The Gray Tower Trilogy: Books 1-3

by Alesha Escobar

  33

  “Back so soon?” Lt. Richard Carr took off his headgear and unzipped the top of his jumpsuit. At first, he didn’t fly on missions as often as he used to, but it seemed, after I returned from Paris, he began hopping into bombers and fighter planes as often as he could. He noticed my somber expression, which was out of the ordinary, when we saw each other here at the Royal Air Force base.

  “Hi Richard, I have pressing matters to attend to,” I said, gesturing toward Ian and the U.S. soldier who escorted him. “Can you get a couple of your guys to come with us down to Morton’s office?”

  When Richard saw Ian shackled and looking disheveled, he snorted. “What is this?”

  “Richard, it was Ian. He’s the traitor. He confessed everything to me.”

  His face blanched and his jaw dropped. “No, it can’t be...”

  Before I could say anything else, Richard had stalked toward Ian and his guard. The soldier saluted him. “Lieutenant Carr, sir. I was instructed to give this to you.” He handed Richard a file folder.

  Richard took it, but fixed his stare on Ian. “Is it true?”

  He lifted his gaze for the first time, and looked Richard in the eyes. He licked his cracked lips and said in a low voice, “Yes.”

  “So...who was it?” Richard shoved the file into the hands of a nearby Royal Air Force officer.

  Ian’s lower lip trembled. “I don’t...”

  “Who was it? Who were you responsible for getting killed?” When Ian only lowered his gaze again, Richard prodded him. “Was Stella one of them? Did she die because of you?”

  I felt a dull ache in my stomach at the mention of my friend. She had been missing for five months before I discovered that she had been caught by the Nazis and died at Dachau. “Richard,” I said as I approached, wondering why I was trying to be the voice of reason, “we don’t know the extent...”

  He held his hand up in a gesture to silence me. “Bollocks, he should be able to recall if he gave them her information. You remember Stella, don’t you, Ian? She...she had brown hair, and a lovely smile...”

  Ian lowered his head. “Richard--”

  “And her favorite color was yellow, she loved dancing, and she told me that when she came back from France that she’d let me take her to dance.”

  Ian raised his head and looked up at Richard again. “I--”

  Richard decided not to let him finish his sentence and smashed his fist into Ian’s face. A couple of officers had to rush over and pull Richard off of him. I didn’t make a move to help Ian. I just felt numb.

  “Max,” I called to the pilot who had run over to us. “Help the officer get Ian into a car. We’re going to MI6.”

  Richard seethed with rage. “That bastard!”

  “I’ll take care of it, Richard.”

  When Delana poked her head out of the plane, the last to exit, I gestured for her to come join me. “I’ll get a cab for you. What’s your niece’s name?”

  “Alina,” she said, rummaging through the tote. “Take this with you. If it glows, then that means I am under attack by Ammon.” She handed me a sapphire pendant.

  “Take care, Delana.”

  She touched my cheek with the palm of her hand. “Thank you, Isabella. I pray you stay strong in the face of what’s to come.”

  I frowned. “You mean Ian?”

  She shook her head. “Hell is coming.”

  She headed out toward the exit with an escort and disappeared. I looked at the pendant once more before placing it on my silver chain. One of the mechanics passed by and I asked him for the time, he told me it was past 3 a.m. When one of the officers, Max, came back in and signaled to me, I knew it was time to go.

  Richard came up and grabbed me by the arm. “Don’t pity him. Pity Stella, and everyone else who’s dead or rotting in a Nazi prison because he exposed them.”

  “I know how to do my job.” I pulled my arm free.

  “I hope you do,” he said in a broken voice. “I truly hope you do.”

  We reached the mansion at Bletchley Park, which housed MI6 as well as teams of codemasters and naval officers working around the clock. We came in at sunrise, and the receptionist wore an expression of mild shock as the Air Force officer and I signed in with Ian in between us. We had called ahead and the agency knew to expect us, but it still must’ve been a heavy blow for many to see an SOE handler, who had previously been well-liked and respected, hauled in like a criminal. An agent approached us and introduced himself as Bancroft. He had the build of a professional boxer and wore a scowl on his face. With a grunt, he came and took Ian into custody. I walked alongside them as we headed toward the lift that would take us to the interrogation room beneath the G-Block. As we went down to the basement level, I stole a few glimpses of Ian and noted that he seemed a little more focused and less weepy. I turned away when he looked at me, but he spoke to me anyway.

  “I’m very sorry, Isabella. Please...speak to me.”

  His eyes betrayed hope and despair at the same time. I opened my mouth to say something, but I didn’t even know what I wanted to say to him. I finally stuttered, “It’s best...it’s better if you don’t say anything to me.”

  “Could you forgive me?”

  Bancroft punched him in the stomach and he doubled over. “If it was up to me, I would’ve asked the Air Force lieutenant to shoot you in the head. Feckin’ traitor.” He pulled Ian along when the doors opened and brought him down the hall to the interrogation room. Joshua Morton, the MI6 liaison who oversaw SOE operations, stood outside with his hands in his pockets, and, for a fleeting second, I wondered if they really were just going to shoot Ian.

  “Mr. Morton, sir.” Bancroft nodded toward Morton and walked Ian into the room. The door closed behind them, and Morton approached me.

  “Why are you here, Isabella?”

  I gave him a startled look. “Ian came to me...he confessed to me. I think it’s only right that I be here.”

  “Is that so?” he asked with a frown beneath his dark beard.

  Bancroft swung the door open with a frightened look on his face. “He’s poisoned himself! He had an L-tablet lodged in his jaw.”

  “Go get a medic,” Morton instructed him.

  As Bancroft ran down the hall, Morton and I rushed into the interrogation room to find Ian slouched in his chair and his head against the table. My legs wobbled and my chest constricted. Morton reached Ian before I did and checked for a pulse. He looked at me and shook his head; the arsenic would kill Ian before the medic even got here.

  “It’s over, Isabella.”

  “No, it’s not!” I screeched at him.

  I placed my hands on Ian’s head and neck. I could feel the poison coursing through his system, and counteracted as much as I could with my body magic. Ian began convulsing, and then he vomited over the table. Bancroft rushed in with the medic, who rolled a wheel chair in. The men hoisted Ian and set him into the chair, then the medic took him out.

  “They’ll get him to a hospital,” Morton assured me when I tried to follow them. “Bancroft, escort Isabella upstairs to my office.”

  Bancroft nodded, and I looked askance. “Why do I have to go to your office?”

  “Just do it.” He left the interrogation room.

  Bancroft reached for my left arm, but I batted his hand away. “I know how to get there.”

  All the same, he fell in step with me as I walked out, and I grew worried. We went up the lift in silence, and when I made it to Morton’s office, Bancroft let me in and closed the door behind me. Morton sat at his desk, with a calm façade over a deep-seated unease. I walked toward his desk and paused just a few feet away.

  “What is it, Morton?”

  He flung a sheet of paper onto his desk and invited me to read it. “SOE sent this to me.”

  I read the letter in disbelief. It was the incriminating note that Ryker and Casandra had threatened Ian with if he didn’t comply with their demands. Besides appearing to have been written by Ian and e
xposing him, it also indicated that I was an accomplice. This didn’t look good at all.

  “Morton,” I said with a lump in my throat, “this is a false statement. Ian was being blackmailed--”

  “Well I don’t know that, because he poisoned himself before I could speak with him.”

  “He was desperate, he said his life was over.”

  “Were you his accomplice? Did you expose other agents and give away SOE’s secrets?”

  “Of course not. You know me--”

  “Apparently not that well.” He shifted in his seat. “Why did Ian go to America?”

  “To warn me about the warlock, Ryker, the one who had been blackmailing him.”

  He paused and looked at me, as if sizing me up. It made me angry, because my loyalty should’ve never come into question so easily, even with these so-called incriminating letters. General Donovan was right; this war had everyone questioning their allies and people’s loyalties.

  “Isabella, I can’t afford to pat you on the back and tell you everything is fine. I think you left some facts out of your last report when you came back from Paris. Now, you’re simply suffering the consequences.”

  I discarded decorum and addressed him by his first name. “Joshua, I understand you have doubts and you want answers. But don’t you dare sit here in judgment over me, not without hearing the whole story.”

  The office door opened, and Jane Lewis barged in. she regarded her half brother with a warning look and rushed to my side. “Joshua, I just saw them take Ian to the hospital...why are you doing this to Isabella? You said you were just going to talk with her.”

  “I haven’t done anything, and I am talking with her.”

  “Whatever it is you think she’s done, it’s not true. She’s one of our best agents.”

  “Then how do you explain this?” Morton grabbed the letter and walked it over to Jane. “Her loyalty doesn’t lie with us.”

  I clenched my fists and glared at him. “You don’t know anything about my loyalties.”

  Jane folded the letter and gazed at her brother. “Let me tell you who she is to me. When Anna was killed--”

  “Jane--” he protested.

  “When they killed Anna, Isabella made certain that at least her burial site was marked, and then she hunted down the criminals who shot our sister. Now put that in one of your reports.”

  He wavered. “I’ve...been using all my resources to find them. I couldn’t understand why those men simply vanished off the face of the earth.”

  Jane’s expression softened. “You never told me that. It felt like you never told me anything.” She turned toward me and squeezed my hand. “Go, Isabella. Whoever made Ian write this letter is the one who needs to be brought in.”

  “Damn it, Jane!”

  “No,” I said, letting my hand slip from hers. “I haven’t done anything wrong. If I run out of here like this, it’ll only convince him that he’s right--which he’s not.”

  Morton grunted. “I’ll call a car to take you home. You’re suspended pending investigation. And I’m sending agents to watch your flat. I don’t want to see you here at Bletchley Park or at the Baker Street office until this is over. Is that understood?”

  I wanted to argue against him, but if I said another word he would fire me and throw me into jail. I turned and walked away with Jane down G-Block and through the front reception area. When we stepped outside, my eyes stung with tears of anger.

  “I’m so sorry, Isabella.” Jane crossed her arms and stared at the ground. “I feel terrible about Ian.”

  “So do I.” I stood in silence in front of the mansion, and headed for the car as soon as I saw it pull up. The driver opened the door for us, and I shouldered my black handbag and got inside.

  When we arrived at our building, I wanted to drag myself upstairs to my flat and crawl into bed, but Jane insisted that I stay with her. After a quick bath, I borrowed one of her nightgowns (one of the non-frilly ones) and devoured a plate of leftover woolton pie. I wrapped my hair in a towel and settled onto her sofa with a cup of hot coffee. She yawned and motioned to the clock to let me know it was almost 8 a.m. I technically hadn’t gotten any sleep, but I assured her I’d get some rest soon. When she retired to her bedroom, I reached into my black handbag and pulled out Veit’s diary with the translated texts.

  I pushed aside some of her magazines on the coffee table and laid out the papers. I secretly tried to do the meditations again during the plane ride over here, but I failed at it again. I began wondering if Dr. Grey was telling the truth about the missing page, and if it contained instructions that I needed. I thought about my father’s words and the texts’ instructions. I was listening to my heart, I cleared my thoughts and made sure nothing impeded me, so why wasn’t I controlling time? The only thing I knew how to do so far was the Zaman’s Fire meditation, and how to call forth the Fire as a shield or weapon.

  Put your Fire into the water, and into your heart. Make the ripples and pulses burn. I still didn’t know what my father’s cryptic words meant. How was I supposed to put Zaman’s fire into water and into my heart? I grabbed a pen and paper and wrote down his instruction. I wrote down all kinds of question marks and interpretations. After staring at the sentences for a few more minutes, I thought about approaching it, not from a mystical perspective, but just one of plain old decoding. My father knew my occupation...it would be easier to just give me a code rather than some lofty spiritual insight.

  Put your Fire into the water, and into your heart. Make the ripples and pulses burn. I underlined “water” and “ripples,” and circled “heart” and “pulses.” It dawned at me that the “heart” I was supposed to be listening to was my actual physical heart, not my emotional one. In a meditative state, these pulsations would be steady and slow. And water ripples would obviously be faster. The heart pulsations would help me to slow time, and the ripples would help me to quicken it. I slowly began to understand how this would work.

  In normal human brain activity, we perceived and reacted to events surrounding us in terms of time. Think of enduring a boring presentation that’s torturously slow, though it’s only been five or ten minutes. Imagine having talked on the phone with your sweetheart and discovering that hours had passed. Our minds didn’t measure time the way clocks did. Our minds interacted with time, but, according to these texts, a Drifter’s mind did so in a unique way. Instead of feeding these meditations with my magical energy, I needed to use Zaman’s Fire.

  I called forth a simple spark from the Fire, making it steady and quiet. Next, I envisioned a dark pool of water rippling. As the ripples traveled and spread, gray images moved about in my mind and I felt a pull right below my rib cage. I felt as if I had stepped into a dream or memory, and I stood in the Courtyard of Light, at the Gray Tower. My stomach clenched with fear as I remembered the last time I had a vision about this place: I saw Beata, the Master Wizard who belonged to the Council and wore the White. She fell from on high and was impaled on the golden sword of a statue.

  The word war impressed itself into my mind, and I let out a low groan. I could never let that happen at the Tower. I would have to avoid violence at the Tower at all costs. I drew in a deep breath and squinted my eyes, willing myself to escape the vision. The room spun, and, when I focused again, I was back where I started in the living room.

  The vision of war in the Tower frightened me, and I wondered if it really was a good idea to go back to there. If anything happened and I entirely lost my mask, I wouldn’t stand a chance against the trackers or any more assassins Octavian decided to send after me. Still, I needed to meet with my father’s allies at the Gray Tower and solicit their help in demonstrating to the Masters why I was for the same cause they were and would never turn to the other side. I also wanted to make sure the Masters punished Hotaru for murdering Ken and those other men. I would need to be there to plead my case.

  I turned my attention once more to the diary, and this time I used my spark of Fire to feed the puls
ations of my heart. I closed my eyes and focused my burning heart on slowing time, and it surprisingly began to strain me. I felt like I was pushing a boulder up a hill. When my body began trembling, I commanded the slow strain to halt, and I opened my eyes.

  Everything felt still and quiet, like in the vision-dream I had at my brother’s house. I stood, went over to Jane’s window and peeked through an opening in the curtain. Several cars in the street were frozen in mid-drive, and men and women walking down the street stood as still as statues though they were mid-stride. I looked across the street and saw the car Morton had sent over. Two MI6 agents sat inside, motionless. My heart dropped in my chest when I saw a shadow figure flit down the street from right to left. I stared through the window to see if it would return or come back down the street, but after a few minutes I focused on the pulsations once more and released them, willing time around me to resume its normal course. The cars in the street rumbled and moved at regular speed, and the people’s footsteps pattered against the ground.

  Though I was impressed with what I had been able to do with the meditations, I didn’t know what to make of the shadow figure I just saw. I told myself that I’d be careful, especially if the shadow returned. I decided to move on to the numbers and the entire part about Ophiuchus, but my eyelids grew heavy and I kept yawning. After swaying a few times and reading the same line three times, I decided that I needed rest. I secured the papers inside the diary and placed them all back inside the bag. I pulled the blanket up to my chin and drifted away into a dreamless sleep.

  I awoke in the late afternoon to a note left beside me from Jane, explaining that she had gone down to SOE headquarters at 64 Baker Street. Her note also said that she had called to check on Ian. He was in a coma as a result of taking that L-tablet, and no one was sure he’d ever wake up. With a heavy heart, I hung around Jane’s flat for a few more hours, mainly because I knew I had no food upstairs in mine, and finally, when sunset came, I gathered my belongings and headed upstairs so I could grab a change of clothes.

  What’s the point of changing into clothes? I asked myself. I wasn’t going anywhere at the moment, and if I did, I’d have MI6 agents tailing me. I used to make fun of some of the SOE agents who had retired from spying and had stayed at home in their pajamas. I swore it would never happen to me--well, fate had a funny sense of humor. Now, the only things I lacked were a cigarette and a glass of Scotch.