Rogue Oracle

by Unknown

  He swore, reached for the phone, dialed the main switchboard. “Get me someone in the Interpol Central Bureau.”

  He drummed his fingers at the frozen face on the screen, the eerie death mask of Lockley’s face. Tara had been right all along.

  “Central Bureau.”

  “This is Harry Li from the U.S. Department of Justice. I’ve got a problem that may have now become yours.”

  There was a sigh on the other end of the line. “That’s how it usually goes. Hit me.”

  “We were pursuing a subject for several murders of retired intelligence operatives. We think he found his way to Rome.” Harry gave the agent the flight information.

  “Do you have a description?”

  “I’ll send you a photo. The guy appears to be approximately six feet tall, in his late sixties, balding, in a green-patterned shirt and straw hat. But this is a disguise. We don’t know what his true face looks like.”

  The agent paused. “By the airport information I have, that flight has already landed.”

  “Is the plane still at the terminal?”

  “Yes. But the passengers are long gone, disembarked hours ago.”

  Harry pinched the bridge of his nose. “Can you do a quick radiation sweep of the plane?”

  “Do you think it was contaminated by the dirty bomb?”

  “I think it was contaminated by the suspect in my case. He’s a Chernobylite, and he tends to leave sticky radioactive particles wherever he goes.”

  “I’ll forward this information to our agents in the field immediately.”

  “Thanks.” Harry hung up the phone and downloaded the picture to send to Interpol. Sweeping the plane for radiation would be confirmation that the Chimera had been there, but wouldn’t provide him with information he didn’t already know.

  A bright yellow interoffice envelope slapped down on his desk. Harry looked up to see one of the women from the LOC standing over him. He vaguely remembered her as the one who’d stolen Veriss’s projector. A librarian in Special Projects was bad news. He opened his mouth to say something like: Hold it right there … you need to be searched.

  The LOC woman gave him a dirty look. “You’re welcome.” She reached over his desk with an insolent gaze, deliberately picked up his stapler, and walked away with it.

  “Hey!” Harry yelled. “Gimme that!”

  She gave him the finger and kept on walking.

  Harry picked up the envelope. There were no markings on it to say who it was from, only his name in cursive writing. He unwound the red cord securing the envelope and dumped the contents out on his desk.

  It was a book. Russian for Morons. When he opened the front cover, an electronic stub for a plane ticket leaving from Baltimore fell out. The destination was Kiev, with a plane change in Athens. His brows drew together in puzzlement. Had Tara sent this to him?

  Harry’s phone beeped. “Li,” he answered in clipped tones.

  “Hello, Harry,” a musical voice greeted him.

  Harry paused in rifling through the documents. “Amira. You weren’t satisfied traumatizing Cassie? Had to go ahead and screw with Tara, huh?”

  “I didn’t intend to traumatize anyone,” the Pythia said smoothly.

  “You did a bang-up job, let me tell you. If you ever lay a finger on Cassie, I will personally burn that farmhouse of yours to the ground.”

  The Pythia tsked. “I promised that I’m not going to force Cassie to return. And I meant it.”

  Harry rolled his eyes. “What games are you playing now?”

  The Pythia chuckled. “No games, Harry. As I explained to Tara, our goals converge. For the moment.”

  “What goals?” Harry crossed his arms. “I’m never quite clear on what your goals are, you and the rest of the Amazons on Paradise Island. World peace? World domination? A really good jewelry sale?”

  “I don’t discuss my plans with outsiders, Harry.” The Pythia’s haughty tone scraped the receiver. When she said outsiders, she made it sound like dog shit.

  Harry pressed on. “Why did you send Tara to Chernobyl? Alone? This guy is dangerous.”

  “I didn’t send her alone. You got my present just now?”

  Harry picked up the copy of Russian for Morons. “This was you?” He’d been hoping it had come from Tara, and his heart dropped just a little bit further.

  He could hear the huff in the Pythia’s voice. “Tara needs you, Harry. Sometimes I don’t have the faintest clue why, but she does. Since you have your useful moments, I am sending you along with her. Your paths will cross in Kiev.”

  “One can’t help but feel used when you’re involved, Amira.”

  “I’m not concerned about your feelings, Harry. Or Tara’s.”

  Harry glanced at the tickets. “I notice that these are one-way tickets.”

  The Pythia snorted. “You have an hour to make your plane, Harry.”

  She hung up, leaving Harry to stare at the ticket. She could just be screwing with him.

  Or it might mean that he wouldn’t be coming back.

  WHAT DID THE CHIMERA WANT?

  Tara stared at her reflection in the black glass of the plane window. She knew the Chimera was going to Chernobyl. The Pythia had sensed it, too. And the Chimera was dying, whether he knew it or not. Was he crawling off to his home den to die alone, like a wounded wolf? Or did he want something more? Something about the situation nagged at her, from Cassie’s star charts to her own readings to the Pythia’s demands. She felt as if she had a blind spot in her vision, something she couldn’t quite resolve.

  She glanced sidelong at her seatmate. The old woman in a pink sweat suit was snoring with her mouth open, dentures slipping slightly over her tongue. This flight was full, and Tara would need to be discreet if she wanted to consult her cards.

  She picked up her purse and crawled over the old woman to the aisle, muttering apologies. She elbowed her way to the lavatory, closing the door securely behind her. She kicked the lid of the toilet down and spread her jacket on the plastic lid. She dug into her purse, dumped her cards out of the cigarette pack she’d concealed them in. She shuffled her cards, mindful to hurry. Under new security procedures, a flight attendant would no doubt be checking on her if she took more than a few minutes.

  Kneeling before the jacket, she began to deal out the cards quickly, in a line of five cards left to right.

  “Distant past,” she whispered, picking up the card on the far left. It was Death, showing a black-robed skeleton riding through a green countryside on a white horse. Death’s horse stepped over the pale bodies of men and women as he rode, and red sunset shone behind him.

  On a cursory level, that made sense. If the Chimera was from Chernobyl, he’d have had his fill of Death all around him.

  “Recent past,” she whispered, picking up the next card. The World, reversed, showed the Sacred Androgyne from her dreams, the figure that fused with everything it touched. Now, Tara understood its significance, and why it was reversed in her reading, giving it a sinister connotation. Perhaps as a result of the accident, as a result of one of the terrible mutations of radiation, the Chimera had become what he was.

  “Present.” She flipped over the Moon. The shape of a serene moon goddess’s face shone from a full moon. Below her were two pillars, one dark and one light. Wolves lifted their heads to howl at her, and a crayfish crawled from the ocean to gaze at her.

  Tara rested her hand in her chin. Before, she’d drawn this card in relation to Lockley, the master of deception. The Chimera was doubtlessly using his talents to escape, the arts of subterfuge and trickery. But the Moon also spoke of the subconscious, of hidden motivations. What else was the Chimera hiding? Were his motives even fully known to himself?

  A knock sounded at the door, causing Tara to jump. “Ma’am, are you all right in there?”

  “I’ll be just a moment longer,” Tara called.

  She turned her attention back to the cards, turned the next one over. “Near future,” she muttered
under her breath. This card puzzled her. It was the Ten of Wands, depicting a man whose back was bent under a heavy load of rods he was carrying. The card traditionally represented overwork and exhaustion, but that meaning didn’t seem to fit here.

  The knock at the door sounded again. “Ma’am—”

  “I’ll be out in a minute, please.” Damn that nosy flight attendant.

  Tara flipped over the last card. “Distant future.”

  Her breath snagged in her throat. The Tower was the structure from her dreams and her earlier readings, struck by lightning. It was the card of ultimate disaster, the one that had come to her to symbolize Chernobyl. Her brow furrowed. But its placement was all wrong here. It belonged in the distant past, the foundation of the situation, not the future …

  Someone jiggled the door, someone with a key. A man’s voice, another attendant, echoed: “You have to get out of there, now, ma’am.”

  Tara stuffed the cards into her purse. She had enough time to pull her jacket off the toilet and push the lid back before the door folded open.

  Thinking quickly, Tara clapped one hand over her mouth and the other around her stomach. She glared blearily at the flight attendants, remembering what it felt like to have the flu and summoning all that misery to her face.

  “Oh.” The male attendant stepped back, embarrassed. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I thought—” He glared at the female flight attendant, who made a face at him. “Are you all right, ma’am?”

  Tara made a big show of leaning over the sink and spitting, as if to remove the taste of vomit from her mouth. “I guess I have no choice but to be all right,” she said, grimly.

  “I’ll take you back to your seat,” the female flight attendant snipped.

  Tara let herself be led by the elbow back to her seat and climbed back over the old woman in the pink sweat suit.

  Tara settled back in her seat. The cards had been burned into her memory, and she closed her eyes, visualizing them, trying to figure out how they were connected. She slid more easily into her dreams now than she ever had before. She knew it was the influence of this new deck of cards, and it worried her. She set the worry aside, let herself be pulled down into the dream, the falling sensation indistinguishable from the feeling of a plane plunging through turbulence.

  In her dream, she stood on the black beach with the lion pacing around her. The lion made broad tracks in the sand not so much different, except in scale, from Oscar’s footprints in a litter box. He glanced at her with his golden eyes. Tara didn’t know yet if he was some type of a spirit guide or, more likely, some partitioned part of Tara’s consciousness, her intuition, translated into a symbol by this odd turn her power had taken.

  She could feel the heat in the land through the soles of her shoes. She squinted into the distance, at the figure she could see walking further on down the strand. The figure approached, but she knew who he was the instant she spied the sun glancing off his polished armor.

  Harry. The Knight of Pentacles. Wordlessly, he walked toward her, visor lowered so that she could not see the expression in his eyes.

  Tara reached up and took his face in her hands. “Harry, I’m sorry that I had to leave you behind.”

  His gauntleted hands remained motionless at his sides. Guilt rippled through her, and Tara’s hands paused to finger the scars in his armor. He seemed like such a wordless automaton here, a machine. She had the sensation that he was becoming hollow beneath that armor, that he was losing himself.

  She threw her arms around his neck. His armor was scalding hot against her body. She reached up to lift his helmet from his face, but he lifted his hands and held her fast. The segments of his gauntlet gloves began to burn the white flesh of her fingers. She wondered whether this was simply the absorbed heat of the sunshine in the metal or whether it was something more radiating from him. Anger.

  The lion paced around her, sniffing the air and growling. From the corner of her eye, Tara watched him walk toward the black forest rising from the beach, away from Tara’s guilt and Harry’s anger.

  Tara took a deep breath. She had work to do. She had to follow her intuition, wherever it led. She disentangled her burnt fingers from Harry’s, picked up her skirts, and ran away through the black sand, trying to catch up with the lion.

  The lion was easy to follow, luminous gold against the crisp burned grasses and blackened bark. As Tara pursued him, she noticed that green sprouts were beginning to emerge from the rich black dust, the dust that coated the bottom of her skirts. It tasted metallic in her mouth, as if she’d taken a mouthful of iron filings.

  The lion led her to a clearing, a familiar one. She recognized the Tower from her cards and her previous dream, black against the blue sky. Even in the daylight, it felt ominous, its hulking, uneven shape blocking out the light. But it was even hotter in the shade of it, looking up at the rusting bits of metal and welds that seemed to hold the ramshackle structure together.

  Tara paused, her hand coming to rest on the lion’s brow. She understood the meaning of the Tower card. Chernobyl. But why was it placed in the future in her spread? Was it merely the act of traveling there that had brought it into such sharp focus? Or did her reading indicate that a new disaster was on the horizon, something beyond the scale of the dirty bomb at the airport?

  Twigs snapped behind her, and Tara whirled. She let out her breath when she saw the Knight of Pentacles clomping through the scorched brush. Harry had followed her here. Or her guilt had.

  She stared up at the Tower, trying to understand what the silent lion of her intuition was trying to tell her. A sparrow roosting in a bent crenellation took flight, but fell out of the sky. The bird landed at the lion’s paws.

  Tara knelt down to pick it up. Its wings were bent, feet stuck straight out. It was suddenly, inexplicably dead. Of what?

  She turned on her heel. Could it be the heat, the radiation from this place? She stared up at the Tower. The accident happened long ago, the radioactive elements sealed in sand and concrete and on their way to decaying. The monster slept, degrading quietly. What changed? What had awoken to kill the bird and char the forest surrounding them?

  Tara gently set the bird down on the cleanest patch of ground she could find. She had the urge to bury the poor thing. Casting about for a suitable shovel, she found a piece of rusty metal at the foot of the Tower. She plunged the edge of the metal into the earth, scraped it away …

  … and gasped as she burned her fingers on something hot. She stepped back, dropping the makeshift spade. Something glowed below the black earth, seething with an unearthly blue light below the surface. The lion approached the fizzling blue light, sniffed. He paced around it three times, began to kick dirt over it to cover it.

  Tara understood. Something was being unearthed here, coming to life that should remain hidden. She cradled her burned hand in her elbow.

  The Knight of Pentacles clapped his hand down on her shoulder. He pointed to the edge of the clearing, where something glowed, bright as a star.

  Tara started toward the movement, shaded her eyes. She called out.

  The movement stopped. Tara squinted into the light. She saw the figure of the World, bent over and broken by a burden it was stealing away. The burden was the same as the card, the Ten of Wands. But the rods glowed the same unearthly blue she’d discovered underground, burning shadows into the World’s impassive face. Shadows of wrath.

  Tara cried out to him: “Why are you doing this? Why won’t you let it be buried?”

  The World’s mouth twisted. “To show you what we have suffered. And never to let you forget it.”

  TARA AWOKE WITH A START THAT NEARLY KNOCKED OVER A cup of water that had been placed on her tray table while she slept. The old woman beside her snorted and glared. Tara reached for the water, feeling it wash the cold, metallic taste of the dream from her mouth.

  She shivered, wrapping her arms around her. A spidery pattern of frost had formed where her face had been pressed up against the window. Tara
wiped it away with her elbow.

  She understood, now. Veriss had been on to something. His notes and the Ten of Wands made sense. The Chimera was searching for the lost reactor rods of Chernobyl. He’d figured out their location from draining the minds of the ex-spies, and was going back to dig them up.

  Tara pressed her fingertips to her lips. If the Chimera managed to do that, the dirty bomb at Dulles would be child’s play. With that kind of materiel, someone could poison an entire water supply, kill thousands. The Chimera’s vengeance was revenge on an unimaginable scale. The effects of the information he’d sold would ripple through the world for years. But this—this would be an unmitigated disaster of unimaginable proportion.

  She knotted her hands in her lap. Perhaps they’d all be lucky. Perhaps the Chimera was still in Washington, deterred by the men at the airport security gate and their Geiger counters. But she knew, and the cards had shown her, that he had escaped. The Moon was the card of deception. She was certain the Chimera had managed to elude the authorities, had slipped through their net and was headed east.

  Tara leaned back in her seat. The Chimera had escaped all attempts to ensnare him. How could she hope to catch him, when she was unarmed, alone, and unfamiliar with the terrain?

  The only weapon she had was what she’d brought with her into the forest of her dreams: her intuition.

  Chapter Eighteen

  TARA’S JOURNEY led her first to Amsterdam, where she changed planes after a long layover to take her to Kiev. The flight to Kiev was only half full, and Tara had the luxury of having two seats to herself. The empty seat beside her bothered her. More than once, she wished Harry were with her.

  She busied herself with poring over the maps and other information the Pythia had included in her envelope. From Kiev, she was intended to take a train to Korosten, which was about 150 kilometers via winding roads west of Chernobyl. A handler was expected to meet her there and take her onward to the Exclusion Zone.

  The plane descended in a fit of turbulence, passing through storm clouds. As the plane broke through the layer of gray, Tara could see Kiev more clearly. It was a beautiful city: multistory white buildings with golden spires peeking out above lush, green trees. The river cutting through the city reflected the color of the gray sky, crossed by delicate-seeming bridges. Tara hoped to be able to return here and explore. If she got the chance.