Limitless

by Robert J. Crane

  “That’s why I’m calling,” I said.

  “Oh, you want to look him up while you’re in town?” she asked casually. “I can give you his number. I’m sure he’d love to get together with you—”

  “Kat,” I said, and I could hear the warning I put into my tone. “Kat, there’s a problem here that you should know about.”

  “What?” That took some of the perk out of her.

  “Janus is missing,” I said. “And people from that group of Omega refugees we brought over to the States are turning up dead.”

  There was a predictable silence on the other end of the phone. “What do you mean he’s missing?”

  “Missing,” I said. “Gone. Untraceable. Karthik, too. Do you know what he was up to over here?”

  “Sienna, he can’t just have gone missing—”

  “Kat, focus,” I said. She was a scatterbrain, and if I let her run the conversation she’d drag me all over the place. “I need to know where he was staying, how to contact him—anything you can give me.”

  “Um. Okay.” She sounded flustered, which was not surprising. “I have an old number for him, but I haven’t talked to him in six months.”

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “Los Angeles,” she said. “I’ll get on the next flight.”

  “You’re half a world away,” I said.

  “I don’t care,” she said, and there was iron in her words. “I’m coming over there.”

  “I can’t stop you,” I said, “but you ought to know that the entire European Union has made it pretty clear that they’re not letting any metas past customs at this point, and I’m pretty sure you’re on the no-entry list.” She was definitely one of my known associates. If she used her own passport, she’d get ejected from the country in about twelve seconds.

  “Well, how are you there, then?” This was tinged with bitterness.

  “I got asked to come over. Official channels. State Department called me,” I said. “I don’t know if you remember them, but Maxwell Llewelyn is dead and we’re pretty sure Angus Waterman is, too.”

  “Sienna, you can’t expect me to stay out of this,” she said.

  “I’m not keeping you out,” I said, “the laws of the United Kingdom and the European Union are. Hash it out with them.”

  “Damn Reed and his Italian screw-up,” Kat said, closer to a curse than anything I’d heard from her so far.

  “That wasn’t his fault,” I said, a tad defensive. You can’t expect me not to have my brother’s back; he was the only one who had mine, after all.

  There was a long silence. “Sienna… you have to find him.”

  “I’m working on it,” I said. I could feel the chill through my coat, the April air laced with moisture and cold. “I need whatever you can give me.”

  “I’ll send you his number and the last address I have for him,” she said quietly. “But he moved around a lot. He didn’t want to run afoul of the authorities. Sienna… I never got to say… he and I left it badly—”

  “Kat,” I cut her off. “This isn’t the end, okay? He could very well still be out there, one way or another. This is just a thread. A possibility. He may be clear of this whole thing, sitting on the Dover shore staring across the channel. I just need to be certain. The guy we’re up against… he knows me. He’s mad about something. He’s leaving pieces of people all over the place. And that’s the only trail he’s giving us.”

  “I’ll text you what I have,” she said, and I heard her voice crack. “Just… do what you can, okay? I know you can beat this guy, whoever he is. Find Janus.”

  The last word she spoke was like a dagger in my gut. “Please.”

  Chapter 24

  Philip watched Sienna Nealon sprint out the front door and vomit in the grass to the side of the walk. It elicited a chuckle out of Antonio. Philip showed his amusement with a smile as he watched the grainy, pixelated surveillance camera picture. That detective inspector followed predictably behind her, tamed house cat that he was, and they exchanged words for a few minutes before she walked to the curb and stood among all the police vehicles crowding the street.

  “She doesn’t look so tough,” Antonio said, his burned fingers running over his black goatee.

  “Appearances are deceptive,” Philip said. “She nearly shot me earlier.”

  “Heh,” Antonio said. “But you showed her.”

  “I hurt her,” Philip said. “That’s all.”

  “You could have killed her.”

  “I could have. Possibly.” He stared at the picture of her on the monitor. The video quality was too poor to make out any detail of her face, but he knew her by her clothes, by her height, by the squat shape of her hips. “The odds were against it, though. Besides, she should rightly be last. Keep her busy, don’t tangle with her until the end.”

  “I don’t care for that idea,” Antonio said. “If she’s formidable, we should kill her now and be done with it.”

  “It will get done when the moment is appropriate,” Philip said. “This is all about timing. We’re building to a necessary crescendo, and she may be the final note we need to complete the masterpiece.”

  “Or she could be the sour note that ends the whole thing,” Antonio said.

  Philip gave him the steady gaze. “You don’t think I’d see that coming?”

  Antonio seemed to withdraw into the shadows, the color of the computer’s monitor leaving him barely lit. “She could be in your blind spot.”

  Philip leaned forward, staring at her on the grainy picture. “I’ve planned this for years, every step, every movement. I didn’t expect her to waltz into the middle of it, but now that she’s here, I have a place in the plan for her as well.” He gave Antonio a smile that made the big man cover his mouth with a hand. “Don’t fear. Your future is assured.”

  Antonio relaxed instantly, stroking his goatee. “How do you mean to do it, then?”

  “The same as we always planned to,” Philip said. “Liliana is still working with Janus, softening him up. Once the possibilities say that he’s… malleable enough to do what we want him to, we’ll retrieve our business and be gone.” He reached a finger out and touched Sienna Nealon on the screen. He almost felt like he could reach through the camera and touch her. He could certainly feel her, the same way he could feel everyone else he looked at.

  And didn’t she have an interesting road ahead.

  “What about the gallery?” Antonio said. Philip could feel him watching without even looking.

  “Tomorrow,” Philip said without looking away from the monitor. “We can manage it and stir up more of the hornets at the same time.”

  “Stirring up hornets tends to make them angrier,” Antonio said. “Makes them want to sting you.”

  “They can’t sting what they can’t see,” Philip said. He truly needed a cup of tea, but it was so late. “After tomorrow they’ll be all impotent rage, furious and blinded by it. As methodical as they want to be, even putting the entire army into London couldn’t stop us. We’ll make them afraid. They’ll flinch. Hesitate. They won’t know what they’re looking for. And we’ll do the last few deeds that need doing and be gone before they even realize what we’ve done.”

  Antonio ran his burned fingers over the surface of the desk in front of them, and Philip caught the scent of gunpowder, wafting off the bomb maker in strong waves. “And the girl?”

  “She has to sleep sometime,” Philip said, staring at the picture on the monitor. “I would guess soon.” He looked to Antonio, gave him a smile. “Why don’t you follow her? Find out where she’s laying her head tonight.”

  Antonio smiled in return. “This I can do.” Something in the way he said it, his accent or perhaps the quiver of enthusiasm in his voice… well, to Philip’s ear, it almost sounded malevolent.

  Chapter 25

  We were back on the road a few minutes later, heading toward Marjorie Webster’s house once more. We’d settled things with Wexford and Marshwin, to no real resul
t, and the crime scene investigators hadn’t turned up anything of note, so we were left hanging around outside of a fancy building with a bunch of other cops, yawning into the midnight air. Webster suggested the sensible idea of leaving and getting some sleep, and me, levelheaded and careful-thinking individual that I was, agreed immediately.

  I was practically hallucinating from the lack of sleep by this point, everything around me taking on a blurry quality. I pride myself on my endurance, but after spending the night before flying over the Atlantic Ocean instead of sleeping, I was exhausted. Fighting gravity and the laws of physics for hours at a time really takes a toll on me.

  “So we’ve got a last-known address that’s vacant,” Webster said as the car thrummed along, “and a mobile number that appears to be disconnected.” He neatly summed up the results of what I’d gotten from Kat. I’d called Janus immediately, of course, as soon as I got the number, but it had been out of service. Webster had sent a couple of his boys over to the knock on the door of the apartment Kat had given us; the only people home had moved in three weeks ago.

  “He was pretty good at staying off the grid,” I said, leaning my head against the cold window. “Probably from all those years he spent with Omega.”

  “I keep hearing you talk about Omega like I should know what it is,” Webster said, guiding the car into a turn. “I mean, other than a bloody horseshoe.”

  Right. Sometimes I forget these things. “Omega was the old gods. Zeus and Poseidon and all them. Operated around the world from behind the scenes since a little before the fall of the Roman Empire.”

  Webster blinked at that. “That… seems like the sort of information that would have come out when your people were revealed to the public two years ago.”

  “Omega’s dead,” I said, succinctly. “They got wiped out in the British Museum by one of Sovereign’s flunkies. At least, the last remains of them. They’d already lost their Primus, the guy who led them, a few weeks before that.”

  “So was that Zeus, then?” Webster’s question held an aura of disbelief. “Like, the real one?”

  “No, he’s long dead,” I said. “The last one was a guy named Rick.” I kept a straight face. “He was a nobody. I doubt you would have heard of him. Point is, sometime after Zeus but before two years ago, Omega became a front for organized crime. They stopped ruling nations and started putting the squeeze on, using their powers for racketeering, drug smuggling, gun running… hell, you name an illegal activity that could make a buck, they had a finger in it.”

  “The Smokes,” Webster said, like it would mean something to me. He must have seen the look on my face, because he clarified quickly. “Organized crime syndicate that essentially disappeared a couple years ago. They had tentacles like you’re describing in everything. We’d get close, get a hand on ’em, and they’d turn to dust in our grip. You’d catch a bloke, think he’s ready to roll on his mates, and he’d just disappear from custody. Or we’d have a raid scheduled, show up, and there’d be nothing there. Even though an informant had sworn up and down that there would be a whole shipment of drugs or guns. They were like bloody magic. We called them ‘The Smokes’ because every time we got close they went up in it.”

  “Clever,” I said without enthusiasm.

  “Your friends Janus and Karthik were part of this?” Webster said, cocking his head at me. “Involved in it?”

  “On the administrative side,” I said, probably sounding more defensive than I needed to be. “Janus was more interested in preventing the coming cataclysm than dealing with their day-to-day bullshit.”

  “So what happened to all their riches?” Webster asked, thumping a hand against the wheel.

  “Who knows?” I asked. “Hell, who cares? This serial killer is clearly targeting them, though.” I thought about something. “Omega had a building here in London. We should check it out tomorrow, see if we can find anything. They used to have computer servers underground; they might be able to give us some kind of membership list if we can get into them.”

  “Have a lot of experience with computer hacking, do you?” he asked, eyeing me warily.

  “No,” I said, yawning, “I pay other people to be good at it for me. They should be able to access the Omega database. We had it set up so we could get into it from across the pond.” I tapped out a text message to J.J. back at headquarters and checked the time at the top of the display: 1:05 A.M. local. Minneapolis was six hours behind. That meant it was seven o’clock back at home. J.J. was probably sitting down to dinner with his cats or something.

  “Why did you involve yourself with them?” Webster said, and I was so close to drooling from fatigue that it took me a few seconds to figure out what he meant. “Omega, I mean.”

  “Because they were all that was left,” I said, trying to blink the tiredness out of my eyes. “Everything else got ripped away—friends, family, boyfriend. I lost it all.”

  “They helped you win the war?” he asked. I could tell he was battling his skepticism.

  “Most of them didn’t,” I said. “They caused me more problems than I could count, in fact, especially when I was first starting out.” They’d sent a revolving door of psychos after me, like they were daring me to kill them one at a time. I had killed a couple of them, too, before others started stepping in and doing my dirty work for me. That had been fine by me; killing had been an issue of conscience for me back then.

  Now it was an inconvenience of my position.

  Or so it had been explained to me, over and over, by people in the executive branch of the U.S. government that oversaw my every move. Having me, an agency head, kill a meta criminal or even a regular one would cause public relations nightmares for them. I’d seen the reason in that after a few go-rounds with the House Oversight Committee following the battle with Sovereign. They’d sifted the ashes of my actions after that conflict and found more than a few embers to burn me with.

  The job was important. So I’d conceded that I wouldn’t kill quite as quickly as I might have wanted to. It had been two years since I’d racked up my last body count—Sovereign being the last tally mark on my belt—and I’d been all peaceable since.

  “So this Omega group,” Webster said, drawing me back to the matter at hand, “what’s left of them?”

  “Janus,” I said, ticking them off in my head, “Karthik. Waterman, Max and a few of the others.” I waved a hand at him. “The people on your list, basically.”

  He nodded slowly. “Is that all?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I mean, all the ones I know about. The rest are pretty much dead.”

  He took his foot off the petal and we subtly decelerated into a slow, curving turn. I was used to freeways running through the middle of cities, delivering you to your destination in minutes. Minneapolis was good like that; 35W and 94 ran right through the heart of it, branching into other offshoots as needed. On a clear night at one in the morning, I could be from one side of Minneapolis to the other side of St. Paul in half an hour by car. I had no idea where in London we were or where we were going, geographically speaking, but I got the feeling that I was wasting buckets of time by not flying.

  We parked in front of his mother’s house a few minutes later. There was still a window lit in the second story, shining out over the red brick facade. “You going home?” I asked him.

  “I’d stay here, but my old room feels small now that I’m used to my own flat,” he said, getting out of the car. The dome light flashed on, shaking me out of whatever reverie I’d been in. I got out, too.

  He produced a keychain from his pocket and unlocked the door, opening it for me in his gentlemanly way. “There you go,” he said, his motions a little slowed. “Don’t forget to lock the door once you’re inside.” The way he said it, his voice shot through with fatigue, I got the feeling he was going to be crashing the moment he got home, too.

  “Thanks,” I said and slid inside. I started to close the door and stopped an inch short of doing so. “Webster?” I called o
ut into the night, and he stopped his trudge back to the car so he could look back at me, profile slumped with weariness, hands stuck in his trench coat’s pockets. “Thanks for the vacation,” I said, with a half-smile. I shut the door on his grin.

  Chapter 26

  Philip could see Antonio’s car from a camera on a bank six blocks away. It was small, but it was there, and Antonio’s voice fuzzed through the speaker of the cell phone. “She’s there,” he said. “The detective inspector walked her up to the front door and then left.”

  “Good,” Philip said, nodding as he stared at the monitor. “You’re sure they didn’t see you?”

  “I only picked them up on the last few blocks, like you told me to,” Antonio said. “I kept far enough away before that. There’s no way even she could have seen me, assuming she knew I was there.”

  “Right,” Philip said. “Address reads as belonging to a Marjorie Webster.” He cracked a smile. “Looks like the good detective inspector’s mother.”

  “You want me to take the DI out of the game?” Antonio asked.

  Philip thought about that one. Thought about it long and hard. “Follow him for now. I…” This sort of uncertainty wasn’t quite like him. “It might not be a bad idea to plant a little something for him. Just in case we have to send Ms. Nealon’s world crashing down around her.”

  Chapter 27

  I woke to sunbeams streaming in, to the sound of faint movement on the floor below, and the aroma of some kind of breakfast cooking. I blinked the bleariness out of my eyes, then remembered as I thumbed the faceplate of my phone alight that I had not only forgotten to bring a charger with me, but even if I had, American chargers didn’t work in British sockets.

  Everything was not exactly coming up Sienna. Or maybe it was, in a color sense.

  I rubbed at my eyes and sniffed, the enticing scent stirring my interest. Eggs. Ham. No, wait. British bacon? Yeah, that was it. Salty. Toast. And beans?