Rogue Oracle

by Unknown

  Galen longed for that, too. That warmth of another human being, connected but separate from his experience. But, to him, the lines always seemed to blur.

  He remembered when he was a teenager, hitchhiking through Belarus. He’d asked to be let out of the car when he’d seen a girl walking through the streets of a muddy town. She was walking down the street in a gray wool coat, long blonde hair loose over her shoulders in waves. Her hat was pulled low over her ears to ward off the early spring chill, but there was something about those eyes when she looked past the car. They were steel-gray, haunted.

  Galen knew that look, that emptiness.

  He slogged through the mud, trying to catch up with her. “Hey!”

  She turned, the mud sucking at her shiny black boots.

  Her eyebrow lifted at him. His heart leapt. Maybe she saw the same thing he saw in her. A spark of something kindred. Something that would keep him warm.

  Galen spread his best smile on his face. “Can I buy you a drink?”

  She looked him up and down, doubtful at the sight of his shabby coat. “You have money for a drink?”

  “Yes.” His fingers clutched a roll of bills in his pocket. He’d robbed the last person who’d given him a ride. “I’ve got plenty of money.”

  She leaned forward, and her breath steamed in his face. It smelled like cinnamon. “You don’t need to buy me a drink.”

  That was okay with him. He wanted warmth. He wanted companionship. Just this once. Even if he had to pay for it.

  The girl led him back to her tiny flat. Galen stood awkwardly inside the threshold, watching her kick the radiator. The paint was peeling off the walls. But everything was orderly. The futon in the center of the room had a newish looking bedspread on it, and the dishes in the broken cabinet were all clean.

  “It’ll warm up in a minute,” she said, sticking her hands under her arms to make small talk. “Where are you from?”

  “Nowhere.”

  The girl’s crimson lips smiled. “Me, too.”

  Heat had begun to creep out of the radiator, plinking as the hot water began to circulate. The girl pulled off her hat and coat. She began to unbutton her blouse. When she turned around, Galen could see that her shoulders were a bit uneven, that the vertebrae of her spine didn’t line up straight. His mouth thinned. She was indeed like him, from nowhere.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “I’m Yeva.” She crossed the room to him in her bra and skirt. Her fingers fluttered up to unfasten his coat. She opened the first two buttons, skipped the missing third, and continued on to the fourth before he answered: “Galen.”

  She looked up at him through her eyelashes. “That’s an odd name.”

  “It was the name of a famous healer.” He felt his mouth turn downward. “My mother had great hopes for me.”

  “You are a doctor, then?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “I’m not anything.”

  She stood up on her tiptoes, pressed her finger to his mouth. “Never say that,” she said, fiercely. “We are all someone.”

  She kissed him then, and she tasted like mulled spices. He sank into the kiss, felt Yeva tugging off his clothes and drawing him down to the futon. His fingers wound in her hair, and he relished the sensation of her warm mouth on his, her breasts pressed against his chest. His heart hammered in his chest as she straddled him, drew him inside her. As she rocked back and forth, he moaned.

  He rolled over, pinning her to the futon. He felt whole, moving inside her, part of some tenuous connection to someone else. For that moment, his entire world was the young prostitute wrapped around him. His fingers wound in her hair as his excitement drove him over the edge.

  Then, it happened. He heard her cry out, thought it part of the game. She turned her head away, and he thought he was tangled in her hair. He began to mutter an apology, but his ardor faded when he realized that his fingers weren’t tangled in her hair … they were enmeshed in it. He pulled, couldn’t free himself.

  “Don’t be rough.” Yeva placed her hands on his chest to move him off her, but he wouldn’t let her go.

  Couldn’t.

  He felt himself flowing into her. It was beyond a simple orgasm. This ecstatic state was more. It was deeper, more meaningful. Yeva squirmed beneath him, began to shout for help.

  He put his hand over her mouth. But his fingers dissolved into her lips and nose, melting like hot glass. Horrified, he tried to pull away, but couldn’t. The orgasm and the heady feeling of wholeness rushed over his senses, dulling the panic and fear.

  She tried to scream, wise gray eyes wide and rolling. She struck at him in panic, clawing at him. But he couldn’t pull away. He felt himself sinking into her as she struggled. He felt her ribs opening and wrapping around his, felt her heart beating in his chest for a few moments after she stopped breathing, suffocating under his hand dissolving down her throat. He could feel it dripping, like wax. He felt her … all of her. All of Yeva’s memories, her life drained into him. He could taste the cinnamon in his mouth, feel the curve forming in his spine.

  The radiator ticked in the darkness, and he was wound around her like the snakes in the caduceus.

  Yeva had been right. She had been somebody.

  She’d been his first.

  Chapter Seven

  TARA DIDN’T bring up last night.

  Neither did Harry.

  They stood on the elevator, descending into the Little Shop of Horrors. The only sign of last night’s fight was a Band-Aid on Harry’s right knuckle. That, and they stood together with shoulders touching.

  The elevator stopped a few floors above Special Projects. A breathless woman in tan coveralls hopped on. Tara glanced at her. She wore a name badge on a beaded lanyard that identified her as Library of Congress staff. Under her arm, she held a projector that looked suspiciously like the one Veriss had been using in his presentations. Her gaze flicked sidelong at Tara and Harry, widened when she saw their badges. Harry, preoccupied with his thoughts, stared at the glowing buttons.

  Tara could guess the woman’s thoughts: Busted.

  The librarian clutched the projector like a squirrel with a golden nut, and her cheeks flamed.

  Tara gave her a short nod of acknowledgement, then pointedly ignored her.

  The librarian’s shoulders settled, and she sighed. When she got off at the next floor, she returned the curt nod to Tara before she scurried away.

  Tara smiled. Perhaps, after all this time, she owed the Library of Congress a peace offering.

  The doors finally opened onto the dungeon of Special Projects. Harry seemed to come back to himself a bit, though he self-consciously tucked his wounded hand in his jacket pocket to fiddle with loose change.

  “Agent Li.” Veriss rushed up to them, breathless, extending a sheaf of paper. “I have your data.” He nearly tripped over himself in his excitement.

  “Thanks, Veriss.” Harry flipped through the pages, full of single-spaced names. “Is this all of ’em?”

  “These are all the personnel who were associated with Project Rogue Angel. Everyone from the motor pool to the high-level spooks.”

  “Good,” Harry said. “I’ve got another project for you.”

  “What’s that?” Veriss bounced on the balls of his feet like a puppy expecting a bone.

  “Use your forecasting model to help predict who’s next on this list … who’s most likely to defect.”

  “I’m working on that. I’m arranging them in a network graph, looking at strong and weak ties—”

  “Good. Tara and I will start tracking folks down to get them into protective custody or surveillance.”

  “But …” Veriss’s brow crinkled. “You can’t put all those people into protective custody. There are one hundred thirty-one people on that list …”

  “We’re going to do our best,” Harry said, firmly. He walked away from Veriss, and Tara drifted in his wake. He paused before Aquila’s door, tapped the glass.

  Aquil
a looked up from his desk and gestured for them to enter.

  “Agent Li, Dr. Sheridan.” He folded his hands over his blotter. “Good morning.”

  Without preamble, Harry said, “Boss, I need a favor. I need to rely on your connections with the Marshals … I need to put some people into protective custody. And we don’t have the staff to do it ourselves.”

  Aquila frowned. “How many people?”

  Harry looked at the list. “One hundred thirty-one. Some of them will be dead, some won’t be able to be found. And some will refuse. But I need a place to put several dozen ex-agents while we figure out who’s after them.”

  Aquila sat back in his throne-like chair, considering. “All right. I’ll see what I can do. Just be aware that on short notice, the accommodations won’t be posh.”

  “Understood.” Harry turned to leave.

  “I’ve received word about a new intelligence leak.” Aquila’s voice arrested him. “Two hundred pounds of weapons-grade uranium was just excavated in southern Georgia.”

  “Where is it now?”

  “We think it’s on its way to Tehran. CIA is scrambling to find it. It should be hot enough to shine under night vision from unmanned drones. If it’s there, we’ll find it.”

  Harry’s shoulders slumped. “How did the deal go down? Can we find a way to contact the seller of the info?”

  “Data Services is working on it. So far, they’ve got nothing.”

  “We’ve gotta figure out how this guy is selling this intel.” Harry clenched his fist, and Tara could see blood leaking through the Band-Aid on his knuckle.

  Aquila glanced at Tara. “You think this is the work of a lone individual?”

  Tara nodded. “Yes. My profile’s still in flux, but I believe it’s the work of one person. I don’t think it’s the Taliban or some organized group. It’s all too quiet for that … Someone would have leaked some information by now, ratted somebody out. That hasn’t happened. I think we’re dealing with a determined guy who’s got a personal axe to grind.”

  “The money would be a motivator,” Aquila said. “Why not just the cash?”

  “Well,” Tara said, “CIA’s not seeing any unusual influxes of cash in the usual networks. Nobody’s buying any more guns or desert islands than usual. Whoever’s getting paid for this is just sitting on the cash … It doesn’t mean enough to him to spend it.”

  Aquila gestured to the list. “You’d better get those people corralled, and soon. Leave the hotel accommodations up to me.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Harry and Tara filed out of Aquila’s office. Harry stared ruefully at the list. “There’s no telling who’s next. It’s gonna take time for the Marshals to round these people up.”

  “Can I see it?” Tara asked. He handed her the papers, and she thumbed through them. “There might be another way. Can I use your conference room?”

  “Sure.” He ushered her to the room that Veriss had used for his presentations.

  Tara pulled the blinds, obscuring the view from the outside, and closed the door. “This room isn’t on camera?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Good enough.” Tara placed the list on the conference room table before her and sat down. She pulled her cards out of her purse.

  Harry pulled up a chair opposite her. “What are you doing?”

  “Inviting a hunch.” Tara counted the pages of the report. There were seven pages of roughly twenty names on each page. She took the deck and began to shuffle. “We can’t interview all of these people at once. We need to zero in on the person who can give us the most information.”

  Tara drew a card from the deck, the Three of Cups. She turned to the third page in the report.

  She concentrated and shuffled the deck again. She pulled the Hierophant, the fifth card in the Major Arcana. She counted down to the fifth name on the list.

  “Our winner is Norman S. Lockley.”

  Harry pushed away from the desk. “Okay. Let’s go interview Mr. Lockley.”

  Tara was amazed at the ease with which he trusted her. Months ago, he would have harangued her about making decisions with the cards, about using them as a crutch. Maybe he’d changed.

  Or maybe he was just too worn out to argue with her.

  Tara flipped over another card, wondering who Norman Lockley was. She picked the Moon, a card of illusions and deception. Half of a woman’s face gazed from a pale moon, the rest of her visage obscured by shadow. A dog howled at the moon, and a crayfish had crawled out of the ocean, stretching its claws toward her. Black and white pillars in the distance suggested a choice: between good and evil, order and chaos, or some other pair of opposites.

  The door to the conference room swung open. Harry elbowed his way in front of the door to give Tara time to stuff her cards back into her purse.

  “Professor. Can I help you?”

  “Yes.” Veriss looked over Harry’s shoulder with a disturbed expression. “Have you seen my projector? I thought it was in here, somewhere …”

  “Haven’t seen it,” Tara said.

  “Conference room is yours, Professor,” Harry said.

  “We were just leaving.”

  Tara smothered a grin as she followed Harry out the door. She knew that Veriss would never see his projector again, not if the Library of Congress had anything to say about it.

  ASTROLOGY WASN’T PARTICLE PHYSICS.

  But it still required some degree of concentration.

  Cassie tapped her pencil eraser on the kitchen table. Her charts and calculations were spread out before her in precise stacks. Her mind kept wandering from the stars and sacred geometry, but she was glad not to be on the makeshift rifle range today. Absently, she reached up to rub the bruise the shotgun had impressed upon her right shoulder.

  She missed Tara. She’d always felt the tension between Tara and the Pythia regarding her upbringing. And she knew that the Pythia had plans for her, to groom her to walk in her footsteps. But Delphi’s Daughters had introduced her to a variety of arcane subjects, from the domestic arts of baking and candlemaking to combat and astrology. An ever-changing cast of Delphi’s Daughters entered and left the house, teaching her something new while Tara watched from a distance. Her new studies were a far cry from her beginnings as a physics graduate student, following in her father’s intellectual footsteps. But she had nowhere else to go, and this place was more interesting than most.

  Cassie rubbed her forehead, erased a mark. The Pythia had decided that Cassie’s primary oracular talents lay in astrology. Initially, the thought had opposed everything she’d embraced about rational science. But she couldn’t deny the irrational pull she felt, looking up at the sky at night, how she intuitively grasped the precession of the equinoxes, could sense the planets in the night sky as they passed along the ecliptic, through the houses of the Zodiac. The Pythia said that she was still flexible, too young to be wedded to any dogma—scientific or otherwise.

  And so, Cassie, being a scientist at heart, undertook her studies as an experiment. She jotted down her observations and predictions, compared them to the statistical outcomes she might expect as a result of random chance. To her surprise, she was much better than chance. She amused herself predicting stock market fluctuations, playing with penny stocks. Her accuracy rates climbed, and she began to trust her results more and more.

  But what she saw in her charts now troubled her, made her second-guess her intuition.

  Cassie had been working with what the Pythia called “mundane astrology”—though it was anything but. The Pythia had explained that mundane came from the Latin word for the world. This branch of astrology was used to explain historical events and predict new world events. It involved casting a chart for a nation or group of people.

  Cassie frowned at her chart for the U.S. She’d cast it for a few days into the future, with Washington, DC as the location. When she’d cast it, she kept showing Pluto in retrograde. Pluto governed power,
nuclear energy, finance, crime, and catastrophes. The sun and Mars opposed Pluto, suggesting strife and instability. The chart also showed the moon in Scorpio. The moon governed agriculture, national security, populations of people and animals. And Scorpio was the eighth house, reflecting secrets, foreign relations, and crime.

  She reached for her laptop to double-check her work. Against the Pythia’s wishes, she’d built a computer program that would generate astrological charts and compare them. She entered in the latitude, longitude, and time, and let it generate another wheel-shaped map of the heavens.

  She drummed her fingers on the table. Same result. The planets and houses clotted together at disturbing angles three days from now.

  “Are you cheating again?”

  Cassie jumped in her chair. The Pythia drifted into the kitchen, holding a cigarette. She was always able to sneak up on Cassie … Maybe it was the bare feet. Cassie had rarely seen the woman in a pair of shoes. Today, she wore a red caftan that smelled like sandalwood.

  “It’s not cheating if it produces the same result, and it’s more efficient.”

  The Pythia harrumphed. “You need to learn to do it by hand.”

  “Yeah. And I did.” Cassie held up her eraser-torn paper.

  “What if you find yourself someplace with no electricity?”

  “Then I’m camping. And I probably don’t give a rat’s ass about homework, then.”

  “Watch your mouth, young lady. An oracle never swears.”

  Cassie made a face. She still didn’t understand why it was okay to play with machine guns, but not to swear. The Pythia insisted that Delphi’s Daughters act like ladies, even when murdering scarecrows. “I don’t see why not.”

  The Pythia put a hand on her hip. “Oracles affect the future more than ordinary people do. A curse from an oracle is exactly that … a curse. And it can affect the world.”

  Cassie rolled her eyes. “Okay. Whatever.”