewart, the Deputy Director for Intelligence. But Stewart, for all his brains and Harvard Ph.D., was a weak personality who had been appointed to the job largely on the strength of several books he’d written a decade earlier while heading some egghead think tank or other.

  Burnett, on the other hand, had come up through the ranks of intelligence professionals
. He’d spent three years as head of the Office of Special Projects—most of which were so ‘special’ that Congress was never informed about them. That had been after six years spent as CIA Station Chief in Cairo, which had followed his four years in Moscow as Assistant Station Chief. Burnett’s first major assignment for the Agency had sent him to Latin America, where he had carried out a number of missions that were never described in his personnel file—indeed, they had never been written down anywhere. The spook jargon for what he’d been involved in was ‘wet work,’ but if ever asked about those days Burnett usually described himself, with no hint of irony, as a “troubleshooter.”

  Leffingwell looked again at his National Security Advisor. “Beheadings aside—and I don’t for one minute want to imply that I’m trivializing those atrocities—just how bad has the situation become, Brad?”

  Stevens pushed some buttons on the console in front of him, and one wall of the Situation Room suddenly lit up with a map of the Middle East.

  “As you can see, Mister President,” he said, “the Caliphate now in effect controls all of Iraq.”

  Glancing toward the President, Burnett thought, What did you expect after you pulled all the US combat troops out, you fucking idiot? The coming of the Peaceable Kingdom?

  “And since the assassination of Bashir al-Assad by a suicide bomber three months ago, the Caliphate has greatly expanded inside Syria, to the point where they control roughly two-thirds of the country.”

  Leffingwell stared at the map bleakly. “And they made their move on the Saudis what—six weeks ago?”

  “Seven, Mister President,” Stevens said. “It’s less of a military assault at this point than a religious one, although Caliphate forces have been seen in great numbers recently along the Iraq-Saudi border. But more worrisome than the prospect of military action is that the Caliphate is working to undermine the religious support for the Saudi royal family—and if they succeed, the government will lose all legitimacy in the eyes of its people.”

  “King Abdullah’s chickens have finally come home to roost,” CIA Director Hinton said, “and I wish I could say to the old bastard ‘I told you so’ right to his face.”

  “Probably a bad idea, Gus,” Jerrod Unger said. “The Caliphate’s not the only ones who behead people, you know.” The joke was not only feeble but in poor taste, so nobody laughed—but a couple of them came close.

  It was in the mid-Eighteenth Century when Muhammad ibn Saud, the founder of what would become the great House of Saud, entered into what would prove to be a devil’s bargain. His partner was Muhammad ibn ’Abd al-Wahhab, an imam and teacher who advocated an ultra-conservative interpretation of Islam. By the time Saudi Arabia became a state in the 1920s, the pact had evolved into an agreement between Wahhabi clerics and the now-royal family. The Wahhabis would give their support to the new regime, telling their followers that the House of Saud’s rule was the will of Allah and should be obeyed without question. In return, the Saudi rulers agreed to give Wahhabi clerics a free hand, along with the material support they needed to spread their extreme version of Islam throughout the region. Over the next hundred years or so, the Saudi state had prospered (due largely to the discovery of a large amount of oil under its sands) and so had Wahhabism, which became the official state religion of Saudi Arabia.

  Then along came the radical Islamic fighters calling themselves the Caliphate—who were themselves followers of Wahhabism. After their military successes in Iraq and Syria, they were in a position to offer Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi clerics a new option—to withdraw their support from the ruling House of Saud and give it to the increasingly powerful Caliphate, whose goal was to establish a fundamentalist Islamic state that would encompass the entire Middle East. And not all the Saudi princes saw this movement as a bad idea—which was akin to citizens of ancient Rome regarding the approaching barbarian hordes with something like eager anticipation.

  The Caliphate, which already essentially controlled Iraq and Syria, was in danger of taking over Saudi Arabia. With Saudi Arabia came its oil—and all of the money that the oil generated. The prospect of these vicious religious fanatics controlling billions of dollars—as well as a big share of the world’s oil supply—kept knowledgeable westerners awake late into the night, and that number included most of the people now gathered in the White House Situation Room.

  “So, what, then?” the President asked. “Boots on the ground in Saudi Arabia?”

  Army General Caleb Carpenter, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke for the first time since the meeting had begun. “We could do it, Mister President—absolutely. Logistics is one of the things our military is best at. But I’m not sure there’s anybody there to fight, at the moment. As I understand it, the Caliphate hasn’t put any troops in—yet.”

  “It’s a moot point anyway, Mister President,” Unger said. “Without an explicit invitation from the King, we can’t effect a military response. Not unless we want to go to war with Saudi Arabia, which would be undesirable at the best of times, which these surely are not.”

  “He invited us in after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, dammit,” Leffingwell said. “He was afraid Saudi Arabia was next on Saddam’s list, and he was probably right.”

  “That was in the face of a tangible and immediate military threat, sir,” Carpenter said.

  “The General’s right, Mister President,” Stevens said. “The situation this time is less clear-cut. There’s no telling how Abdullah is going to respond. And some of his advisors are sympathetic to the Caliphate.”

  “We could accelerate the bombing, couldn’t we?” Leffingwell asked. “The Caliphate has virtually nothing in the way of air defenses—and even if they did, it’s pretty hard to defend against a Cruise missile.”

  “Abbas knows that too, sir,” Stevens said. “Over the last six weeks, he’s been basing his fighters among the civilian populations of Iraq and Syria. The more we bomb, the more civilians we’re going to kill.”

  “And every dead civilian probably means two more supporters of the Caliphate,” Hinton said. “It’s the same problem we faced in Vietnam—and as you recall, we lost that one, sir.”

  Leffingwell slammed his palms down on the arms of his chair. The sound surprisingly loud in the crowded room. “So you’re telling me the greatest military in the world is helpless in the face of the Caliphate? Is there no power on Earth that can stop these bastards?”

  Ted Burnett let his gaze rest upon the Commander in Chief, currently acting, in Burnett’s view, like a frustrated child. None of the disdain he felt showed on his face, of course. No, Bobby boy, there may not be a power on Earth to get us out of this mess you’ve created. But fortunately, there’s another power that may just be the answer—if only the right people have the resolve to use it. And I’m pretty sure we do.

  Chapter One

  “THIS IS WHERE we found him,” the Sheriff said, pointing. Dan Sturbridge was a big man in his forties, with the look of a body builder gone slightly to seed. Tiny salt crystals clung to the armpits of his uniform shirt where the hot desert air had dried his copious sweat almost as soon as it formed.

  There wasn’t much to see—just the usual scrubland with an area about ten feet square marked off by yellow crime scene tape. Within the square, the dirt was torn up in places and some long-dried stains marked the earth. They were dark brown, but might have once been the bright red of fresh blood.

  “It was a couple of hikers came across him,” Sturbridge went on. “Said they had to walk for an hour before they could get enough bars on their phone to call 911.”

  “Did you get on ID on the victim?”

  “Scott Gerald Rivers, age 29,” Sturbridge said. “Lived in San Diego. No criminal record, if it matters.”

  “What did you use, fingerprints? I’m guessing you didn’t put any of these photos out on the wire.”

  “Didn’t need to run his prints. Guy’s wallet was still in his pants—or what was left of his pants. Had plenty of ID—alo
ng with credit cards and 148 bucks in cash.”

  “So much for robbery as a motive, then,” Morris said. “What was Mister Rivers doing out here, all by his lonesome, Dan? Any ideas?”

  “Camping, looks like. We found a campsite, about 80 yards the other side of that patch of cactus. There was a tent set up, along with some gear, dried food, and a fire that had long since burned out. Looked like none of his stuff had been disturbed. What he was doing over here, so far from his campsite...” Sturbridge shrugged his big shoulders.

  “Running from something, maybe,” Morris said. “Or could be he was dragged.” He looked at the nearby ground for sign, but the hard-packed earth was resistant to impressions from anything lighter than an elephant, and anything else useful had already been blown away by the desert wind.

  “What about crime scene photos?” Morris asked.

  “The official ones are all on file at the DA’s office. You’d need a court order to get a look at ’em.”

  Sturbridge opened the Nokia tablet he’d brought from the police car. “But I already figured that, so I used my phone to take some shots of my own. Coroner’s guy wasn’t too happy about it, but he didn’t have the authority to stop me.”

  He fiddled with the device for a few seconds, and then passed it to Morris. “Here’s the first one. Just swipe your finger upwards to see the rest.”

  Morris spent the next few minutes studying the images of what, he had been told, had once been an adult human being.