Revisionary

by Jim C. Hines

  I crossed the room and touched her throat until I felt the slow bump of her pulse. “She’s alive.”

  “Keeler’s wife?” guessed Lena.

  “Probably.” I studied her more closely. “If I’m reading this right, someone used a copy of Firestarter on her.”

  “Wouldn’t that, I dunno, set her on fire?” asked Deb.

  “The title character is a magic pyromaniac, yah, but there’s another who can force people to obey his voice. At one point, he commands someone to sleep, and they don’t wake up for six months. All you’d have to do is reach into the book and bring the sound into our world. It’s elegant, but damned dangerous.”

  “So whoever did this was a libriomancer,” said Deb. “One of your team?”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t tell them where we were going.”

  “Keeler has three children,” Lena said tightly. “Check the rest of the house.”

  We found the bedrooms near the back of the house. All three kids lay blanketed in their individual rooms by the same enchantment as their mother. I rejoined the others in the hallway. “I can wake them up, but they’re safe for now. Deb, you said you smelled blood?”

  “Upstairs.”

  An unconscious man sprawled at the top of the stairway, a gun in his hand. Blood from a cut cheek and split lip had stained the tan carpet. His dark suit and muscular build made me think bodyguard or private security. Was it normal for a senator to have armed security in his house, or had he been afraid someone would try to hurt him?

  I stepped carefully over his wheezing form and looked about. A second bodyguard slumped against the wall opposite a large, opulently furnished bathroom. Smudge was alert but calm. Whoever had done this was already gone.

  “In here.” The coldness in Lena’s words told me what she’d found. “Watch your step.”

  In the faint light coming through the windows, the blood on the desk and floor shone like black mercury. Lena switched on the overhead light, using her sleeve to avoid leaving fingerprints.

  Senator Alexander Keeler’s lifeless body lay against the wall behind his desk. His throat had been torn open.

  I was no forensic detective, but it looked like Keeler had put up a fight. He clutched a broken desk lamp in one hand, like he’d tried to use it as a club. His knuckles were bloody. His left hand curled like a claw, as if he’d broken it. Perhaps by punching someone or something inhumanly solid.

  I spun toward Deb. “Did you tell anyone from Vanguard about Keeler?”

  Deb stared at the body, her head shaking in slow denial. “When exactly did I have the chance to do that without you and Lena breathing down my neck?”

  “On the metro. The police officer. You could have told her to deliver a message—”

  “Deb wasn’t part of this.” Lena knelt beside the body. “Look closer. He was dead before we set foot on the metro.”

  Keeler’s hand and forearm were a dark raspberry color where the blood had pooled. I wrapped the bottom of my shirt around my thumb and pressed the back of his hand. The color didn’t change. It had been a while since I read up on livor mortis, but I was pretty sure that meant he’d died between six and twelve hours ago. I checked the wall clock. That put the time of death no later than eight p.m.

  “First they killed him, then they killed his computer.” Deb pointed to the overturned desktop unit beneath the desk. The side of the computer case had been torn away, and judging from the bent metal brackets inside, Keeler’s murderer had physically ripped the hard drive free.

  The oak file cabinet in the corner was a mess as well. A cylindrical lock lay on the floor, leaving a matching hole behind in the upper drawer. Both drawers had been yanked open roughly enough to twist them off their tracks.

  It would be just past eleven back in Vegas. I backed away and called Talulah. “Any chance you can hack into the security footage for Alexander Keeler’s house?”

  “Hello to you, too. Look, I’m good, but even I need a little more information to work my magic. What’s going on?”

  “We need to know who else has visited the senator in the past twenty-four hours.”

  “Depends on who set their system up and how. Is the video hosted on site?”

  I glanced at the computer. “If so, I think it’s gone now.”

  “Of course it is. Can you at least tell me what company they’re using?”

  I thought back to the security panel inside the door. “Nighthawk.” I gave her the street address as well.

  “It’s a start. I’ll call you back if I find something.”

  I crossed Keeler’s office to where a series of framed photographs sat on the bookshelves. There were the usual school photos of the kids in their private school uniforms, a family trip to Disney, a dusty wedding photo . . . I studied a shot of Alexander Keeler at the ribbon-cutting ceremony at New Millennium from almost a year earlier.

  I spotted myself in the photo, standing toward the back in an ill-fitting suit and tie. I hadn’t known much about Keeler back then. All I’d cared about was that New Millennium was opening, that we were finally going to show the world what we could do. The towers in the background had been under construction, but we’d been given the okay to begin work on a handful of research projects.

  I turned back to the desk and picked up a relatively recent New Millennium brochure titled A MAGICAL FUTURE. The cover showed our facility in Vegas. Inside were all the ways we hoped magic would benefit the world. The back listed future potential New Millennium sites in other countries.

  “Can you talk to him?” asked Lena. “Or look into the past to see who did this?”

  “Not with the books I’ve got on me. When I armed up at the library, I didn’t expect to have to talk to the dead.”

  Keeler’s family hadn’t fought back. The sleep spell had struck them before they could react. Them, but not the security guards upstairs or the man himself. Either the libriomancer wasn’t strong enough to knock out the entire household at once, or else they’d targeted only the people downstairs. Assuming it was deliberate . . . “They needed Keeler awake.”

  If his guards had time to draw their weapons, they’d had time to shout a warning. How much time had that given him?

  “To question him,” guessed Lena. “Find out how much he knew and who he’d shared it with.”

  “How much he knew about what?” Deb glared at the body.

  They’d destroyed his computer and ransacked his files. I found a cellphone with a broken screen on the floor beside the wall. An empty slot on the side showed where the SIM card had been removed.

  He hadn’t called 911. Otherwise the police would have discovered the bodies long before we arrived.

  Alexander Keeler had been a bigoted, manipulative, obsessively narrow-minded man, but he wasn’t stupid. So what had he done in those seconds between realizing someone was in his house and the moment that intruder ended his life?

  He might not have done anything. A lot of people froze in situations like this. I stepped around the desk and imagined myself in his place. The guards would have called out. We’d seen no evidence that either man had fired his weapon. They’d been overpowered quickly.

  I examined the desk. He’d had a computer, but no time to compose an email. He might have scrawled a note instead. I checked the notepads and a half-empty packet of printer paper, going so far as to rub a pencil over the top sheets of each in case it picked up indentations from a previous page, but found nothing.

  Grimacing, I checked the senator’s pockets next. I found his keys, eighty-three cents in change, a silver business card holder, and a leather wallet. They hadn’t taken his money or credit cards. The business card holder held about twenty of Keeler’s own cards on one side, and four more on the other.

  I imagined my own office, mentally overlaying it with Keeler’s. “There’s no printer.”

  “Maybe there’s a wireless printer somewhere else in the house,” suggested Lena. “One the kids shared for homework and things like that?”
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  “The paper’s here, and I can’t imagine someone like Keeler bothering to walk downstairs every time he needed a printout. Especially given the sensitive nature of his work.” I spread my arms and turned slowly to get a feel for what he could have reached from his desk. The file cabinet was just beyond arm’s reach. Easy enough to push back in a rolling chair and grab whatever he needed, and there was a gap of about four inches between the side of the cabinet and the wall . . .

  I leaned over and picked up a small black wireless printer that had either fallen down in that gap or been deliberately moved out of sight. A single LED blinked amber. My heart pounded. “I need a blank sheet of paper.”

  Deb handed one to me. I set the printer down as carefully as an armed bomb, fed the paper into the top, pressed the OK button, and hoped.

  The printer hummed to life and tugged the paper through. “Keeler sent whatever he was working on to the printer. With no paper, the printer held it in memory. His killers destroyed his hard drive and cellphone, but who’s going to bother—”

  The paper finished printing and fell into my hands. The light kept blinking. “There’s more.”

  Deb fed more paper into the machine while I read the first lines of Alexander Keeler’s final document. I read them a second time, then a third, trying to comprehend. Trying and failing to reconcile everything I’d thought, everything I’d assumed, with Keeler’s words.

  Lena touched my arm.

  “I was wrong,” I whispered numbly. “He didn’t go to the prison to check on their work. He went to expose it.”

  Keeler had been drafting a press release about the Virginia facility. Phrases like “trampling Constitutional freedom” and “betrayal of American ideals” jumped out at me. He’d been working to expose them, the same as us.

  This was the same man who’d championed the RAMPART Act, seeking to register and detain inhumans as well as libriomancers and other magic-users. But Keeler had wanted these things done openly, in full view and with the approval of the American people. As I kept reading, I started to see that no matter how much the man had hated and feared those of us with magic, he hated government secrecy and overreach even more. “It says he was tipped off by a source within the Department of Homeland Security.”

  “The Coast Guard reports to DHS,” Deb said quietly.

  I grabbed the next page of Keeler’s letter, which discussed “secret abductions and unethical experimentation” as well as the “deliberate fueling of tension and hostility in regards to magic” and “plans for a bigger, deadlier attack, intended to unite the world against inhumans and magic-users.”

  I hadn’t liked the man, and he’d never bothered to hide his hostility toward me, but he’d died trying to do the right thing. When this was over, I was going to make sure people knew it.

  My jaw beeped. I jumped hard enough I pulled something in my back. I had to get Talulah to turn down the intensity on that damn communicator. Then maybe we could add a caller ID function. “Hello?”

  “Isaac? It’s Jason.” I tensed. The last time I’d heard him so somber was when he’d been getting ready to fire me. “Nidhi’s gone.”

  “What do you mean Nidhi’s gone?” I spoke out loud for Lena’s benefit.

  “She’s alive,” said Lena. “I’d know if she wasn’t.”

  “I’ve been searching all night. I called her apartment. When she didn’t answer, I drove down and knocked. No answer, but her car was in the lot. I woke up some of her neighbors, asking when anyone had last seen her. She was taken away late last night.”

  “Who took her?”

  “Two men from the FBI. It’s too late for me to get through to anyone at the FBI office in Detroit. I’m talking to a reporter friend to see if they have any contacts who might be able to tell us what’s going on.”

  I swore silently. Not silently enough. The implant decided I was subvocalizing, and passed my curses along to Jason.

  “I’m doing everything I can.”

  “I know you are,” I said tightly. “Thanks, Jason. Have your reporter friend put the spotlight on Nidhi and the FBI. There are people who might try to make her disappear. Don’t let them.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “And try calling an agent named Steinkamp. He met Nidhi in Lansing. He might be able to help.” I recited Steinkamp’s number from memory, then hung up. How the hell could I have all this magic, all this power, and still feel so damned helpless?

  “Nidhi might not be a libriomancer,” said Lena, “but she’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and she’s tough as hell. We’ll get her back.”

  Nidhi had faced down people far more dangerous than FBI agents. I nodded.

  “Look at this.” Lena picked up a business card from Keeler’s desk, one of the cards I’d pulled from his case. “You said Keeler got a tip from inside DHS.”

  The card was from a Darlene Jackson-Palmer in the DHS Public Affairs office. I clenched my jaw and called the number on the card. Nobody would be there at this time of night, but I could at least leave her a message.

  A male voice began speaking after the first ring. “Thank you for contacting the Department of Homeland Security Public Affairs Office. Darlene Jackson-Palmer is on indefinite administrative leave. If you need assistance, please contact—”

  I hung up. “She’s gone.”

  “Jackson-Palmer,” said Lena. “Any relation to a certain libriomancer?”

  I stared at the card. “If someone high up at DHS is behind all of this, they might be using Darlene Jackson-Palmer as a hostage. That could explain why Babs was so upset. She got drawn into this to protect Darlene’s life.”

  “We don’t know that for certain,” said Deb.

  “It fits. It also answers another question.” I looked at Lena. “During the hearing, Keeler asked why my niece got into our medical trials.”

  “You think someone brought them in as potential hostages too?”

  I left the office and stepped carefully around Keeler’s unconscious bodyguards. “Not someone. Russell Potts. He’s the DHS representative on the New Millennium board.”

  “You’re sure he’s involved?” asked Deb.

  I’d been sure about Keeler, too. “I can’t prove anything yet, but I’m not taking chances with my family. I’m going to get them the hell out of there, and then Potts and I are going to have a very unpleasant chat.”

  I called Talulah once we’d left Keeler’s house. My throat was dry, and sweat dripped down my sides. “I need to confirm whether Babs Palmer is any relation to a Darlene Jackson-Palmer at DHS. Make sure nobody at New Millennium knows you’re running this search.”

  “This isn’t my first concert, Isaac. Hold on . . .” I heard the machine-gun clicking of her keyboard. “Darlene is Babs’ sister.”

  “How long has she been working for Homeland Security?”

  Another pause. “According to her LinkedIn profile, just under a year.”

  They’d hired her right around the time we started building New Millennium. “Thanks, Talulah. Any luck with that security footage yet?”

  “Working on it.” She paused. “Vince texted me about a half hour ago. He’s going over our research projects again. He noticed that Doctor Palmer has been poking around your Gateway files.”

  Another piece fell into place like a sledgehammer to the sternum. “Understood.”

  “You look like you can’t decide whether to puke or punch something,” Deb said as I hung up.

  “Keeler’s press release mentioned a bigger attack, something that would unite the world against magic. The bastards intend to start a war. And I think they mean to use my research to do it.”

  TESTIMONY AND QUESTIONING OF WITNESS NUMBER 18: ISAAC VAINIO (CONTINUED)

  The CHAIRMAN: Please tell us about the Gateway Project.

  Mr. VAINIO: The goal is to create a safe, stable portal that can establish instantaneous transportation between two points. I got tired of losing half a day in airports and on cramped planes every time I
got called to D.C., or needed to commute between Michigan and New Millennium.

  Mr. HOFFMAN: How much could a portal like that move? What distances are you talking about?

  Mr. VAINIO: I’ve seen a small, short-lived portal connect the Earth and Moon, so we know it can reach at least two hundred thousand miles. We’d have to run some tests to see how much magical energy was involved, and what kind of charring—

  Mr. HAYS: Charring?

  Mr. VAINIO: Magical damage. If you channel too much power through a book all at once, for example, the results look like you held a blowtorch to the pages. Human beings can suffer the same damage. I lost fifteen percent of my vision that way.

  The CHAIRMAN: What applications do you see for this project?

  Mr. VAINIO: Space exploration. Commercial trade and transportation. We could use Gateway to take samples from the Earth’s core or drive a rover directly onto Uranus. If we’re able to go large scale, we’d drastically reduce fossil fuel consumption.

  The CHAIRMAN: Have you thought through the potential abuses of such technology? The privacy concerns? What’s to stop one of you libriomancers from opening a portal into Fort Knox?

  Mr. VAINIO: If I want gold, I can just pull it out of a book.

  Mr. HOFFMAN: The point remains, this raises serious questions.

  Mr. VAINIO: All of which are being considered by New Millennium, as well as the Department of Homeland Security oversight process. But you’re right. Any new technology carries the potential for harm, and magic is no different. Does that mean we turn our back on progress?

  “What was the mission of the Porters?”

  “What is this, pop quiz time with Professor Gutenberg?”

  “Indulge me.”

  “You made us each swear an oath to preserve the secrecy of magic, protect the world from magical threats, and to expand our knowledge of magic’s power and potential.”

  “I created the Porters. That made them—you—my responsibility. Part of that responsibility meant being prepared in case the Porters themselves ever became a threat.”