Strange Magic

by Justin Gustainis

  Libby reached over and patted him on the shoulder. “Nice work, cowboy,” she said. “We may just have figured out our ‘where.’”

  “Yeah,” Morris said. “Now what the hell do we do with it?”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  TED BURNETT WAS in a very good mood, and it showed. Clyde Neale was glad to see that rare sight—it might soften the blow of the bad news he was bringing to his boss.

  “I have just returned from another meeting with the President—to talk about these ‘forbidden weapons’ he’s heard that someone in CIA might be messing around with. Hinton, Stewart, and I each took turns assuring our Chief Executive that diligent, nay, exhaustive digging on our part, and that of our loyal and trusted subordinates, had turned up no evidence whatever of anything that might be remotely considered a ‘forbidden weapon.’ And it worked! The stupid bastard bought it—you could see it in his face. He told us that clearly he had been misinformed, and that he had been mistaken to put his faith in unreliable sources of information when he had the finest intelligence-gathering agency in the world at his disposal—I tell you, Clyde, it was glorious!”

  “I’m very glad to hear that sir,” Neale said. “It must be quite a load off your mind.”

  “Oh, it’s that, all right. But you know what? Before we left the meeting I couldn’t resist twisting the knife a little bit. ‘Now, Mister President,’ I said, ‘if you ever find that you can give us more precise information about these forbidden weapons of yours, we in the intelligence community would be only too happy to launch a new, more precisely-calibrated investigation directed toward those specific devices, whatever they might be.’”

  “You didn’t!” Neale said

  “I most certainly did. What was he going to say? ‘Well I was actually concerned about demons—would you mind checking if you’ve got any running around down there in Langley?’ I could have referred him to Foggy Bottom—I bet he’d turn up one or two at the State Department, don’t you think? Huh?”

  Burnett gave vent to a gale of laughter unlike anything Neale had seen coming from the boss before. Part of his mind considered that he might survive this meeting with his scalp intact after all. The other part wondered if he just might working for a manic-depressive who was currently experiencing an up-swing.

  Once Burnett’s jollity had abated, Neale took a mental deep breath and plunged in. “I’m really glad to hear that, sir—especially because I haven’t anything remotely as good to tell you.”

  “Really?” Burnett studied him for a couple of seconds, his mood suddenly sober. “Well, then, maybe you’d better give me what I’m beginning to suspect is a big plate of bad news.”

  “It’s not as bad as it could be, sir. But I regret to report failure of the operation designed to tie up all of our loose ends in New York.”

  “The two FBI agents who were becoming a bother to us? Fenton and somebody?”

  “Fenton and O’Donnell, sir.”

  “And the other two—those ghostbusters, or whatever you call them.”

  “Morris and Chastain, sir. The occult investigators.”

  “What happened?”

  “I sent a good man, sir. An experienced man. I told him to draw the equipment he needed from our vast collection of untraceable weapons, and to hire any pickup help in New York he thought was necessary.”

  “We were going to going to put someone with an RPG across the street from that woman’s apartment, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What happened to the original idea of just planting a bomb inside the place?”

  “I hired the best B-and-E people in New York, sir—which means they are very good, indeed. They were given the bomb, instructed how to conceal it, and informed of a time when Chastain was likely to be away for a couple of hours.”

  “And?”

  “Same thing as before, sir. That got the locks open easily enough, but they could not gain entry to Chastain’s apartment. The only thing they didn’t try was getting crowbars and prying the door loose from its frame. That might have worked, but it tends to leave traces, sir.”

  “Traces, my ass. The door would be a wreck—Chastain would know she’d been burgled, and would probably turn the place upside down to find out what had been stolen. Whereupon she would turn up our little bomb.”

  “Yes sir—that’s why I told them not to pursue any approach that would leave evidence behind.”

  Burnett threw up his hands. “Shit, I don’t know. Maybe it is magic. Could be she is a fucking witch. After all, if demons exist, why not witches?”

  “That’s a good point, sir.”

  “You know, that might be an area worth exploring—black magic, and all that. Once Project H has been launched, of course.”

  “I’ll make a note to that effect.”

  “So, all right, you went with Plan B, as instructed. You sent a good man with a reliable weapon, and discretion as to whatever assistance he might need to hire. What happened?”

  “They were killed, sir. All three of them.”

  “Killed? How?”

  “Beaten to death, it appears. The RPG was found next to the bodies—it was of great interest to NYPD, as you might imagine. They’re treating the whole thing as some sort of terrorist plot gone wrong.”

  “Um. That much could work to our advantage—get them looking in the wrong direction. Maybe we could even provide a little ‘information’ to help them in their inquiries along those lines.”

  “I’ll see what can be done, sir.”

  “But these three guys—they were all professionals—experienced thugs, to put it bluntly. Correct?”

  “Absolutely, sir.”

  “Shit.” Burnett sat rubbing his face for a few moments. “What d’you figure, Clyde? More ‘magic?’”

  “Not impossible, sir—although no evidence points in that direction just yet.”

  “Chastain figured out that she was being put in the crosshairs, and decided to take preventive action? She took out the men who were sent to take her out?”

  “It makes a certain amount of sense, sir—if you posit the existence of magic.”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  Burnett leaned back in the big leather chair and closed his eyes. Without opening them he said, “As it turns out, the annoyance posed by Chastain and her friends doesn’t appear as serious as it once did.”

  “Because the President is on board now, you mean?”

  “I wouldn’t say the stupid bastard’s on board, exactly—but he’s not going to be acting as an anchor on the damn boat, either.”

  “So what do you want me to do about Chastain and the others, sir? Send a bigger and better-armed team in?”

  “No—for now, let’s file them under ‘Unfinished Business’—at least, until Project H is launched. In fact...”

  Burnett opened his eyes and brought his chair upright. “The whole point of the project is to gain control of demons, then send them to destroy our enemies, right?”

  “Exactly, sir.”

  “So who decides who the enemies are?”

  “We do.”

  “Fuckin’ A right we do. Once the Caliphate is history, why not send one of our infernal agents—I like that term, don’t you? ‘Infernal agents?’”

  “Most appropriate, sir.”

  “So why not send one of the demons we control after Chastain and her pals? See how well that ‘magic’ of hers does against one of them.”

  “Interesting idea, sir. I’ll make a note for us to discuss it sometime after Halloween.”

  “Which is in three days’ time.”

  “Which is, indeed, in three days’ time.”

  “It’s going to be glorious, Clyde. Glorious!”

  “I have no doubt it will be, sir. None at all.”

  Chapter Forty

  “DOES THAT REPORT give a specific address in Fairfax where all this shit went down?” Fenton asked.

  “I’m pretty sure it does,” Morris said. “Let me check.” After a f
ew moments of paper shuffling, he said, “Yeah, here it is: 984 Sager Avenue. There’s a note here that it used to be a high school at one time. Then Uncle Sam bought it. I have no idea what it is now, or even if it’s still there. Could be a supermarket, for all I know. Or a vacant lot.”

  “Be kind of interesting, if it were a supermarket,” Colleen said with a half-smile. “Trying to conjure demons in the frozen food aisle, or some such.” She made her voice sound very nasal, like something coming over a cheap PA system. “Attention, Price Saver customers. For the next fifteen minutes, a portal to Hell will be open in Aisle 6. Those of you wishing instant eternal damnation should proceed to Aisle 6 within the next ten minutes—and, as always, thank you for shopping at Price Saver.”

  “That would be even funnier if it weren’t so fucking plausible,” Libby said.

  “Okay, let’s see what we can find out,” Morris said. “How many computers do we have between us?”

  “I’ve got both a desktop and my laptop,” Libby said. “The desktop’s in my office, and the laptop is over there, on the end table.”

  Colleen O’Donnell hefted the briefcase she’d brought in with her. “Our laptop’s in here,” she said.

  “Okay, three should be enough,” Morris said. “Libby, I’ll use the one in your office, if that’s okay.”

  “Fine, go ahead. You already know the password, right?”

  “Yep. Okay, I’ll check the real estate listings for Fairfax, and find out if the property’s up for sale. Libby, how about you get into Google Earth and see if you can get a look at the place?”

  “Will do,” she said.

  “Colleen, maybe you or Dale can just Google the address, and see what comes up? Maybe nothing, maybe something—we won’t know until we try.”

  “The FBI is on the case,” she told him.

  Morris turned to Ashley and Peters. “Sorry there’s nothing for you guys to do at the moment. Hope you don’t feel left out. After all, Ashley, I’d say you’ve done plenty of heavy lifting for us already.”

  “Yes, and mostly it was corpses,” she said.

  “We’ll be the cheerleaders,” Peters said.

  “All right, let’s see what we can come up with,” Morris said. He turned and walked toward Libby’s office.

  Twenty minutes later, they reconvened to share what they’d found.

  “The place was for sale until fairly recently,” Morris said. “It’s listed in the Fairfax edition of Pennysaver Press, but there’s one of those diagonal ‘Sold’ banners over it.”

  “What do you want to bet it was bought by some obscure company,” Peters said, “which is part of a holding company, that is affiliated with some other company that doesn’t exist?”

  “In other words, the CIA,” Morris said.

  “That’s the way they used to operate,” Peters said. “I don’t imagine things have changed all that much.”

  Morris turned to Libby. “Anything on Google Earth?”

  “Several photos from different angles,” she said. “The place looks deserted and abandoned. Of course, there’s no way to know how recent the photos are. You can tell it was once a school, though—see?”

  Morris looked at the screen. “Yeah, typical public school layout. Doesn’t look a thing like a gateway to Hell.”

  Morris turned to the FBI agents. “What did a general Google search turn up—anything interesting?”

  “Not a damn thing,” Fenton said. “’Course, I’m not sure Google was even around in 2002—was it?”

  “I think it was, but maybe not the huge deal that it is now,” Morris said.

  “Since Google came up essentially with nothing,” Colleen said, “we went into some newspaper files. Fairfax is in the DC metro area, so we thought the Washington Post’s back issues might have something.”

  “And did they?”

  “The last twelve years, not a damn thing about 984 Sager Avenue. We looked at 2002, and apparently there was a car bomb or something that went off in front of the place. It killed five fundies from some church who were involved in a protest demonstration in front of the building. Several others were burned pretty badly.”

  “That was a diversion that Asmodeus set up so that he could get back in the building unobserved,” Morris said. “He thought the place might be under surveillance, and he was right. Mike Pacilio and a couple of others with him saw the whole thing, but were powerless to stop it.”

  “So, the CIA has quietly bought the building,” Libby said. And in three days they’re going to try recreating the experiment that accidentally brought a demon across back in ’02. Except these idiots are doing it deliberately, on the assumption that they can control whoever comes across to this plane and send it—or them—off to do bad shit to the Caliphate.”

  “Far as I’m concerned, it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of guys,” Fenton said. “Except for that one little problem.”

  “Yeah,” Morris said. “‘Little’ like that one little bomb we dropped on Hiroshima in ’45. A demon, once summoned, can be very hard to control, as I have reason to know. And if you’re bringing forth more than one, the difficulty—and the danger—increases exponentially.”

  Colleen shook her head. “If there was ever a better refutation of the notion that the ends justify the means, I don’t know what it is.”

  “So, we know what these bastards are going to do, along with when, where, and how they’re gonna do it. Question is: how do we fucking stop it?”

  “I may have an idea about that,” Ashley said. It was the first time she’d spoken in a while.

  Everyone else in the room turned toward her. “I think it’s fair to say that we’re all ears,” Morris said.

  “The thing is, some of you might not like it.” Ashley was looking right at Libby as she said this.

  “Why not?” Libby said.

  “Because it’s rather... ruthless,” Ashley told her.

  Libby took in a deep breath, let it out, and looked slowly around the room at the others. “I can’t speak for anybody else here,” she said. “But I’ll listen.”

  Chapter Forty-One

  Fairfax, Virginia

  Halloween night

  11:46 p. m.

  IF CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE’S character Doctor Faustus were somehow transported to the Twenty-First Century, he, would have been amazed at how the science of demon-summoning had advanced in the centuries since his birth, life, and damnation.

  The apparatus occupied the better part of the large room in what had once been Fairfax Regional High School. It didn’t look like much, considering what it was supposed to be capable of doing. Three big Packard-Bell turbines were linked in series off to the left. Ten feet in front of them sat the black transformer, roughly two feet square, that took the power generated by the turbines and channeled it into the rest of the machine. To the right was a bank of computers that were programmed to calculate the flow of energy passing through the system and optimize it to fit the system’s needs at any given moment. A variety of programs had been developed to do this at different stages of the process. In the middle of it all was The Door.

  It actually looked less like a door than a gate, consisting of two cylinders made of industrial-quality ceramic material. The cylinders were five feet high and seven inches around, and they stood upright exactly five feet apart. Each was surrounded by a thick electromagnetic coil. Various heavy-duty cables and thinner electrical wires led from the base of each of the cylinders to the turbines and computer banks.

  On the floor between the posts formed by the two cylinders was another electromagnetic coil sandwiched between two thick sheets of safety glass about three feet square. The coil had been laid out in the shape of a five-pointed star surrounded by a circle.

  Hans Westin handed Ted Burnett a set of goggles with thick, yellow-tinted lenses. “Here,” he said. “You must wear these once the process commences. Everyone in the room, myself included, will do the same.”

  Burnett examined the device curiously.
Apart from the lenses, it resembled the eye protection that he’d seen some NBA players wear on the court during games.

  “Are you anticipating unusual wavelengths of light?” he asked.

  “We may well experience some,” Westin said. “But these goggles provide a more vital form of protection. You propose to send the demon we summon to possess a high-level member of the so-called Caliphate. Well and good. But until the demon has occupied a human body, it cannot be viewed without protection such as that which I’ve just given you. The literature on such matters is, as you might imagine, unreliable. But there are to be found several accounts saying that those who he gazed upon a demon in its pure form were instantly driven mad.”

  Westin, it must be said, had at one time considered not giving Burnett a set of the protective lenses or explaining the necessity of wearing them. Having the man turned into a gibbering lunatic seemed an appropriate revenge for the threats Burnett had made against Westin and his family. But Westin, despite his many ethical failings, had decided that he could not in good conscience afflict such a fate on anybody, even someone whom he despised as thoroughly as he did Burnett.

  “Well, in that case...” Burnett put the goggles on, allowing the lenses to rest on the top of his head where they could be quickly pulled down to cover his eyes.

  “You’ve done good work here, Doctor,” Burnett said, surveying the array of technology. “My congratulations.”

  “Perhaps you might withhold the accolades until we’ve seen the device work,” Westin said sourly.

  “You have doubts Doctor? At this late hour?” Burnett’s voice was hard and mean. “Do I need to remind you of the price of failure—a price to be paid not only by you, but by everyone you love?”

  Hans Westin’s hands twitched, as if he wished they were wrapped around Burnett’s throat. Perhaps giving him a set of protective eyewear had been a mistake, after all. But his voice remained calm as he said, “I have no grounds for pessimism, Mister Burnett. But it is a tradition among scientists to withhold congratulations until after an experiment or procedure is completed—that is all.” No such tradition existed, to Westin’s knowledge, but it was a convenient lie.