All four of us already burned juice into our predator effects.
The joint predator froze Adkins in place. She lost her hold on her tamed bad juice, unable to complete the summons and the predictable deadly bad juice attack. I put a bullet in her heart to keep her quiet and activated two dross scramble bombs at her feet, Gilgamesh specials, another obstacle to prevent her from using her tagged bad juice. Mary and Giselle went to the door to Adkin’s suite and jammed it shut. The predicted Attack Focus began her charge from her guard duty at the entrance to Adkins’ apartment building. Adkin’s captive Crow, which I hadn’t expected, went into climax stress the instant Adkins’ hold on him vanished and he metasensed us. Useless.
Ten seconds since we landed on the roof. Heh.
The guard on the roof shouted to awaken the household. Shots popped outside, Tom’s people offering up a distraction. The household guards squandered a few precious seconds attempting to figure out the threat.
Webberly leapt out the window, and I followed immediately with a semi-conscious Adkins across my shoulders. Down. Giselle and Mary backed through, covering us against attacks from the rear, but Adkins’ Attack Focus guard didn’t reach the door to Adkins’ apartment until we were already on the way to the front gate. By the time I reached the front gate, Rose had it open, and Giselle had pinned down three of Adkins’ people, surprising them from invisibility and being careful not to actually hit anybody. Shots rang out at us, but we passed through the gate before they got the searchlights on, and the shots went wild. I tossed the last of Gilgamesh’s dross scramble bombs behind us as we passed through the gate, cutting Adkins off from her tagged bad juice and allowing us to relax our predator effects. By the time the household got the searchlights on, we were three blocks down the road and inside our getaway car. The Attack Focus lost us on her metasense before she got to the parking lot. She followed on a Harley, but turned the wrong way on Telephone Road.
Clean! I smiled my feral smile as I glanced longingly at Wini Adkins bleeding out on the back seat, pinned between Giselle and me. At my signal, we reactivated our predator effects at a lower level, now tuned to terror. Mary leaned over and got into Adkins’ face. Adkins practically pissed herself.
“You can’t do this,” she said.
“We just did,” Mary said, singing a song with her words.
“Gwen Larson sends her regards,” Giselle said, her voice echoing years of Adkins’ maltreatment of the Ontario Focuses. Adkins lost her composure and her water.
I pulled the waiting gag and shackles from the floor and bound Adkins tight. Then I put my hand in the hole in her chest and squeezed her heart, just to watch her thrash.
“I’ve got plans for you, little Focus,” I whispered in her ear. “You can’t imagine how bad your life is about to be.”
Five years. Five years and now the bitch who arranged my juice withdrawal was mine. The pleasure was so intense it was orgasmic. Old scores and recent ones. I owed her pain for her years of making Gail’s life miserable. Oh, and for what she did to Littleside, as well. Those were my thugs her thugs killed, before they got to the Focus bodyguards and ran out of easy targets.
I called in our success to Ila, and sped to the regional airport in Sterling Heights.
By the time we reached my Chicago house, it was nearly six, local time, and we had dear Wini well softened up. I regretted not being able to play with her some more, but duty called. I packed her in a secure box I had especially prepared in my basement, a box the size and shape of a coffin. A few air holes so she could breathe, heavy iron bands to hold the lid down tight, and a dross repulsion field care of Gilgamesh. I didn’t expect her to give anyone any trouble while I was otherwise occupied. I had gotten the idea from Gail, in a conversation where I mostly convinced her she didn’t want to get involved in the attack. I found Gail’s bloodlust a bit disconcerting; one Lady Death in the world was enough for now.
It hurt to leave Adkins. There was nothing I wanted more than to spend days and weeks pulling apart her mind and body. Orders, though, so I consoled myself with the thoughts of what I would do with her when I got back.
Ila gave me the news from Haggerty. Haggerty, Lori, Betsy, Lori’s Inferno bodyguards and Haggerty’s top merc squad got Schrum clean, and were on their way to Jackson. Lori had actually done a victory dance on Schrum’s corpse. I sure as hell hoped the attack had sated Lori’s bloodlust, or she would be the one dragging me into the endless dark void. Nothing from Keaton’s crew. The Student Arm running the phones, Sokolnik, had nothing to report.
Webberly, Giselle, Mary and I changed and showered. We put Duval in charge of guarding Adkins and we were on our way to Utah within a half hour.
I missed Shadow’s phone call by five minutes.
Elspeth still hadn’t beefed up her household security or called in the police to help. Her Transform rights organization didn’t appear to care about their lack of security or the ease of penetrating their ranks. Hell, two members of Elspeth’s organization were Fed plants, and another was from a fringe commie labor group. Still, there had to be something to this woman besides rabble-rousing and moneymaking. She did hold a seat on the Focus Council, the only first Focus to do so, and she held her own. I knew from Gail that Transform rights was no cakewalk, a miasma of vicious politics, yet here her household sat in the comfortable suburb of Granite, open to the first Hunter or angry Focus goon squad who stomped in. I suspected we had another Focus Webb here, with some screwy secretive defensive capability we would need to overwhelm. I sent in my hirelings to trip the expected traps and attrit her defenses. Nothing. My pathetic hirelings of the rob-the-corner-liquor-store-if-they-got-lucky variety walked in and took out Elspeth’s household without a fight.
Elspeth wasn’t at home. She was out for a morning jog, her first morning jog in at least a year, according to my people’s espionage. Normally, she went running just before midnight. She jogged up to the four of us Arms, no metasense protections, no fear, no worries, no nothing. She even sent her bodyguards home after she spotted us. In the early morning light, Elspeth was sunlit beautiful, tall and leggy, with long dark gold hair, an elfin angular face, a slim girlish body, and a metapresence even her scars couldn’t ruin. She was fit and athletic, but no fighter. I gazed at her with thoughts of ownership in my mind, and desire caught me like a fire, starting in my abdomen and making every nerve clench. This one, I wanted.
“So this is it?” she said. I nodded, looking up to one of the few women I had met taller than I was. Mary, Webberly, Giselle and I then hit her with the Arm predator to subdue her. The predator effect slid off her like water off a duck, sparking a momentary fear of an impending disaster. Instead, she just blinked and held up her hands for us to bind.
“Ila?” I was in a phone booth by a closed Esso station having its underground gasoline storage tanks swapped out. Elspeth was gagged, bound, and in a body bag in the back seat of our recently stolen car. Although her easy surrender disturbed me, Elspeth remained well behaved and obedient, and I hadn’t made her any more miserable than I needed to.
“Boss, thank God!” My stomach sank as I heard the tone in Ila’s voice.
“What went wrong?” I said.
“I got the call from Shadow just after you left Chicago!” Ila’s words came out in a rush. “Keaton lost! She went in with sixty normals armed with her stolen military toys, and with Bass and Rayburn, and she still lost!”
Fuck! I sat down on the little phone booth seat. Cold sweat poured from my body, and my vision narrowed to a single point. Two senior Arms plus Rayburn, who would have gained enough stature in the fight to become the next senior Arm, and they lost?
“How much of a fight was it? Did Keaton’s crew manage to damage Patterson and her people before she went down?” This made no sense whatsoever.
“No. According to Shadow, they fought their way into Patterson’s compound and surrendered. He thinks Keaton fell into a trap.”
I took a long breath and my nerves began to sin
g. This was it. Hell and opportunity both at once. We had been betting Keaton would screw up, and here it was, in one of my least likely scenarios. We all knew the dangers of Patterson’s home base, Hilltop, we knew her capabilities, her resources, her enslaved Focuses and her oversized household. We knew more about her setup than we knew about nearly any other Focus. Keaton and I had wargamed out attacks on Hilltop for years. Keaton knew to take in Crow help, and I was sure Bass’s Crow, Snowcone and Rayburn’s Crow, Kincaid, were at least hovering in the vicinity to protect them from Patterson’s suspected captive Crows. Haggerty and I had even eliminated the biggest danger, potential FBI help.
Despite all our preparations, we had missed something big. Keaton, implausibly, had fallen.
Now we needed to survive the experience.
“Lori, did you hear the news?”
“Yes,” she said, on the phone from Memphis. “What are you going to do?”
“No. What are we going to do?”
Lori paused. “I think you and I need to tag Sky and vice versa. Invite the witches to meet with us and divide up the world. Number one on the agenda should be replacing the UFA with a new organization.”
“What about Patterson?”
“Let her rot. Without the other ruling firsts to do her dirty work, she’s nothing.”
“I see two problems. First, she still has blackmail information on a bunch of important Focuses, and likely has quite a few of them tagged. Second, she’s got Keaton, Bass and Rayburn. Eventually, she’s going to break them and turn them into her enforcers.”
“That does sound like a problem,” Lori said. She took a deep breath to steady herself. “Take over the Arm organization, Carol. Finish the job Keaton started with Patterson.”
I shivered, nervous and paranoid. “I’ll get the Arms. Finishing the job against Patterson, though, will be far more difficult. Keaton should have won.” Against Keaton, Bass and Rayburn as Patterson’s enforcers, we would need to radically change how the Arms worked as an organization. We would need to be watching each other’s backs, full time. We would each need multiple Crow partners. We might not even end up with real territories. Most of our juice might end up coming from Focuses. I would need to challenge Keaton and win. To get the stature necessary, I would need to tag all the other Arms. How, dammit, had Keaton lost? “You work on Patterson; taking down the First Focuses should have been a Focus operation from the start. Come up with a plan and I’ll get the Arms and our organizations ready for the fight.”
“No, Carol. Think about the big picture. Think like the Commander, like Patterson’s nightmare.” Pause. “Please, love. We don’t know the whole story yet, and I think the real story is going to turn out to be far worse than anything we’ve ever imagined in our darkest nightmares.”
“I’m afraid you’re right about that.” Something or someone else had to be involved. Nothing else made sense. Amy’s ‘unknown ultrapowerful Major Transform enemy’ theory was looking good today.
But thinking like the Commander? Riiight. Keaton and Bass had beat me far enough into my beast to make thinking like the Commander unnatural. The Commander could sweet talk neutral Crows and Focuses into participating in wars, and plan out devious battle strategies for fun. All I could think about now was hunker-down paranoia-driven plans that would drag my friends into the darkness.
Reclaiming my place as the Commander? Thinking like the Commander made my brain hurt.
Lori was correct, though. My responsibilities, not just as Chicago’s Arm, but as the owner of the juice music project, the juice to an Arm project, and as the owner of the Network, meant I needed to think strategically, or someone would take it all away from me. I must do this.
I focused my mind and pushed through the hurt, pushed through the paranoia and pushed through all my nasty Arm instincts. The darkness of my beast faded from my mind, napping, not gone. The world opened up around me, the dance of the Major Transforms. The politics of all the Major Transforms. The big picture.
Lori was right. When I thought about this as the Commander, the issues became obvious. If we ignored Patterson, she would re-establish her hold over the Focuses before they got off their asses and took her down. She would use the blackmail weapon on the Focuses, enforced by her new Senior Arm goon squad. The Focuses wouldn’t make their move soon enough. Worse, Keaton’s fall would push Enkidu and his damned Hunters into their attack. They were predators enough to sniff out any hint of weakness. They would be at our throats in an instant, long before the Focuses defeated Patterson. Nor could we go after the Hunters with Patterson at our backs. She and her enforcers would destroy us with ease.
I had my duty, and I would do it. Patterson needed to fall.
“Okay,” I said. “You willing to take some orders, Lori, and arrange some things for me?”
“Yes, Commander.” I smiled.
“I think it’s time I visited Tonya. Order Betsy to take Teas to Chicago. You and Haggerty fly to Philly, and meet me in Philly at Fairmont Park. If you get some time, find us somewhere private to use as a base camp, say, in one of those Noble tourney sites in New York or New England. Start getting anyone and everyone there with even the slightest interest in participating in a war against Patterson, both as fighters and as support people. Except Polly’s witches. We’re going to handle them through Tonya. No delays. The only way we’re going to win this is if we hit Patterson before she’s ready and before the Hunters attack. Speed is our only option.”
After I hung up the phone, I composed myself, and walked back to the car to talk to Rose, Giselle and Mary.
“There’s been a sudden change of plans,” I said. I explained the situation, and sent them on their way.
“Smith,” Hank said, over the phone. The phone booth by the closed Esso station was getting a lot of use this morning. I had already lifted a supply of quarters from the cash register of the nearby Dunkin’ Donuts.
“Double your bodyguards, stay in your office, and don’t leave for any reason,” I said.
“What’s up?”
“Patterson took Keaton, Rayburn and Bass.”
Pause. “Commander, ma’am, this sounds like treachery. Talk to Van, he’s…”
“I will, when I get the time. Get him to write up his theories and send them on to me. Keep your head down.”
I had called him to alert him and get him to hide under my protections just in case someone took a shot at him on the way by. I had neglected one important detail, though: his insights into the situation. “Give me a worst case scenario, Hank.” Although Keaton’s Arms working for Patterson was bad enough, I suspected there were worse possibilities.
“Yes, Commander,” he said. Using my title was his way of telling me he understood the gravity of the situation. “Recall my side project on Arm shape alterations? If Patterson remakes those Arms, you should watch out for radical physical changes in the medium to long term. Enough to surprise you in a fight, perhaps enough to alter their appearances.”
“Short term?” My big worry.
“Is the scuttlebutt correct that Patterson uses élan?”
I grunted in the affirmative. I should just give up on trying to keep anything from Hank.
“Élan means speed, Commander. Consider Keaton with the size and bulk of Armenigar, if you want a short-term worse case. Or Rayburn as an Arm-Monster, or Bass as a Chimera. I would suggest you move against Patterson as soon as possible.”
Good confirmation that I was on the right track. “I am. Remember, you learned the benefits of speed from me.”
Dolores Sokolnik: December 20, 1972
“Okay, what’s our scoreboard like, now?” Del said. She sat down next to Dorothy, and toweled off from her late night exercise session. Normally, she would turn in for her two hours of sleep, but not with the way the night was going. Far too many no-reports. Dorothy slid the notepad over to Del, who whistled. The whistle was a beat late, but still, it was a normal human reaction. Del was proud of it. “Did you get a chance to talk to Arm
Hancock’s communication woman about the Adkins attack?” There were three telephones in the communications room, plus two televisions and a radio. Papers, maps, and notebooks covered the table, many of the notes in Del’s handwriting. After reading through the research on Adkins, she had fingered Adkins as nearly as likely as Patterson and Fingleman to cause problems for them.
“A normal, and a rather independent one,” Dorothy said. Disgusted. “Yes, and we now know more than ‘they succeeded’. Hancock’s crew actually took Adkins alive.”
“Damn,” Del said. She expected all the inner circle first Focuses save Julius would be too well guarded to capture. “What’s that squiggle mean?” Del said, pointing to the Claunch attack section in her notebook.
“Had to make something up,” Arm Kent said. “Bartlett and Focus Mann took Claunch’s compound, but Claunch and her Transforms were gone. She left a bunch of normals running the place as decoys. Claunch went gypsy on the tenth of December, and somehow managed to fool the lot of us.”
“Nothing from the Boss?”
“Sorry. Not a word.”
Del winced. This didn’t sound good. Ma’ams Keaton, Rayburn and Bass had started their attack on Patterson two hours ago. Ma’am Keaton had predicted twenty minutes, tops for the operation, and a maximum of an hour before she called in and was on her way to Charlotte to pick up Corrigan.
“Did you learn more about what went wrong on the Fingleman nab?” Ma’ams Billington and Naylor had called in to report failure in taking Focus Fingleman, but they were under a time crunch and couldn’t give the details. Using the Crow information, they should have been able to surprise Fingleman by going in through Fingleman’s supposedly secret escape tunnels.
The Forgefires of God (The Cause Book 3) Page 15