by Tom Doyle
I had the money. Few of the old Families were poor, and those poor ones largely by choice. But both my Puritan and practitioner pasts usually combined to insist on restraint. Wealth was a legacy to be grown and held in trust for future generations; earthly indulgence was the sin that led to others.
Indulgence or no, I would have spent twice as much for a flight an hour earlier. Sure, I’d been humiliated, but I’d gotten used to God and the Devil’s amusement at my expense. I wasn’t running away from that; I was running toward my friends.
I made another pair of calls direct to Dale and Scherie. No answer. She had told me she’d be in Istanbul for babysitting; he had said Tokyo, but wouldn’t tell me why, “for your own sake, Mike.” I tried Attucks, but he wasn’t taking my call.
As I hung up, the schizo wave washed over me. Everything I had sensed today went into what the Peepshow called semiotic overload, and the entire world consisted of nothing but tactical clues. I hated this feeling almost as much as I hated farsight oracles. The similarity of my antipathies itself became a clue. Langley and H-ring’s farsight games played out like statistical 4-D chess, with moves and countermoves calculated along many timelines. What would I call this ugly opening? I’d been made vulnerable, and I didn’t think my superiors had consented to it to satisfy the inquisitive in MI13. I’d name this stripping of my usual protections an “Ishtar gambit” (I knew the classic pagan stories too). I was being dangled like naked bait in one of H-ring’s stinking probability games to draw out the enemy.
I changed clothes as if rushing to battle, though the style was international casual. I knew of too many practitioners killed in their rooms. Hotel rooms, with their one exit, were terrible tactical places. Most times, this sort of thinking was PTSD or the public posing of a young vet, but I was in a combat situation. I wouldn’t be sleeping tonight; sleep was for idiots. My drug-induced nap hadn’t been the healthy kind of rest, but it would do. I abandoned the rest of my luggage. Except for my sword, I never packed anything that I couldn’t afford to lose. I’d better get that sword back, or the family ghosts will be pissed.
Now I had to choose where to hole up instead. I could go to the airport earlier and wait on standby, but for practitioners international airports were like hotel rooms on a large scale, a sort of cul-de-sac with many bad ways to exit. A quick abduction and I would be off to a far nastier place than England. I could try the American Embassy, but as they knew nothing about my mission here, they might not be helpful. A metropolis like London offered the easiest solution: plenty of very public places kept the lights on and the people hopping all night. Nessun fricken dorma. And it was Friday. (Thank you, Lord.) Of course, if my enemies didn’t care about craft secrecy, all bets were off, but that would mean graver threats than to my single life.
I left the hotel and wandered across some of the Z (as in Zevon) coordinates. Trader Vic’s, Mayfair, Soho, Chinatown, Lee Ho Fook’s. These non-historical spots were all places of power, but not for me. The streets were jammed with nightlife seekers. I couldn’t find an Indian restaurant with less than a two-hour wait, so I ate some McDonald’s like the tourist I was. After a few hours of me walking, the town started slowing down. What some practitioners called the History Channel kept leaking into my view: Dickensian slums filled with Dickensian ghosts, old pubs and music halls pervaded by prostitutes of both sexes—always very young. Odd that I was seeing dead people who weren’t my family; in a few months I’d gone from seeing little to seeing too much. I was strung out from the day.
I checked my phone. No messages, and no signs of tracking or tapping. Spiritually enhanced devices were something like quantum-entangled communications: I could tell when someone was trying to listen in. I checked the local news feed. It reported a fire in my hotel, but no details. Another bit of collateral damage from my travel. I prayed no one was hurt.
I searched for the nearby twenty-four-hour places, and naturally found the dance clubs. A rave would be the perfect bolt-hole, with the usual bonus of it being an extremely ridiculous place for me to be. My grandmother had told me that being a Christian practitioner was to be in a perpetual state of irony with one’s life. I saw this all the time.
I chose the New Gargoyle because the club’s name added to my sense of absurdity, and that was unfortunately a good sign. My clothes were anti-hip, but they let me in anyway ahead of the younger and restless. Right after the door, the kids started in with “Hey Yank, want a trip?” The military haircut only seemed to encourage them. They knew the “Yank” without a word from me; they always knew. Besides any sin, designer drugs were a bad idea for a practitioner.
I found an elevated part of the floor with a good view and multiple points of departure. A low-level craft glowed throughout the club and pulsed along to the demon-hammer beat. The DJ seemed to add a little power to the mix, probably unconsciously. The young, alive, and beautiful danced, and no sign of a kindred soul in the lot. But in a moment I was dancing too, and the workout did me some good. Form didn’t seem to matter, except for the few who were putting on a show. Sometimes it was just a lot of hopping up and down. Pretty women with flying-saucer-sized pupils smiled at me and rubbed my scalp. I just smiled back and they danced away.
The more I got into the rhythm, the more the ghost space of the old Gargoyle Club asserted itself. Again, I saw ghosts of strangers: American servicepeople stranded in London because, for some reason, they couldn’t go home.
Other than those lonely spirits, the hallucinogenic music, the mindless groping of the other dancers, and my freewheeling paranoia as I anticipated an attack, this dancing was kind of fun. As personal oracles went, fun was not a good sign.
Someone was moving their extended thin white arm in time to the music. The arm left a craft afterimage on my retina like the glow sticks some of the dancers held. There he was: the third man from the car. Car Man was waving at me, his killer’s eyes flashing ultraviolet in the club lights.
OK, you have my attention. I took a photo of the asshole with my phone, and with a touch sent it to everyone at H-ring. Car Man smiled, and seemed unconcerned. He made gestures toward the rear of the dance floor. Two men and a red-haired woman emerged from the darkened bar alcoves, glowing with the true power that made the background craft of the club seem like nothing. They moved through the crowd, caught in the jumping frames of a strobe light, wearing the nerdy glasses of the young Elvis Costello or Buddy Holly—an odd choice for prospective combat. With their female accomplice trailing, the two men grabbed two women who were dancing together, no doubt in a very suggestible state for trance, and in some combination of craft and mundane action compelled them toward the emergency exit sign, with no protest or sign of alarm from anyone.
Car Man had slid into a clear spot on the floor just below me. He held up two fingers, made a slash across his throat, pointed at me, pointed at the exit, then followed his three colleagues. No sign of deception in his threat gesture.
So there it was. Two random people were being held hostage. Should I call the police? If I didn’t show, would Car Man stop with just two?
Didn’t matter. These rogues had my name and number. I would fight for the druggie damsels in distress. Oh, I briefly wondered if Marlow’s harangue earlier had been part of a long-game set up, but that didn’t matter either. A straight-up choice of life for life (two lives!) felt vastly different from my reckless endangerment on the road. Not logical, but typical. My father’s ghost would chew me out when my spirit showed up in Arlington, if I didn’t get stuck here with the WWII crowd. H-ring would have ordered me not to fight, as any Peepshow game would require a few more moves and a bigger payoff for my sacrifice. But I really, really didn’t give a Mach 5 fuck what H-ring and Langley thought just now.
I did care what happened to Dale and Scherie, but they weren’t here. Sorry guys—I hope you’re OK.
I followed the kidnappers. That was when it got weird. I started to feel good—too good. A little high. Had someone slipped me something? But no, my coord
ination seemed fine, other than bumping into endless dancers.
As I walked to the exit marked by a green sign, I tried to think of a plan that would get the two club women out of this alive. Car Man had packed a gun earlier, so they’d be armed now. I could dodge a couple of rounds at a distance, but I was pretty sure they’d just shoot me up close the moment I left the building.
So, I’d pray for four people to drop their weapons through a closed fire door. Sure, why not. I stood to the side of the door to avoid the inevitable bullets. I heard some confused high-pitched syllables and low voices on the other side, so they could hear me. “In Jehovah’s name, drop your guns!”
The low voices stopped, but still some fearful squeaks from the hostages. Neither silence nor squeaks suggested that anyone had been disarmed against their will.
I was at bottom. Lord, I’m listening.
Nothing. If I was at bottom, why the heck was I feeling so good? Eli, Eli, feet don’t fail me now. Shame to die just when I was enjoying the party.
“Supper’s ready, Major. Come out, or we will kill them in five, four…”
The countdown was like an echo of my stunt with MI13. Enjoying the party. What was that thing Morton had pulled at his going-away party? He had disarmed everyone with a prepared bit of craft that had made our guns too hot to handle. But he could only do that with the power of the House of Morton. I was overseas with no such spiritual fountainhead. But what the heck.
“Jesus, Lord and Savior, please disable their guns!”
For most of my life, I’d taken God and his miracles for granted. Mission after mission I was his instrument; I said the words, and he made them so. What had been a sacred duty had become a job.
Then from outside came the yells and screams of the disarmed and the clacks of metal on pavement, and I was again in awe. Thank you, Lord. Even if you’ve only given me seconds, I will not waste them.
For I was already moving through the door and into an alleyway. Time dilated to an eternity in the blink of an eye as my tactical senses went into a spiritually accelerated sharpness. The glow of a weak bulb a couple of backdoors down lit the scene. The one private security camera dangled, lens pointing at the ground. No risk of violating the craft secret, though I had been hoping to attract some attention. The alleyway smelled of puke and urine, of damp and motorcycle exhaust.
The abductors had dropped their red-hot guns and backed away from the door. The two men held their hostages as shields in front of them, bringing my charge to an abrupt halt. Their free hands sought knives, and the red-headed woman already had some sort of Bowie blade at a tense ready. I took a step back toward the wall, limiting my foes to one-eighty degrees of opportunities. From the way they lifted and flared their noses to catch my scent, they were Gabble Ratchets, the British equivalent of the Gideons, though I couldn’t tell whether these were government or underground. Only Car Man on my far left seemed relaxed—angry as he flexed his burnt hand, but relaxed. “Underground” didn’t fit him; “veteran, elite, and professional” did.
“Don’t move, or we kill them,” said the Ratchet woman in some non-standard Brit Isles accent, speaking loudly as if she didn’t care who heard, or maybe she was still deafened from the club’s loud music. Car Man grimaced, but nodded in approval of the threat. The club women’s eyes darted, confused and finding only terror. One of them had north Indian or Pakistani features; the other looked to have south China somewhere in her lineage. Not clipping the more numerous Anglo-Saxon roses. I wondered if that meant something.
“I’m here,” I said, dropping into normal time. “For Christ’s sake, let them go.”
Perhaps this prayer moved the Ratchets a twinge, but they didn’t comply. I looked closer, and saw why my commands hadn’t worked, though my prayer to disable their guns had. The Ratchets had monitor plugs in their ears like some musicians and soldiers wore, so they could block out my words. Their eye gear was capable of head-mounted display, which I was betting could obscure the motion of my lips. For them, any loss of vision and hearing would be worth the trade-off; I could still try command, but I wouldn’t get the strong and immediate results I needed for combat. Dead certain now—they had come prepared specifically for me, and maybe the airport limo had been about capture, but this was a kill squad.
Car Man, with naked cold eyes and exposed ears, seemed not to care about my commands. But two others were still vulnerable, and I’d remove them from the equation. “God loves you,” I told the club women. “Sleep.”
In an instant, the women were inert weight in their captors’ hands. Car Man grimaced again with something like embarrassment, then made a little shooing gesture with his hand. Ratchet woman ordered, “Just drop the feckin’ girls and get the bloody major.”
The men did as they were told, and the dancing queens splashed down into cold, dirty puddles. I tried another prayer: “Lord, disable their knives,” but whatever spiritual power had worked the gun miracle was gone now, so the Ratchets advanced on me with their long knives. Car Man struck a match and lit a cigarette in his cupped hands. I was aware again of the empty space at my side. I had always thought I’d go down with the Family sword in my hand. Now both that and my primary spiritual power had been stripped.
Against the long odds, I again stepped into the accelerated frame of spiritual combat. I dodged the knife blow and deflected the arm of the man nearest me. Then I went in close and forced the knife from his hand and used him in an orbital swing into his colleague before elbowing his face hard enough to hear the satisfactory crack of his heads-up glass wear and his nose. I was now within the reach of the second man, and I forced his knife as well, trying to steal it for myself, but it flew out of his hand, so I boxed his earplugs with my fists. Two down for a four count.
But even as the second man reeled away, the woman said “slow” and “heavy,” and as I too slowly turned to face her, I had to stumble back to avoid her first slash. She caught me with the back swing, nicking my raised forearms, ruining my nice jacket. Then, I was crouched back against the wall, and the other two men were up again and on her flanks. This was it. Into your hands I commend my spirit.
CHAPTER
FIVE
“You retrieved the major. Good.” A new voice, the click of her shoes echoing down the alleyway. Commander Marlow had arrived, perhaps to finish me off. I found this oddly comforting. She wore a long, white fur coat, with seemingly no concern for PETA, the muddy streets, or her effect on me. Car Man twitched with conflicting silent signals, but Ratchet Woman just said, “Yes, ma’am.”
Retrieved the Major. Marlow did not sound like one of my executioners. I gave her the benefit of the doubt. “Commander, they’re dangerous…”
“That’s enough from you, Endicott. All right, then, let’s get him into my car.”
Marlow moved toward us. The expressions on the Ratchets’ faces were all wrong. This was not part of their plan.
Marlow kept talking. “You weren’t going to do him here, were you? Just because there aren’t any cams doesn’t make this a good place. You were seen.”
Car Man had thrown his cigarette to the ground in disgust and was reaching under his coat, probably for his own knife. They would kill Marlow.
I brought up my bloody arms. “Don’t you dare touch her!”
Marlow’s shoulders sank; she glared at me in exasperation. “Major, how many times do I have to tell you…” But as her right hand reached up to slap me, her left hand tucked under her coat and retrieved something longer and thinner than what Car Man would find. Sometimes spiritual power is just enhanced sleight of hand. As her right hand threatened me, her left threw the object to me. In a flash, I snagged it out of the air. My sheathed sword.
The combat was short and intense. I had seen my family and comrades fight. I’d seen the ineffable dance of the Morton school of Native American–inspired martial arts. But I’d never seen anything like Marlow. She was like some warrior angel out of Jesus Christ, Superstar. The flow—not anticipatable, vi
sible only in retrospect, like a river wild, with limbs that, as if acting on their own initiative, found human bodies to be target-rich environments, full of collateral damage. As she fought, she spoke what sounded like Latin—the charm of British public schools mixed with craft. I stuck to plain English prayer.
We hurt all of the Ratchets pretty badly, but they’d probably live. Car Man had again disappeared. The club girls remained asleep. I stared at Marlow. She was winded, but even as her chest worked, her face remained focused, as if still seeking targets. “Never seen combat, Major?”
I wanted to say, no, not like this, never so beautiful. Instead, I resheathed my blade and quipped, “Thank you for the sword, but I really would have preferred a gun just now.”
“Right, so you could bless the bloody bullets? Did you really have to bring God into this? Isn’t that somewhat blasphemous?”
I ignored her and pulled a plug from the ear of one of the men. It could be some nasty craft, but I needed to hear, as I expected this to be used against me again. Holding it close, I heard noise cancellation plus “Stay on mission” in a continuous loop, delivered by a steady, craft-inflected voice. Stay on mission. Good advice, if I knew what the mission was. It was nice being saved, but not my usual position, and Marlow’s reappearance had that schemes-within-schemes sort of timing.
I turned back to her. Down the alleyway, she had retrieved an old khaki duffel bag. “What brought you here?” I asked.
“Your third man,” she said. She was pulling stuff out of the bag—motorcycle helmets and leathers.
“What about him?”