“Not as much fun as a massacre,” Caitlin said.
“No, but they still get shut down, Mayor Seabrook doesn’t have to deny her involvement after the fact, and we keep our hands clean. We still don’t know who’s behind this ink business. We just finished fighting a gang war; I don’t want to drag the New Commission into another one without intel.”
I opened the passenger door and stepped out. It felt good to stretch my legs. I smoothed the lapels of my suit jacket and took inventory. My deck of cards nestled in my breast pocket, ready to dance. They softly crackled with magical energy, like a constant kiss of static electricity rippling against my chest. On my other side, my favorite backup plan: a Colt 1911 semi-automatic nestled in a calfskin shoulder holster. When it came to handguns I was a “whatever works” kind of guy—I’d packed everything from a suppressed .22 to a monstrous Taurus Judge in the past—but I’d been putting in some range time with the Colt lately and it felt like a solid all-purpose tool.
The final piece of my arsenal was literally up my sleeve: my new wand sat snug in the spring-release sheath Caitlin had bought for me. I’d brought it mostly out of curiosity, seeing as I didn’t know how the damn thing worked. The ebony wand originally belonged to Howard Canton, a stage magician and closet occultist from the 1940s. The ends were capped in white bone. Human bone. One tip came from the skull of an ancient Egyptian illusionist, the other from debunker and skeptic par excellence Harry Houdini. Lies and truth, the power to weave illusions and the power to rip them away.
I’d only used the wand twice, battling Damien Ecko then taking the fight to his mob allies in Chicago; both times it had sprung to life in my hand and I’d harnessed its magic on pure instinct. Destroying Ecko’s human guise, conjuring smoke and mercury mirrors. I just had no idea how, and since then the wand had sat dormant. To tell the truth, I wasn’t even sure I was the one weaving the spell. Canton’s relic seemed to have a mind of its own and opinions it didn’t feel like sharing.
All I knew for sure was that the Enemy, the man with the Cheshire smile, was obsessed with finding anything and everything connected to Canton and his career. That made things simple. He wanted it, which meant I wanted it more.
Caitlin and I skirted the crumbling brick wall to find a parking lot around back, ringed by a rusted fence. Coils of barbed wire rotted in the dark like a promise of tetanus. Two men stood guard by the driveway gate, and I knew we were in the right spot. One wore a windbreaker with bulges in all the wrong places, and the other didn’t bother with the camouflage: a MAC-10 dangled from a shoulder strap, freshly oiled steel half an inch from his open hand.
“You want the one on the left, or the one on the right?” I breathed.
Caitlin crouched like a cat beside me. For a moment her eyes shifted to swirls of molten copper. She smiled, flashing rows of shark teeth.
“Now this,” she purred, “is my idea of a couple’s vacation.”
8.
The ace of spades leaped from my breast pocket and into my hand, streaming sparks of golden light as I burst around the corner. I charged the guards head-on, shoes pounding the pavement. The one in the windbreaker turned and his mouth fell open. I flicked my fingers. The card sliced through the gloom like a laser-guided knife. It slashed his throat before he could shout, painting the pavement with spatters of hot blood. The card spun, still going, then lodged crumpled and spent in the rungs of the chain-link fence.
He dropped to his knees in slow motion, mouth still gaping and nothing but a wet gurgle coming out. His buddy grabbed the MAC-10; the machine pistol swung up as Caitlin ran ahead of me, bounding like a lioness. She threw herself on him before he could pull the trigger. One hand clamped over his wrist. One hand on his throat. Both hands dug in, her nails black iron claws, and twisted. Bone and cartilage snapped. His final breath, as his broken body fell at her feet, was a graveyard rattle.
She smiled, pleased with herself, and sniffed at her bloody hands as I jogged up. Her claws melted back into their human shape, a perfect French manicure dripping burgundy red.
“Let’s get these guys out of sight,” I said and grabbed my victim’s wrists. I heaved him toward a grime-caked dumpster on the edge of the lot, dragging him on the asphalt. Caitlin just scooped the second corpse up under her arm, toting him like a bag of trash. We tossed both bodies inside. Nothing left but slug trails of blood, shimmering black in the gathering dark.
I kept my ears perked. No commotion, nothing but the sound of traffic on a distant freeway and the rustle of the bone-dry wind. I led the way to a side door, corrugated steel, no sign and no window, and fished out my oilskin lockpick sheath.
“Time me,” I said, crouching down.
She tapped the stopwatch on her phone. I tugged out a tension rake and a pick that curved like a white-water river, pocketing the rest. The tumblers slipped and jiggled under my picks as I probed at the lock’s innards, working blind, racing the clock. The final tumbler slipped, caught, and rolled over, rewarding me with a satisfying, hollow click.
“Two minutes and thirty-four seconds,” Caitlin said. “I think you bested your average.”
“I’m feeling lucky tonight. Let’s see if that holds up.”
The door led to a narrow cinder-block hall, with black rubbery tile that sparkled like a bowling-alley floor. No guards in sight. I took the lead.
“What happened to ‘ladies first’?” she whispered in mock dismay.
“Still not sure what we’re up against, and I’m the only one carrying a piece,” I whispered back. “You know, you could have grabbed a gun off one of the guards outside.”
“You know I don’t care for them,” she replied. “In the course of my executive career, I’ve found that my preferred style of conflict resolution is more personal. Hands-on.”
The hallway opened onto a wide factory floor, lit by stark white overheads dangling from the vaulted roof and circled by a second-floor balcony and steel catwalks that crisscrossed overhead. The place hadn’t changed much since the thirties, but the assembly line—standing silent, its conveyor belt rusted and dead—wasn’t pumping out baby formula anymore. Two rows of grim-faced men, stripped down to their boxers and wearing surgical masks, labored on a narcotic production line. They mixed chemicals in plastic dishes and flasks, spun vials in centrifuges, an elaborate dance that didn’t look like any production process I’d ever seen. Plastic jugs sloshed on a rolling cart as a laborer brought in another load of raw materials. On the far end, two workers carefully measured the final product—black, spiky grains like bristly ocean pearls—into clear plastic baggies.
The factory stank, the kind of odor that clung to the very bricks and sank into the fibers of my suit. An unholy cross between pool chlorine and the musty smell of a wet dog. The smell didn’t bother me as much as my magical senses did, though: fire-alarm bells rang out in the back of my mind, and my third eye squinted at the chemical cart. Whatever was in those plastic jugs wasn’t just toxic, it was magically active. From the frown on Caitlin’s face, she sensed it too.
We kept moving. Skirting the outer edge of the factory floor, keeping to the long shadows, ears perked. A lone sentry walked the floor with a rifle cradled in a careless grip, and we pressed our backs to a brick pillar until he moved along. Others patrolled the catwalks, or made slow circles along the second-floor balcony. I counted five guards in all, but those were just the ones I could see. We glued ourselves to whatever cover we could find.
I had my eyes on a door up ahead. Closed, with dusty blinds drawn over a long glass window alongside it. It would have been a foreman’s office, back in the day, and hopefully it still was. I wanted to get my hands on whoever was running this operation. Using spellcraft to put mental blinders on their street dealers was one thing; if they were actually infusing occult ingredients into the drugs, I needed to know why.
As we inched closer, I heard a muffled voice from behind the door, nasal and strident.
“I’m telling you,” he said, “it’s a bad
idea. We shouldn’t set foot in Vegas. Hit the towns around it, and let ink spread virally. Why? Because there are some crazy motherfuckers in Vegas. Trust me, I know. Firsthand experience here.”
I narrowed my eyes and drew my Colt, holding it close to my chest.
“I know that voice,” I murmured.
“Yes,” he went on. “My previous employer. You know, the one who turned into a plant monster, changed her name to Eve, and wanted to destroy half the planet to save the other half? You know who stopped her? Worse people than her.”
I tried the handle. It gave, slowly. Unlocked.
“Swear to God,” he said, “if I never have to see Daniel Faust again—”
I swept into the office, Caitlin right behind me.
Dr. Francis Nedry, draped in a white lab coat, his eyes shrouded behind form-fitting mirrored glasses, froze with a phone receiver in his pale hand. His lips twitched.
I pantomimed holding a phone and whispered, “You’ll call them back.” Caitlin shut the office door.
“I gotta call you back,” he said and hung up the phone. Then he slumped into a cheap office chair behind a cluttered desk. He had a battered filing cabinet, a stepstool in the corner, and not much else. A streaky mirror on one wall captured the tiny room and reflected it back at us.
Not much of a fiefdom, compared to the last time we’d crossed swords. He’d been on Lauren Carmichael’s payroll back in the day, a scientist-sorcerer helping to fuel her rise to godhood. With Lauren he had funding, his own laboratory, and a steady supply of test subjects culled from Vegas’s homeless population. Looked like he’d fallen on harder times since then.
Nedry’s gaze shifted to a beige box beside the desk phone, with a little red button on top.
“Panic button?” I shook my head. “I wouldn’t do that.”
He looked down the barrel of my .45 instead. “You gonna shoot me?”
“Probably. Haven’t yet, though. Tell me what I want to know and you might stay lucky. Ink is nationwide and I doubt you’re running the show from some rust-bucket factory in Albuquerque, so let’s start with this: who’s the top dog?”
“They’ll kill me,” he said.
I glanced sidelong at Caitlin. She cracked her knuckles.
“Really,” she told him.
“Worse than you can, sweetheart. See, after that mess with Lauren, me and Dr. Clark went job hunting. We got…recruited. For Clark’s skill with, you know, various recreational pharmaceuticals and toxins, and for our shared background in trans-dimensional experimentation.”
“Oh,” I said, “like Viridithol? Like how you took snippets of cancerous plant life from the Garden of Eden and fed it to women who thought it was a new fertility drug?”
He held up an irritated finger. I saw my reflection loom in one lens of his mirrored glasses, Caitlin in the other.
“Test subjects,” he said. “Those women signed full releases and engaged in a proper clinical trial. But yes, mistakes were made. And learned from.”
I pointed at the closed door. “Ink? Don’t tell me you’re putting Viridithol in this shit.”
“You kidding me? After what happened to Lauren? Oh, hell no. Mistakes made, lessons learned. Iterate and optimize. That’s called science, Mr. Faust.”
“So who’s calling the shots?” I asked. “Five Families? Bratva? Cali Cartel? This isn’t a penny-ante operation—whoever’s behind it has a hell of a bankroll and nationwide reach.”
Nedry chuckled, but there wasn’t any humor in it.
“Nationwide? You wish they were just nationwide. Nah.” He leaned back in his chair. “Hell, you should probably just shoot me. You won’t believe me anyway.”
“Try me,” I said.
Nedry turned his mirrored shades my way. He tilted his head and sized me up.
“The Network.”
“Bullshit.”
He shrugged. “Told you.”
Caitlin looked my way, her brow lightly furrowed. “Network?”
“It’s an urban legend,” I said. “Criminal underworld spook stories, a cartel so secretive that nobody even knows their real name, or if they have a real name. They’re just ‘the Network.’ See, it used to be a popular scam back east. Guys would claim to be working for the Network and recruit local talent who thought they were being scouted for the big leagues. It basically boiled down to ‘rob this place while I supervise—in other words, do nothing—and give me most of the take.’ Then the recruiter would skip town and leave the locals holding the bag.”
“Used to be a popular scam,” Nedry said. “Know why it stopped?”
“Because everyone figured out the Network isn’t real, and the last few guys who tried it got their skulls split.”
“It stopped because the Network doesn’t like having its name taken in vain.” Nedry shifted in his chair. His arrogance coming back to the fore, even at gunpoint. “And you haven’t seen the proof because you’re not invited to the party. The Network is compartmentalized. It runs tight, silent, and with its tentacles in a thousand different pies. Anyone at street level, anyone who might flap their gums to the wrong people gets a little insurance plan installed in their intestinal tract.”
“The geas-roaches,” Caitlin said.
“You’ve seen those?” Nedry asked. “Huh, explains how you found this place. Kudos for that. They’re supposed to kill their hosts if they somehow get pried out. Dead men tell no tales.”
“I could maybe buy the feds not knowing about all this,” I said, “but why wouldn’t we, or the Outfit, or the Brighton Beach crowd? It’d be in their best interest to do business with us. They’re leaving money on the table.”
Nedry turned his ugly smirk my way.
“It’s not about money, Faust. The Network has a philosophy.”
“Which is?”
“Above my pay grade,” Nedry said. “I just know it exists. This isn’t a criminal syndicate. It’s a holy order.”
“For an organization obsessed with secrecy,” Caitlin observed, “you’re being rather loose-lipped.”
Nedry shrugged. “I was bored. Nobody to talk to around here. Besides, why not? You’re not getting out of here alive.”
I’d been watching his body language. His slow shift to the left, chair slightly turning. The way his head inclined toward the mirror on the wall. I couldn’t see his eyes behind those shades, but I knew exactly what he was looking at. And what he was planning to do.
“Focus on the gun,” I told him. “We’ve faced off before, remember? I know your tricks, Nedry. Don’t even think about jumping into that mirror. You’ve got about four feet of space to cross, and my trigger finger is faster than you are.”
“Oh, I’ve got a new trick or two,” he said. “See, Lauren Carmichael might have given me money and a fancy lab, but she wanted all the power—the real power—for herself. My new employers? They believe in rewarding loyalty. Observe and learn.”
He lunged for the panic button on the desk.
I shot him between the eyes. The Colt boomed in the tight office, my eardrums ringing as Nedry’s head snapped back. He slumped in his chair, dead.
I heard him snicker. My gaze shot to the mirror where his reflection, unharmed and smiling, gave us a wave.
“I don’t control reflections anymore, Mr. Faust. I am the reflection now. Iterate and optimize.”
His hand slapped down on the reflection of the panic button. A grinding klaxon sounded, echoing through the musty factory, letting Nedry’s guards know they had intruders. And telling them exactly where we were—in a tight little killing box, over two hundred yards from the front door, and with every gun in the building standing in our way.
9.
I shot the mirror.
I knew it was pointless even as I pulled the trigger, but I did it anyway, watching jagged shards scatter upon the office floor. Nedry grinned out from each and every one of them, reflected a dozen times as he flipped me the bird. Then he darted out of sight, his image vanishing.
I bolted for the door, flung it open—then jumped back as a full-auto blast of rifle fire raked through the doorway. It tore the desk to scrap and shredded papers into a cloud of confetti. Caitlin’s hand clamped on my shoulder, firm.
“I go first,” she said. “You provide covering fire. We stick to the pillars and go out the way we came in. Yes?”
I clenched my jaw, bracing for the fight.
She lunged out in a blur of motion, and I was right on her heels. Muzzle flare from the catwalk above. I snapped off shots on the run. The rifle tumbled from the shooter’s hands as his shoulder spouted blood. He stumbled back, losing his footing, going over the rail and screaming as he plummeted to the concrete fifteen feet below. We jumped behind a pillar and another gunman rounded the corner right in front of us, weapon to his shoulder. Caitlin knocked the barrel upward just as he pulled the trigger. The slugs chewed into the rafters, point-blank muzzle flash leaving streaks of white across my vision. Then she ripped the rifle from his hands and spun it around, putting two shots in his chest and the third through his skull.
I tried to break cover, falling back as another burst of gunfire rattled across a row of dented steel lockers to my left. Two shooters were perched behind the old conveyor belt, hunkered down and locked onto our cover, pinning us like bugs. I heard a voice shout over the deafening klaxon, “Bring up the grenades! Flush ’em out!”
Caitlin leaned against the pillar, gritting her teeth. My stomach twisted into a knot. She was bleeding, dark ichor oozing from ragged holes in her blouse.
“I’m all right,” she breathed. “Bullets, I can endure.”
I wasn’t sure about grenades. My chances weren’t too good either, but in that moment I wasn’t thinking about myself. Just her. Wanting to protect her, feeling like I’d failed. Helpless, trapped, out of ideas and waiting for the hammer to drop.
The wand throbbed against my forearm.
It was a tugging sensation, pulling at my veins and making my blood pulse in strange rhythms. I flexed my wrist to trigger the quick-release sheath. Canton’s wand dropped into my fingers. I caught it and whipped the bone tip upward in a flourish.
Double or Nothing (Daniel Faust Book 7) Page 6