Golden Eagle (Sons of Rome Book 4)

by Lauren Gilley

  At least…he hadn’t at first.

  But as he aged, aches and pains began to make themselves known. A soreness in his neck, back, and shoulders at the end of long days spent hunched over microscopes. His eyesight was degenerating, his glasses prescription stronger every year, and his doctor starting to predict glaucoma, given his family history. His blood pressure was high, and a medicine had been prescribed that he only sometimes remembered to take, and which left him so dehydrated that he shook and shivered and had taken to keeping bananas and Gatorade in his desk drawers. Eventually, his body would fail him – totally – and he’d be nothing but a tidy stack of research, and some bright-eyed young protégé would have to pick up where he’d left off – only less ably. No one working under him was a match for him. He loathed the idea of handing his work off, after all that he’d achieved this far.

  He wasn’t ready to let go. To get old. To take time off. To go blind and feeble, and…

  And then he’d realized that he wouldn’t have to.

  He was studying immortals. And there were ways to become immortal.

  If only his plans for that didn’t keep getting fucked to hell by Nikita Baskin’s people.

  A knock sounded at his office door, and it opened before he could call permission. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and didn’t snap at Gustav when he entered.

  “Good, you’re here. Thank you for coming.”

  Gustav shut the door, but remained standing. Only a few months ago, he would have dropped languidly into a chair and adopted a pose meant to flaunt his superior power. There’d always been something of you need me about his mannerisms, coy and mocking.

  He’d recovered, outwardly, from his run-in with Baskin a few days ago, but his expression, weary and wary at once, indicated that the conflict had taken some of the wind out of his sails.

  For the first time, Fowler felt that the power had shifted between them. On Gustav’s end, his agreement to turn Fowler had always been a quid pro quo situation. But now, that agreement was in tatters.

  “I called you up here,” Fowler said, shutting down his computer and turning to face his guest fully, “because I’m on my way to a meeting. Earlier this morning, I received a call from Detective Trina Baskin.”

  Gustav didn’t move, his features carefully schooled, but he swallowed, and that telltale ripple in his throat said everything.

  “She wants to sit down with me and discuss, in her words, ‘our agreement.’ That would be blackmail, by the way. And you know, the funniest part about it is, Detective Baskin is supposed to be dead. As is the rest of her pack.”

  Another swallow.

  “Would you care to explain why they aren’t?”

  “Killing them wasn’t part of our original agreement,” Gustav evaded.

  Fowler offered a smile. “You’re right. It wasn’t.” And retracted it. “At first. But then you went and bungled the job you were placed in charge of, and got them all involved. And then you volunteered to remove them from the equation, and bungled that. Consider your leash shortened. Significantly.”

  He stood, and gathered his briefcase, already packed and ready. “I’ll be taking a team with me to deal with Baskin’s people. You stay here, with your Familiars, and guard the lab, should they have any designs on splitting up and sending part of their pack here.”

  “You know that’s exactly what they’ll do.”

  “Yes. Are you telling me you haven’t recruited replacements for the vampires you lost in your last encounter with them?”

  “No, I–” Frustration bled through his voice, showed on his face. He sighed. “I underestimated them, before. They’re…they’re stronger than I first thought.”

  They’d all underestimated them, but Fowler wasn’t going to admit to any such thing.

  “Yes, well, pride does tend to come before a fall. Don’t make the same mistake tonight. They are few, and we are many. We can crush them, and it’s high time we did so.” He moved past the vampire, toward the door. “Oh, and, Gustav? Recapture LC-7. That’s an order. And if you get the chance to kill Basil Norrie” – another smile, because he felt like it, because it was a good outlet for the energy thrumming through his veins – “make it hurt.”

  ~*~

  Before he left the building, Dr. Fowler went down to the subbasement. He went through the basement, through both labs there, past the loose huddle of Gustav’s recruited vampires, a motley group of thugs, street-fighters, pickpockets, and predators, men and women, most of them muscled and tough-looking. A few sent him hostile glances, which he ignored. He’d grown used to vampires, and their territorial ways.

  He’d learned, immortal or not, that they screamed just like humans when you applied the right sort of pressure.

  He used his keycard – a unique one, with special codes written into its chip – to access a stairwell built to look like a section of metal wall-paneling, and headed down.

  The idea had come from Virginia, from its two subbasements. It was one thing to have a basement for normal security purposes – but sometimes you needed something more. A deeper hole to bury something truly awful. Before this branch of the Institute had been opened, its front façade of a pleasing, soothing hospital environ in place, construction had begun: long months of digging down, bracing up, installing plumbing and electric, and installing heavy, heavy doors in the right places. A freight elevator provided the means to shift down crates – or cages. And the floor hosted dozens of drains which allowed for drainage of all sorts, some of it aided by the powerful hoses coiled up on the walls.

  The subbasements in Virginia were useful, but terribly antiquated, like the dungeons in an Old World castle.

  The subbasement here was a thing of efficient, sterile beauty, much more serviceable.

  The stairs switched back several times, and dumped him out in the center of a rectangular, concrete room, lit with caged lights, circled by heavy steel doors set with small, barred windows at their centers. He’d heard the noise by the last landing, and now that he was here, surrounded by it, he knew a fleeting, uncharacteristic pulse of fear.

  Their new acquisitions were loud.

  Shrieks, howls, growls, snarls, and the occasional leonine roar, all muffled by the steel and concrete; some of the acquisitions pounded on the walls and doors of their cells, scrabbling like they were trying to claw their way out.

  “Sir,” the young guard on duty greeted him, snapping to attention. If Fowler remembered correctly, he’d been a sergeant before his injury, discharge, and subsequent treatment at the Institute.

  “Do they do this much?” Fowler asked, motioning to the cells.

  The sergeant swallowed, throat jumping, his face too pale. He’d seen war, seen his own body blown apart, but clearly, he’d never seen anything like this. “All the time, sir.”

  “Hm. And where are the handlers?”

  “Having dinner, sir.”

  “Go and get them. They need to be ready in the event our new friends need to be put to use tonight.”

  “Sir.”

  He trotted off, and returned ten minutes later from a side door with a disgruntled Dr. Hawkins, who’d once been a vet, and now was handling a very different kind of animal. He started to say something, frowning, some complaint about having his dinner interrupted – a belligerent, stupid man, heedless of the good work they were doing here – and Fowler cut him off.

  “Gather your team, Dr. Hawkins, any who can be spared from here, tonight, and prepare as much sedative as you’ll need to transport five of them.”

  “T-transport?” Hawkins spluttered. “Are you fucking – it was hard enough getting them in their cages!”

  “Yes, I imagine so, but they aren’t here to be used as decoration. Get what you need to move five. I don’t want to be late.”

  44

  Trina had chosen the place for the meeting, and Dr. Fowler had agreed too easily. She’d picked an office building that was occupied, thinking the presence of civilians – those that
remained after five – would deter the Institute from taking drastic action against them, and maybe show a little goodwill on her part for the same reason.

  But, now, standing in front of the main doors, she felt more than a slight twinge of doubt. What if they got someone hurt? Killed? Could she live with that?

  Now wasn’t the time to let her conscience get in the way. She pushed through the revolving door, Mia and Jamie behind her, and strode into the terrazzo-floored lobby.

  A night watchmen, bright-eyed, probably just come onto his shift, glanced up from the computer at the front desk, and called a “good evening,” a question in his voice. She remembered his name was Miguel, his face familiar.

  Mia pulled out her badge and showed it to him. “Detective Baskin,” she said by way of greeting, sure to give him a long look at her picture and decide her badge was real. “I worked the Jefferson case here back in the summer.”

  His brows went up, and recognition dawned. “Right. Yeah. You caught the guy, didn’t you?”

  “We did, but my boss wants me to have another look at the scene. The trial’s coming up and there’s some loose ends.” She rolled her eyes, feigning bored.

  “Oh, you need to go up? Sure. Yeah. Seventh floor’s still empty.”

  “Great. We shouldn’t be long.”

  “The phones are still connected up there, or at least one is. Call down if you need anything.”

  “Thanks, Miguel.”

  She didn’t exhale properly until they were closed into the elevator and going up, and then it was a deep rush of breath.

  “Okay, you being nervous is gonna make me a lot more nervous,” Jamie said.

  “I’m not. Just…working out the kinks.” She popped her neck side to side as an afterthought.

  Mia pulled out her phone and hit Send on the text waiting in her outbox. It was one headed to Kolya, Fulk, and Anna, the signal that they were past the first obstacle, and on their way up.

  Trina reached beneath her jacket to check her holster, again. Flexed her ankle the tiniest fraction to feel the slim little spare gun she’d stowed in the shaft of her boot. They were an old pair of harness boots she’d bought years ago, when she was going through a wanting-to-look-badass phase; not the comfiest, but she had a gun down one, and a knife down another, and that made them worth their weight in gold right now.

  The elevator climbed, slow and smooth.

  Mia took an audible breath. “The reason I wanted to come…there’s something I should tell you,” she began, haltingly.

  The elevator arrived with a polite lurch and a ding.

  “Not now,” Trina said. “We need to move.”

  The doors opened on a wide, unlit area filled with cubicles. A few exit signs threw a faint red glow, revealing the low walls of them, and the cleared place where a number had been folded up, back in the summer, to allow room for cleanup after the Jefferson case.

  It had been a nasty scene. So nasty, in fact, that when employees tried to return to work, they’d experienced what they’d described as “ghost activity.” Management had moved to a satellite location, and so far hadn’t made any steps to return, so the two floors of Mason Unlimited remained empty. Haunted.

  Mia walked forward, slowly, the two vampires flanking her, and turned the first corner to find light shining through the gaps in the blinds of the conference room.

  Dr. Fowler was already here.

  They’d nearly reached the door when two black-clad men stepped forward out of the shadows, the faint ambient glow from the blinds gleaming faintly on the matte barrels of the rifles they carried on their shoulders. Trina managed to bite back her gasp, but Mia and Jamie didn’t.

  “Trina Baskin,” she said, snappish to cover her startlement. “We’re here for the meeting.”

  “We need to pat you down,” one of them said.

  She’d expected as much, but damn. She held out her arms and widened her stance without argument. One of the goons handed his rifle to the other, and did the honors, brisk and efficient.

  Mia made a quiet, unhappy sound in her throat when it was her turn, and Trina shot her a glance over her shoulder she hoped she could see: Play it cool.

  She didn’t have anything against Val’s mate, but she didn’t know much about her aside from the fact that she was newly-turned, a civilian, and a potential liability.

  “Okay, you can go in,” Mr. Pat Down said, and leaned over to turn the door handle and push it wide for them.

  Trina had to blink against the onslaught of light: the too-bright fluorescents were on, droning faintly.

  The conference room was long and narrow, hugging the side of the building, its whole outer and inner walls composed of windows: one side looking into the rest of the floor, shielded with blinds, and the other overlooking the street below, bare, offering a glittering glimpse of the windows in the building across the way. Entrances marked either end, a liability that Trina and her team planned to exploit, later.

  In the center, a long, high-gloss table, ringed by chairs.

  Dr. Fowler sat at the far end, formal and proper, hands folded on the tabletop, two more guards standing behind him, one to either side of his chair.

  “Good evening,” he greeted pleasantly. “Take a seat.”

  Fuck you, she thought, because she was a Baskin.

  But she said, “Thank you,” and pulled out a chair, because, career tanking or not, she was a detective, and this was a game she recognized: intimidation.

  Jamie sat down across from her, and Mia beside her – between her and Fowler, interestingly enough.

  Trina had rehearsed what she’d say, recited it aloud in her head all day, so when she spoke, it was smoothly, without betraying so much as a hint of emotion. “Dr. Fowler, the last time we met, we came to agreement.”

  “I remember it well. And it’s you who’ve violated it, Detective.” He gave a small, satisfied smile, and tilted his head so the lights flared off the lenses of his glasses, obscuring his eyes.

  “I disagree. I haven’t shared the video I have with anyone. Meanwhile, your facility has not only endangered my pack, personally – which you agreed not to pursue – but it’s responsible for the horrific murders of civilians. That’s a breach of a verbal contract if I ever heard one.”

  His smile widened. “I see your vocabulary has improved since last we met. Very well: in your own words, you told me that we weren’t to, and I quote, ‘come after you.’ We have not done so.”

  “When you’re killing people in my precinct, that’s an act of aggression.”

  “Toward you? No. That was merely a tying up of loose ends.”

  She’d heard murderers refer to their victims in all manner of impersonal terms; offhand statements that would make anyone sick to hear.

  But hearing that from Fowler enraged her. A feral clench of anger in her belly that left her wanting to bare her teeth, like Lanny or Nik or Sasha would have.

  She tamped the urge down and said, “I thought it was bad when you kidnapped Sasha. I thought it was bad that your feral wolves were so uncontrollable that there’d been a mistake, killing that family, when you were tracking us. But what you’re talking about now is purposeful, premeditated murder, and that seems like an awfully big jump from doing what you have to for your cause, and having some kind of predilection.”

  He lifted his hands, brought his fingertips together, a lightly-held triangle beneath his chin. “You think I enjoy it?”

  “I think somewhere along the line, it wasn’t enough to make medicine and fight a war. You got a little taste of power, and it went straight to your head.”

  “A detective and a psychoanalyst. I’m impressed. What do you want, Ms. Baskin? Why are we here?”

  “To explain to you that our agreement is terminated. I’m done trying to negotiate with someone without a shred of morality.”

  He chuckled, a quiet, delighted laugh that belonged in the throat of a movie villain.

  She’d started to shake, fine tremors that wouldn’
t be visible; an internal shivering that was all nerves, but which would only get worse if this dragged on, or she didn’t have an outlet for the adrenaline. She drew herself upright in her chair, and leaned her forearms on the edge of the table. “Dr. Fowler–”

  “No, no.” He waved, an easy gesture. “I don’t mean to offend you. I commend your bravery, really. But, honestly, what do you think you can do in this situation?”

  She allowed for a pause, like she was considering; like she was uncertain. She wanted him to think that.

  “If you think me beyond negotiation,” Fowler continued, “then what do you hope to achieve through this meeting? Surely you don’t hope to overpower me, somehow?” He turned his head side-to-side, glancing purposefully toward Jamie, and then Mia, then back to Trina, his gaze pitying.

  “No,” she said, angling her upper body toward him another fraction, trying to offer the tiny, wireless camera set in the collar of her jacket the best view of him. It looked like a lapel pin, a little golden lion, and Much had explained that their mage, Tuck, had enchanted it, much like he had with the flash drive, so that it would work better, and transmit more cleanly than a bulky mic pack and wire like undercover detectives wore. “I guess…” She affected uncertainty, now, for the first time. “I guess I just want to understand the point of it all. Why are you doing this?”

  He smiled, patronizing. And she knew what he was thinking, what she’d hoped he would take her up on: that he wasn’t going to let them leave this meeting alive, and that it couldn’t hurt anything to indulge her curiosity. If her job had taught her one thing, it was that egomaniacs loved to hear themselves talk. They loved explaining their brilliance to the idiots around them. Showing off.

  She could play the idiot, certainly, if it meant that Harvey, sitting in front of a laptop at the coffee shop down the street, got all of this recorded, and uploaded to a secure cloud server.

  This was their plan: if Trina and Lanny had to kiss their careers goodbye, and flee the city, they might as well deal the Ingraham Institute a blow from which they could never recover.