by Ryk E. Spoor
Three men in suits seemed to materialize from the crowd; two of them flanked me and slowed the pursuit of the press as the third nodded to me and said, “Mr. Wood? Please follow me. We’ve got a car waiting.”
“I kinda assumed you would. Good coordination with your friends there, Mr. . . . ?”
“Special Agent Colin Marsh,” he said, guiding me through the maze of the airport. “Thanks. I approve of the free press, I just wish they’d be free where it didn’t hold up traffic.” He glanced at me. “Of course, if you kept a lower profile . . .”
I shrugged. “I guess I could turn down large sums of money for television appearances to tell people about something that’s totally blown their minds, but while I wasn’t ever broke before, I wasn’t rich, either.”
“Can’t say I blame you,” he conceded.
The waiting vehicle was a classic black limousine—though not quite as posh as one of Verne’s—that pulled away from the curb smoothly with only a purring hum of the engine. “So, we’re headed to the Capitol?”
“Not really,” said one of the others. “Agent Jake Finn, Mr. Wood.”
“Glad to meet you, Agent Finn. But I thought—”
“Oh, the public info says that’s where the meeting is, and we’re sure letting it look that way, but completely securing the Capitol Building the way it is? That’s a bitch and a half—sorry for the language—and it’d really interfere with other operations. So we’re actually meeting somewhere else.”
That made sense. “So, we’ll appear to drive to the Capitol, but then, what, switch cars?”
He grinned. “Not that complicated. We can go into an underground garage, then take an exit to a different street and continue on.”
It was, in fact, that easy, and about fifteen minutes later, we pulled into another underground parking garage across the river in the Crystal City area near Alexandria. We then walked to one of several relatively nondescript-looking buildings and entered.
A security and guard post was set up just past the main entrance to prevent anyone from getting into the building proper without permission. A familiar face was waiting there. “Hey, Jeri.”
Agent Jeri Winthrope nodded. “Mr. Wood, glad you made it. You’ll have to go through the security screening before you go any farther, though.”
I went towards the security archway, which looked like a metal detector. Three MPs stepped forward. Two aimed rifles directly at my head, one on either side. I noticed my escorts clear the line of fire. The third man stepped up. “Hold up your hands, Mr. Wood.”
I blinked, but did so. Faced with rifles ready to blow your brains out encourages compliance with simple instructions. The MP took each hand, examined it carefully front and back and scraped it with something that looked like an emery board—it probably was an emery board—and then stepped back. “On your left and right, you will see a metal cylinder. Please pick up each cylinder and hold it tightly. It is very important that you make good contact with both cylinders, sir.”
The way he said very, the way he now raised his weapon, and the way his companions each took a breath and steadied their stances, made me suspect that I was the one it was most important to.
The silver cylinders were each attached to a retractable cable that went into the booth walls. I grinned suddenly. “Oh, I get it. Very clever.” I squeezed both tightly. “That should work, and be pretty hard to get around.”
After about ten seconds, someone to the side gestured and the MPs moved to “at ease” stance. “All clear, sir. Welcome to the conference, Mr. Wood.”
“Thanks,” I said, not without some considerable relief. “So why that particular test, Jeri? I mean, you could’ve used some silver-based drops or something.”
She gestured for me to follow. “Yes, we could have, but if you add other substances to the mix, there’s the chance of it reacting to those substances; exposure to the chemical mess you hit Virigar with would poison a human being anyway and potentially cause a rash. We wanted pure silver since there’s no documented cases of allergic reaction to it—as opposed to silver alloy. That way, if the person holding it reacted at all, we could be pretty sure we had a wolf.”
I nodded. “And the cables there mean you’ve got it hooked to something—resistivity, capacitance, something—that tells you whether the person’s actually making contact with the metal. You use the emery board to take a sample and to scratch any coatings on the hands. Nice.” I glanced back, made out the logo above the rear side of the booth. “Oh, of course. Shadowgard Tech. Smart outfit. It’s a good stopgap, though you need something better in the long run. I can figure ways to scam this.”
She grimaced. “You’re kidding. That fast?”
“I’ve been thinking about this problem longer than anyone else. Maybe I’ll give Shadowgard a call. I’ll need someone with experience in the security industry to market my solution and if we improve their design a bit, it’ll be a good supporting solution for mine.” I looked at her. “Now, everyone who comes into the building goes through that procedure?”
“Including the people manning that barricade, yes.”
I whistled. “And some of the people coming in here are awfully . . . high up, I’d bet. Caught any?”
She grimaced. “Three so far. Fortunately, after Morgantown, it looks like they’re trying to be a little circumspect; all of the human beings they were duplicating are alive. A couple of the guards who were there when they were unmasked . . . weren’t so lucky.” She nodded to the guards at a set of double doors and ushered me in. “Still, it provided a lot of urgency to the meeting—”
“Especially,” said a very familiar voice with a Texan twang, “since one of them was my friend Sal Battaglia, the Speaker of the House.”
I stared for a moment. I’m not normally prone to stage fright, and I’d been interviewed a lot in the last couple of weeks, but this was something way out of my normal league. At the head of the meeting table was the President of the United States, Rexford Aisley Ash II, and seated near him were most of his cabinet, enough military men—some from other countries—that the room held, as a friend of mine might have put it, “More stars than Hollywood and more scrambled eggs than a truckstop diner.”
Not being a military man, I didn’t salute, but I did immediately approach the president. “A great honor to meet you, Mr. President.”
His grip was firm but not too tight—a classic handclasp in the political world. “Oh, much more my honor, Mr. Wood. You’ve managed to turn this country more upside down than I have yet. Please, take your seat—it’s down at the far end, opposite me.”
As I did so, I realized everyone was continuing to look at me, and the president stood again. “Well, everyone, our guest of honor’s here, and I’m sure we’re all ready to hear what he has to say. Mr. Wood, you read the briefing materials?”
I swallowed and took a breath. I thought I’d just be one person they were talking to, not the star of the darn show. “Yes, sir. You’re working on how we respond to a threat we never realized existed, and so you want me to give my views on the situation. I’ve prepared a presentation, and I can answer questions afterwards.”
He nodded. “All right, then—let’s get started.”
I gave a quick summary of who I was—before all this mess, at least—and reviewed the events that led to what the papers and newscasts were calling “the Morgantown Incident.” This was a careful blend of fact and fiction, but I was reasonably confident it would hold up because Jeri Winthrope had worked with me and Verne to make the story hold water a lot better than our previous vampire coverup.
“So,” one of the military, a General Jean Bravaias, a woman with gray-streaked sandy hair, said after some questioning, “you were able to see these creatures? Sort them out from regular people by using this viewer you built, right? What’s the range?”
I waggled my hand from side to side. “Hard to say, General. What little field experience I got showed that my jury-rigged gadget gave me fifteen, maybe t
wenty feet, but the real limit’s a combination of imager resolution and sensitivity through atmosphere. I’d already gotten that particular infrared camera heavily customized for absolute minimum noise, so I don’t know if you could really improve on it all that much. You’re looking for patterns of heat that are very, very small in scale and intensity combined with some emissions on the UV band, but those are really small. Maybe thirty, thirty-five feet at the outside.”
“Still,” she said, “that’s one hell of a lot better than what we’ve got now, which is somehow getting the target to be in contact with silver directly, then observing the reaction. If we don’t have people right there, watching, a smart man—or . . .” she hesitated “. . . werewolf, could figure out ways to look like they were carrying out the instructions and actually avoid it. But with people that close . . . they get killed.”
“Well,” said another person—someone from the CIA, I thought, “couldn’t we just give the guards better armor? I’d think—”
“Mr . . .” I squinted “. . . Rosedale, have you ever actually seen a werewolf?”
“Well, I’ve seen the pictures, but . . . no.”
I looked around. “How many people here have actually seen one in person?”
Besides my hand and Jeri’s, only one other hand went up out of fifty other people in the room. I guessed that was someone who’d been there when they caught one of the three trying to get into this building. “Then you—all of you—need to really get into your heads what you’re dealing with.” I reached into my bag and found the slender sheath, grasped what was inside carefully. “The average wolf—when not pretending to be human—stands eight feet high and weighs over five hundred pounds. As my experience shows, they are capable of sprinting at speeds in excess of sixty miles per hour—almost as fast as the fastest land animal known.
“As for armor,” I continued, and with a practiced flick of my hand, sent something sparkling through the air to land with a chunk! in the conference table, “take a look at that.”
Standing up at an angle from the shining wood of the table, vibrating slightly with a faint, chiming hum that was fading away, was a sparkling, transparent, curved form measuring nearly nine inches long. “That is one claw—a hand, I think—from an average werewolf. As you can see, I threw that thing very gently, just a flick of my wrist, and it buried itself about two inches into the hardwood of the table. I mentioned that my car is armored. After my encounter with Virigar, I found that the one that grabbed onto my car had cut nearly through the armor in four separate places. And this was with almost no chance to grab and establish purchase.”
I clicked my presentation back to the sketch of a werewolf. “Unfortunately, I don’t have any good photos of these things. But I want you to look at that claw, then realize that these,” I pointed to the claws on the sketch, “are what you’re looking at. This is a creature that can outrace a car on anything except a straightaway, has claws that can cut like butter through almost anything, is strong enough to lift one end of an armored car clear off the ground, and that likely has other tricks it didn’t show us.
“And they can transform themselves to look and act exactly like anyone else on Earth.”
Faces were noticeably paler around the table. General Bravaias reached out and carefully pulled the claw free, studying it. “What is this thing made of?”
“We don’t really know. It’s something like diamond in that it’s mostly carbon, but it doesn’t shatter like diamond can. It’s almost unbreakable, whether we’re talking impacts, compression, tension, or torque. Right now, the guess is it’s some form of carbon with an unknown microstructure, but exactly what that microstructure is we won’t know until we get a detailed X-ray crystallographic scan on it. And even that might not work.”
The general nodded, then passed the claw back down to me. “In any case, it is clear that we really need your sensing devices. Yes, I know that’s slightly outside of this meeting’s purpose—”
“Don’t you worry about that, Jean,” said the president. “This is definitely a high priority. Mr. Wood, I’d like to make sure our major installations are protected by these, er . . .”
“CryWolf sensors,” I said with a grin. “That’s the name I want to call them, anyway.”
He laughed. “Let’s hope they don’t ‘cry wolf’ too often, huh? Anyway, I’d like to make sure that happens as soon as possible.”
Hmm, that gives me an idea. “Well, sir, I’d be glad to give the government a license on the technology and all, but right now I’m getting held up in the patent office . . .”
CHAPTER 32
Upgrades and Relationships
“I must thank you, Jason,” Verne said, surveying the mound of equipment assembled in his dining room. “The advice of an expert is always appreciated.”
Verne had decided to fully enter the fast-approaching twenty-first century, adding telecommunications and computers to his formidable range of resources. I grinned. “No thanks needed. Advising someone on what to buy is always fun, especially when you know that the person in question doesn’t have a limited budget.” One of the workmen looked at me with a question in his eyes. “Oh, yeah. Verne, how many places are you going to want to be able to plug in a computer? I mean to the Ethernet lines.” Extra jacks were a good idea; cable didn’t yet run out to Verne’s house, so we were going with a dedicated satellite hookup and a LAN on Ethernet through the house.
“Ah, yes. I would say . . . Hmm. Morgan?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Are any of the staff likely to need such access?”
Morgan smiled slightly. “I would say most of them, sir.” While Verne was modernizing, he was not quite grasping the change it was going to bring to his household.
Verne sighed theatrically. “Very well, then.” He turned to the workman. “You might as well rewire the entire house—first, second, and third floors—and put two of these Ethernet jacks in every bedroom and study, as well as one here in the living room,” he pointed, “and another three in my office, marked there. Make sure there are also enough phone connections for everyone; several of my staff would like their own private lines.”
Ed Sommer, the head contractor, smiled broadly, obviously thinking of the money involved, and glanced at the plans. “We’ll write up a work order. What about the basement?”
“No need for anything there.”
“Gotcha.”
Sommer cut the work order quickly; I’d recommended his company because of their efficiency, despite the fact that they were the new kids on the block. Verne signed it, and we left the rest of the work in Morgan’s hands. “Coming, Verne? Syl’s out of town on a convention and I’m up for a game of chess if you’re interested.”
He hesitated, the light glinting off the ruby ring he never removed. “Perhaps tomorrow, Jason. Having all these strangers in the house is upsetting.”
“Then get away from them for a while. Morgan can handle things here. Besides, how could anything upset you?” This was partly a reference to his vampire nature—I expected a man who’s umpteen thousands of years old to be comfortable everywhere—but also to his constant old-world-calm approach, which was rarely disturbed by anything except major disasters.
“You may be right. Very well, Jason, let us go.”
The night was still fairly young as we got into my new Infiniti. Verne nodded appreciatively. “Moving up a bit in the world, my friend?”
“The only advantage of being attacked by ancient werewolves is that the interview fees alone become impressive. And the publicity for WIS has made sure I’ve got more work than I can handle, even if I do have to turn down about a thousand screwballs a day who want me to investigate their alien abduction cases. Not to mention that the government groups involved in the Morgantown Incident investigation would rather use me as a researcher than an outsider.” I gave a slightly sad smile. “And age, plus being hacked at by werewolves, finally caught up with old Mjölnir.”
“He served you well
. Have you named this one yet?”
“Nope. I was thinking of Hugin or Munin—it’s black and shiny like raven feathers.” We pulled out of his driveway and onto the main road into town. We drove for a few minutes in silence.
“I was not deliberately changing the subject,” Verne said finally. “I understand how you would find it hard to imagine me being disturbed by anything. I was thinking about how to answer you.”
I was momentarily confused, then remembered my earlier comment. At times, it was disconcerting to talk to Verne; his long life made time compress from his point of view, so a conversation that seemed distant to me was recent for him. Sometimes he forgot that the rest of us don’t have his manner of thinking.
“You have to remember that one with my . . . peculiarities rarely can have an actual long-lasting home.” Verne continued. “So instead, one attempts to bring one’s life with one in each move. Rather like a hermit crab, we move from one shell to another, none of them actually being our own, yet being for that time, a place of safety. Anything that enters your house, then, has the ability to encroach on all those things you bring with you—both physical and spiritual. Workmen are things beyond my direct control, especially in a society such as this one.”
“Are you afraid they’ll find out about you?”
Verne shrugged, then smiled slightly, his large dark eyes twinkling momentarily in the lights of a passing car. “Not really. Besides the fact that Morgan would be unlikely to miss anyone trying to enter the basement, the basement itself contains little of value for those seeking the unusual. The entrance to the vault and my true sanctum sanctorum is hidden very carefully indeed, and it’s quite difficult to open even if found. And my personal refrigerator upstairs is secured very carefully, as you know well.” Verne referred to the fact that I’d installed the security there myself. “No, Jason. It is simply that my home is the last fading remnant of my own world, even if all that remains there are my memory and a few truly ancient relics. The mass entry of so many people of this world . . . somehow, it reminds me how alone I am.”