Ixeos: Book One of the Ixeos Trilogy

by Jennings Wright

  “A layer of protection.” Hannah took another bite. “Makes sense, I guess.”

  “When are you going back to the tunnels?” Marty asked.

  “Tomorrow morning, before first light. I’ll take the messages back with me. You keep copies, just in case.” Hannah scraped the bottom of the bowl, then blew on her tea.

  “In case of what?” Marty asked.

  “In case I don’t make it back,” Hannah said, sipping. “You never know.”

  Hannah left before anyone was up. Marty spent his first hour awake pacing the floor. Finally Marissa grabbed his arm and pulled him into a chair.

  “Chill,” she said. “She’s taken them—it’s out of your hands.”

  “I know, but what if she doesn’t make it back. How will we know? For that matter, how will we know if she does, and if Clay and Neahle find a machine, and if the code gets cracked? This makes me nuts!” He stood up and started pacing again.

  “Unfortunately we don’t have any way to communicate. It’s like the olden days. You know, the Pony Express and all that. You wait.” At his pained expression, Marissa laughed. “You get used to it. And we’ve got a job to do, beyond your messages. You know where to find Verestyuck and the person at LRTD now, so put that aside and help us. It’s the other’s job to find Darian and free him. If they do, they’re going to need all the intel we can give them. That’s our job.”

  Marty looked at her serious expression for a long moment, then nodded. He couldn’t help that he’d been born in the era of instant communication. He was definitely going to start a project to give the rebels and outsiders a secure network to call or text or communicate in some way. In the meantime though, Marissa was right. Their job was to collect intel, and it was something he was good at. Time to get back to it.

  Hannah quickly made her way across the bridge to the motorcycle she’d hidden in the shrubbery along the Seine. Riding motorcycles was her least favorite part any operation, especially when she was alone. Even though she could go fast and elude almost anyone, she felt incredibly vulnerable. The Firsts had guns, and well placed bullet would beat evasive measures any day. Plus, the noise of even the quietest bike was fifty times louder than her own two feet. But sometimes you needed speed.

  She reached the corner a hundred feet from the alley entrance to the vehicle Depot and turned off the bike, keeping in the dark shadows to let her eyes and ears adjust. After five minutes of waiting and watching, she walked the motorcycle down the sidewalk, turned down the alley, and made her way to the Depot door. She entered, pulling off her helmet and parking the bike in the row for service. Shaking her hair free, she caught a brief movement to her left among the parked motorcycles.

  Pretending not to notice, she set the helmet on the leather seat and unzipped her jacket, walking casually to the office. Footsteps sounded behind her. They were quiet and slow, but loud enough for her trained ears to pick up. She entered the office, picked up the biggest wrench she saw, and turned quickly, hiding next to the door. A dark figure followed; she swung the wrench as hard as she could at its head, watching as it fell silently to the floor.

  Hannah found a kerosene lantern on the shelf and lit it with trembling hands. She walked over to the unconscious figure. It was a man dressed in black, a knit cap on his head. Blood trickled down the back of his neck. Grabbing duct tape, she pulled his arms behind him and taped them together at the forearm, then moved down and taped his legs at the knees. His face was away from her and his hair was covering his eyes. She sat down in the office chair and waited.

  Fifteen minutes later, the man began to groan softly. Soon after, he tried to move. When he found himself bound, he struggled violently, then lay still, moaning in pain.

  “Who are you?” Hannah said. When he didn’t answer, she switched to French. “Qui êtes-vous?”

  The man groaned again but didn’t say anything coherent. Hannah got up, stepped over him, and went out into the workshop. She dipped a cup into a bucket of water and returned, tossing it on the man’s head as she stepped over him.

  “Qui êtes-vous?” she asked again.

  The man mumbled something.

  “What? Que?” She leaned forward to hear him better.

  “It’s me. Rod.” The man lifted his shoulders off the ground, shook his head, and turned to look at her. It was Rod. The traitor.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Abacus decided to leave all the floppy discs behind, hidden in the ledger closet, and take only the most recent data drives. They would travel to Madrid via a portal into Toledo, Spain, and find the house of Michael de Santos. If no Enigma machine was found, they would search both the Paris and New York addresses while letting Marty work his way through the stored transactions on the hard drives.

  Their bags weighed considerably more going back. There were three hard drives per year for six years. Each of the men packed five drives into their back packs, and the girls split the remaining three between them. Sarah took two drives, so Neahle packed the three ledgers and three file folders into her own.

  “What time is it?” she asked Riley. “Are we going to sleep here?”

  “It’s morning. And yes, I don’t want to be out in the daytime, so we’ll hang here today. Not down here in the basement—I want to be able to stand watch. We’ll crash in an office on the first floor and make sure that back door is locked. We can’t do anything about the broken window, which is a bummer, but I doubt anyone else would come here in the daytime.” He led them out of the room.

  They settled in an employee lounge on the first floor. It was out of sight of either entrance. Two leather sofas were set up in an L with a square coffee table in front of them. An oval mahogany dining table was surrounded with eight upholstered chairs. A small closet revealed a stack of metal folding chairs. The floor was oak parquet with a huge and beautifully woven Persian rug thrown on it. A kitchen counter holding a microwave, coffee machine and sink took up one corner.

  “We’ll each take a two hour shift on watch. Eat and rest up when you’re not on duty. We’ve got a long walk tonight and a lot more to carry. I’ll take first watch, then I want to take a long nap!” Riley threw his back pack on the counter, checked his flashlight, put his penlight in his pants pocket, and left.

  Neahle collapsed on a sofa. “I’m beat! I don’t think I can take the next watch, but I’ll take the one after, if that’s okay with everybody else. I’m going to crash.” She put a throw pillow under her head, curled up on her side, and was asleep in under a minute.

  Clay smiled at her as he sat at the table. “I’ll take the next watch. Sarah, you want to rest, too?”

  “Give me the one after Neahle, before it gets dark out. I’m going to read for a bit, then catch some sleep.” She pulled a worn paperback out of her bag, lay back on the sofa, and stuck her penlight under her chin.

  “I’ll take the last shift,” Monkey said. “Wake me up an hour before, if I’m still sleeping.” He made a makeshift bed against the wall using his sweatshirt as a pillow and he, too, was asleep in minutes.

  “Guess that leaves me after Sarah. I’m not really tired, though. I’ll stay with you til your shift,” Abacus said. He joined Clay at the long table, sighing with relief when he sat down in the soft chair. “So, what do you think?” he asked Clay.

  “About the machines? I think we’ll find one. I’d like it to be the guy in Spain, but who knows. If he was a true collector, he’d probably kept it. But if he died or ran into financial problems… Well, there was a lot of time between 1981 and the last war to sell it.”

  “That still leaves two,” Abacus reminded him.

  “Two with iffy information, and, again, sold a long time ago. If my grandfather had something like that, I don’t think my grandmother or my parents would have held onto it. My grandmother wasn’t fond of clutter.”

  “Europeans have
longer memories than Americans,” Abacus said. “If Mr. de Santos didn’t keep his machine, my bet’s on the one in Paris. At least, of those three.”

  “It’ll probably come down to Marty and the newer sales on those drives. I’d sure hate to have to come back here if there’s nothing on them.” Clay pushed his back pack around the table.

  “If we need the discs we won’t all come back. Riley can do it faster and safer with one other person than with all of us. He’ll be able to get in and out quick, since he’ll know where they are.”

  “True.” Clay rested his head against the back of the chair. “I just want it to be faster.”

  Abacus laughed. “Join the club.”

  As they were packing up to leave, Monkey strolled in. “Check it out,” he said, holding up an enormous key ring.

  “Nice find! Did you lock the store room?” Abacus asked.

  “Yeah, but there’s also a key for the back door. Doesn’t fix the broken window, but there’s a huge armoire in one of the front showrooms. If we can push it to the back, we can block that window and at least discourage anyone from coming in.”

  “No one’s come in for years,” Sarah said. “Do we need to do all that?”

  “It’s still possible someone saw us yesterday or will see us leave,” Riley said. “I like the idea of blocking that window. We may never come back if we don’t need those discs. But if we do… As the one who’d be doing the op, it would make me feel better.”

  Leaving their bags, they trooped to the showroom. Monkey hadn’t been exaggerating—the antique armoire was enormous. And heavy.

  “Are you kidding me?” Clay said after he and Riley had put all their weight into it and not moved it an inch.

  “They got it in here somehow,” Monkey noted.

  “Forklift?” Clay said, wiping sweat from his brow.

  “Nah, doors aren’t big enough. There must be some kind of dolly or hand cart. I saw an equipment closet one floor down. Wait right here.” Monkey jogged away. In five minutes he was back with a red four wheeled cart.

  Sliding the handle back, he tipped the cart onto two wheels so that an eighteen inch heavy-duty shelf was on the ground. He pushed it under the end of the armoire.

  “Help me—guide it back onto the cart,” he said.

  Riley, Clay and Abacus all went to the other side of the armoire and steadied it as Monkey tipped it back, groaning.

  “Crap,” Monkey muttered. “I thought we could use all four wheels but it’s too heavy to tip further back. Someone help me…”

  Riley ran around and gripped a handle. The other four gathered around the armoire, two on each side, as the men slowly began to turn the cart around. When it was behind them, they pulled it slowly down the hall. It took twenty minutes and several breaks, but finally the armoire was in place in front of the broken window. Riley and Monkey sat down on the floor leaning against the wall, soaked in sweat.

  “Okay, that sucked,” Riley said. “But nobody’s going to push it out of the way, that’s for sure.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  By the time they left Christie’s, the drizzle had turned to a solid curtain of rain. They stopped under the torn front canopy of the Carlton, already soaked to the skin.

  “Good news, bad news,” Riley said. “With the rain, there won’t be anybody on the streets except for the Firsts in cars. That would make a topside run for the portal safer than the tunnels and probably faster. Bad news, we’ll be colder and wetter than we are now, and we’ll have to join the London Overground line at either Imperial Wharf or cross the Thames and go in at Clapham Junction. Imperial Wharf is closest. But everybody’s inside, sheltering from the rain, so the tunnels will be dangerous.”

  “Then they’ll be dangerous no matter what, and I’d rather be above ground where we can run for as long as possible,” Neahle said. The others nodded agreement, already starting to shiver.

  Riley agreed. “That’s my first choice, too.” He thought for a moment. “The safest route is probably to go to around Buckingham Palace and through the parks. That’d put us one block off the Overground Line. If it was a little later, I’d risk a straight shot, but I think we’ll be better off to go a few blocks out of the way and stick to the parks as much as we can. There’s a lot of occupied residential area around here, which is why we normally go in the Tube if we have to come over this way. I can’t image there will be anyone walking the roads—even Firsts know enough to stay out of the rain. I think we’ll be okay.” He still looked a little worried.

  “You don’t like that route?” Abacus asked.

  Riley shrugged. “I don’t like any route right now. You’d think, with all the old tunnels in London, there’d be more than one portal, but if there is, we haven’t found it. We’ll just have to take our chances; rain is probably more of a help than a hurt if we’re careful.”

  They set off, this time in single file. The Carlton was their emergency meeting place for the first half of the walk, if they got separated. The girls stayed in the middle, with two men on either end. Everyone looked grim.

  As in every other city, the Firsts had allowed all the parks to revert to the wild. This both shielded and slowed them down. The giant trees shielded them from the rain and the quick pace helped them stay warm. They crossed Constitution Hill, an empty, narrow road, and entered Buckingham Palace Park.

  Fences had been erected in the days before the last war when there were simpler things to worry about, like terrorists and assassins. The fences had fallen or been torn down in many places and Riley led them unerringly through them. They skirted a wildly overgrown pond to the west, the lights of Buckingham Palace shining brightly to the east.

  They reached the edge of the park and stood behind a row of dense shrubbery looking across Grovesnor Place to the smaller Wilton Street beyond. Alternating streetlights were lit, leaving shadows between the anemic circles of light. A lone car was approaching, several blocks away.

  “Down!” Riley said. They all ducked low, tucking themselves into the bushes as best they could. The car, a sleek black Audi R8, purred south down the road, never slowing. It turned left at Lower Grovesnor Place, just past the park.

  When its lights were completely gone, Riley dashed across the wide street and down Wilton, leading them down the south side under a line of trees planted in the sidewalk. The didn’t stop until they reached Upper Belgrave Street, another wide, dimly lit road. Pausing only long enough to check both ways for headlights, Riley ran catty-corner, aiming for a small park. When he reached it, he got out of sight of the road and knelt down, breathing hard. Everyone slid to a crouch.

  “Having fun yet?” he whispered, grinning.

  They left Eaton Square Park at Lyall Street, a two lane, one way road heading east. There were few lights on the street but many from the large townhouses along the way. The sixth block was long and industrial; they welcomed the darkness. The next block was short, and at the end of it Riley pulled them into a recessed doorway, crowding them in.

  “We’ve got to cross Buckingham Palace Road, but the block after that is offices. They should be dark. The Overground track runs across some empty land; once we’re on that, we should be fine. Keep a good pace until we get to the Imperial Wharf Station. If you get separated, hit the tracks, go south to the station, and underground. Find the portal and get home.” He didn’t wait for an answer. Holding up a hand for them to wait, he slid down the building to the corner and checked the road. Waving them forward, they ran flat out across the road, and then crossed the smaller St. George’s Drive to get to the right side of the road. They found themselves in a scrubby area full of saplings in front of a massive building.

  Rounding the corner, Riley slowed to a fast walk. Soon they came to the railway tracks. They hadn’t gone fifty feet when two dark figures appeared in front of them, large and menacing.r />
  Riley stopped; the other five gathered around him, the men forming a line in front of Neahle and Sarah. Not taking his eyes off the locals, Riley said in a voice only his friends could here, “Straight down the tracks to the station, right? Don’t look back, just go.” He started to advance.

  A male voice called out, “Whatcho want, mate?”

  “To pass,” Riley replied. “That’s all.”

  “Oh aye, that’s all. And why should we let you pass, leastwise without a dekko at whatcho got in them bags?”

  “We’re minding our business. You mind yours,” Riley said, taking his large flashlight from the drink pouch of his back pack. Abacus did the same.

  “This here track be our business.”

  Monkey slipped back beside the girls and began to nudge them to right. Clay stayed in front of them, masking their movement in the dark. As the two assailants lunged forward, Riley and Abacus swung their heavy flashlights like clubs. Clay picked up a rock. Monkey took Neahle and Sarah by the hand, swung around away from the fracas, and then swerved back to the tracks, running as fast as they could go for the station.

  Slamming through the doors, Monkey led them to the escalator. They plunged into the darkness. Halfway down, he clicked on a penlight, shining it at his feet. They jumped the stile, ran across the platform, and leapt to the tracks below, huddling there to catch their breath.

  “What about…” Neahle began.

  “Our job is to get back. They can take care of themselves,” Monkey interrupted. “We’re almost at the portal. Once we’re through, we’re safe. Ready?”

  Looking up over her shoulder at the dark platform and seeing nothing, Neahle nodded. Sarah squeezed her hand. “They’ll come back,” she whispered in Neahle’s ear.