by Weston Ochse
Trevor had joined because his family had a tradition of service going back hundreds of years. Walker had joined to be like his brother.
Genaro Stewart, she now learned, had joined because it was the only way he’d be able to afford college. His intention was to stay in long enough to have his loans paid off, then get out, but he’d ended up liking the service more than any possibility higher education could unleash.
They all had reasons for serving. She’d originally joined to help out Trevor, to show her appreciation for what he’d done for her and her brother. But that had quickly changed as she came to learn that she enjoyed doing something that made an impact greater than she could alone. What she was doing had an effect on everyone in her beloved country. And to think she never would have discovered any of this had the hooligans not decided to target her and her brother.
Her brother had provided her a log-in screen behind his firewall. It gave her similar superuser privileges. While he was busy trashing links his algorithms found, she’d do a little detective work. She went straight to the CCTV database. Although the Blackpool cameras had been interrupted during the attack, they wouldn’t show any problems prior to the attack. For the woman to have been in place to take pictures at the right time, she would have had to have been there previously.
Preeti spent an hour cycling through Blackpool images before she found her. Wearing a white dress and with blond hair, the woman behaved as if she knew she was being filmed. She kept her face down and away from every camera she came near. Preeti didn’t have enough to run face recognition. But she had a better idea.
She walked the woman to the point at which the CCTV cameras were interrupted. She already had her camera out and ready, possible proof of Preeti’s theory. When the cameras started working again Preeti was able to find and follow her from camera to camera until she got in a vehicle. The first was a municipal bus, which took the woman to a bus stop on Church Street. The woman got off, waited for ten minutes, walked west for three blocks, then boarded another bus, which backtracked to Devonshire Square. Then she took yet another bus, this one all the way to Blackpool North Railway Station, where she got out and went inside.
Preeti sat back. This next step was a problem. She spent the next twenty minutes hacking into the British Transport Police servers, which got her access to the cameras inside the terminal. She was able to view live feeds but couldn’t find any stored feeds. After another twenty minutes she found out where they were supposed to have been.
Someone had gotten there first.
“Bastard.”
Preeti could always check the train schedule, but without a clear biometrically capable shot of the woman’s face it would mean nothing.
She rattled her fingers on the desk for a moment. Had she missed something?
Of course she had!
She checked the footage from inside the buses. She got access to the cameras and found where the files should have been stored.
Again. “Double bastard!”
Someone was covering their tracks quickly.
She needed to hurry.
Then she had a brainchild!
She went back along the woman’s route of travel and marked the location of each ATM and found one at Grosvenor Convenience Store that had the perfect angle. It took her a few moments to hack into it; then she was able to back through the photos taken during transactions.
And there it was.
Or at least, there half of it was. She had the upper half of the woman’s face, seen over the shoulder of a haggard-looking man withdrawing money. The rest of the pictures had buses or taxis in them.
Then she zoomed into one of the faces in a bus window in another photo. The route of travel from Devonshire Square to Blackpool North had brought the blonde back by the ATM for the second time. The woman was good, but she wasn’t as good as Preeti.
There, in the window of the bus, she could make out a full side shot of the woman’s face, even as she kept her head tilted forward so she could hide from the camera in the front of the bus.
Preeti collected the image, cleaned it in Photoshop, then uploaded it to her biometrics program. Then she set it to search. It could take a minute, or a day, or a month, or forever. At the very least, her program would scour the system for matching faces in both real time and storage. Her guess was that the woman—or an associate—had gone in and removed evidence of her in storage, so it would have to be in real time.
She stood and stretched. She went over to the fridge and grabbed a can of Coke. Genie sat at a nearby table watching a TV episode on his laptop.
“Want one?” she asked.
He did. She gave him one, then sat next to him, watching the episode run on the screen. She had no idea what it was, but it looked like nerds sitting in a living room singing songs.
“Want to hear?” He pulled out one of his earbuds.
“No. Just trying to clear my head.”
“This shit will do it.” He angled his head toward the back room. “Anything to keep from thinking about that back there.”
“He just looks like an old man to me.”
“Whatever that is inside him was out for a while back at Van Dyke’s house. I saw it. It looked like a stick man, walking in the shadows of his house. One minute it was there; the next it was a pile of sticks.” He shuddered. “Some things you just can’t unsee.”
He put his earbud back in and resumed watching the show.
Preeti sat there as long as it took to finish the soda. Then she got up, tossed the can in the garbage, and went to the restroom. By the time she came out, an alert on her screen was blinking.
Stewart stood beside it. When she came up behind, he said, “I wasn’t sure if there was anything I should be doing.” He pointed to the screen, which showed a live image of a woman in a long coat who was walking down a city street. “Is that her?”
“Absolutely. Where’d she come from?”
He pointed to a car pulling away from the curb. “That one.”
Preeti copied down the plate number, then input it into another program, this one assigned to the National Automated Number Plate Recognition Data Center. She set her program to automate, then returned to looking at the woman … the woman who had stopped and was staring into the camera at them.
“She’s not looking at us,” he whispered.
“I think she is.”
The woman smiled and began to move her fingers and hands in a complex geometric pattern. The screen began to fuzz and pixilate.
Preeti felt fingers of worry dance along her back. She couldn’t be sure, but it felt as if the woman was in her head with her. Something. A presence.
She jumped forward and shoved the monitor onto the floor, where it crashed, pieces of plastic and glass shooting out in all directions. Then she ripped the cord free from the wall, removing all power.
Stewart fell heavily into his seat. “What the hell was that?”
“I don’t know, but now I’m scared.”
“Just now you’re scared?” Stewart grinned nervously. “This shit has been scaring me from the very beginning.”
“Do you know what I wish?” she asked.
He regarded her.
“I wish that we weren’t alone.”
They both looked toward the giant closed door of the hangar and the small door set in it.
CHAPTER 28
NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM, LONDON. AFTER MIDNIGHT.
They’d been in place for three hours and Yank’s boredom meter was already pegged. They were on radio silence and no amount of imagination was going to help him pass the time. He hated waiting, which was one of the reasons he’d become a SEAL. Too many nights aboard ship pulling watch, staring at a display or out to sea, had been such a mind-numbingly brutal existence that he seriously had considered quitting the military and returning to Los Angeles.
And now, here he was waiting once more, pulling a sort of watch. The only thing good about it was that at the end of this he’d have a chance to s
hoot people. Maybe even kick them in the head a few times. He took a deep breath and reminded himself why they were here. It was like Holmes had said: We don’t really give a fuck about someone else’s problems. We were formed to protect our country, to deal with her problems. But when someone else’s problems become one of our problems, then we’re all-in.
All-in. Yank liked that.
Just as his adopted father, Uncle Joe, had been all-in for Yank.
Petty Officer Second Class Shonn Yankowski. That name really told his entire story. He could have chosen the name of his father, who’d ended doing life in Chino. Yank had never met the man but knew he was a thug for the 22nd Street Hustlers and part of the Bloods. His last name had been Johnson, but Yank had refused to take the name of a man he’d never met. He could have kept the name of his mother, who after spending his first six years clean and sober had broken down into the sorry caricature of an L.A. crack whore. Named Rennie Sabathia, his mother had called him Shonny, which went well with her last name. And he’d owned that name, right up until the day she’d died in the fire and he’d earned the burns on the side of his face trying to save her. At thirteen, he’d met Joseph Yankowski, recently transferred from Chicago to Los Angeles as part of the longshoremen’s union. Uncle Joe, as Shonn learned to call him, ran a foster home in San Pedro, and Shonn soon found the first stable and safe place he’d ever known. Fostering turned to adoption, and by the time Shonn turned eighteen and made his desire known that he wanted to join the U.S. Navy he also had changed his name to Yankowski, out of respect and love for Uncle Joe—not really an uncle, not even a relative, but more of a father than he’d ever imagined having.
Holmes reminded him of Uncle Joe. They were both hard-ass, no-nonsense types, but you could tell that underneath it all they cared immensely about what they were doing.
Nothing at all like Laws. There were times that he loved working for the brainiac. But others, like when Laws made fun of him back in the hangar, he wanted nothing more than to haul off and slug the guy. Laws seemed to always be yanking his chain about something. While Yank appreciated humor as much as the next sailor, he didn’t like it done at his expense.
He sighed.
He’d figure out how to handle Laws. The key was to keep his cool until he did so.
Yank checked the monitors through a toggle on his QUADEYE. They’d set up four cameras. Either they’d show when someone was coming or else the image would become distorted. Either way, they’d have some warning.
Holmes had sat him up in an alcove in the main hall. The gargantuan interior was like being in a domed football stadium, that is, if the stadium had marble steps, polished wood rails, wainscoting, and elevated ceilings with tray case paintings and skylights. It was beyond elegant. It was what the British called posh.
The night security lights created pools of luminosity through which a security guard moved along his normal route. He’d been told to ignore the SEALs and Section 9 members. Ian had shown the man a badge and said something about national security and it was all over. The guard had been relieved. He had thought they were there to pick him up because of his wife’s overdrafts. That Triple Six didn’t care made his day.
Yank shouldered his HK416 and plugged his QUADEYE into the rifle’s scope. He zoomed in on the areas of the roof outside the skylights but couldn’t detect any movement. If he had to bet, they’d come from that direction. It’s where he would come from if he was infiltrating.
His MBITR crackled. “Ghost Four, this is Ghost One. Status? Over.”
“Ghost One, this is Ghost Four. Nothing here.”
Of course this all could be a crap shoot. The Red Grove might never show. No sooner did he think that then a shadow twisted on his periphery. He turned toward it but saw nothing. Just a wall with a bronze bust in front of it. Then he saw another shadow, this time to his left. But just as before, when he turned it was gone.
They called it ghosting. Seeing things that weren’t there. He thought about calling Holmes but didn’t want to be the one to sound a false alarm. He was literally just chasing shadows now and would only call if he had anything besides his own tired and inventive imagination.
Shadows twisted twice more in his peripheral vision. Both times nothing was there when he looked. He altered strategy and began staring straight ahead, counting on his peripheral vision to sort itself out. Then he saw them … actually saw them … shadows, crawling across the walls. Roughly humanoid in shape, they moved fast across the surface, like lizards.
He toggled his mike and was prepared to tell his team, when he felt cold.
Everything went black.
Then he was falling.
* * *
Holmes and Sassy Moore were in the sub-basement room called the cauldron. The head sat in the middle of a metal table, upon which a pentacle had been drawn in white chalk. A gag had been placed over the golem’s mouth, but the eyes remained fixed on Sassy, as if she’d been chosen as the target of the monster’s enmity. Other strange symbols adorned the points of the inverted star. Sassy had her eyes closed and was humming slightly off-key.
Holmes called for another report. All SEALs answered except Ghost Four. Holmes tried again, but still no response. He called the team net. “Ghost Four may be down. Prepare.”
“Ghost One, this is Ghost Two,” Laws said, keeping radio discipline despite the sudden jolt of concern in his voice. “I’m in the best position to check on Ghost Four.”
“Negative, Ghost Two. We’ll wait and see if it’s not just radio issue.”
“And if it’s not?” Walker asked, unconcerned with net discipline.
“Then we’ll know soon enough, Ghost Three.”
Holmes was about to call for Yank again but stared at the head instead, which was now floating five inches above the table.
“Um, Miss Moore? Should the head be doing that?”
Her eyes snapped open. “Oh, hell.” She closed her eyes again. This time her hum was louder but equally off-tune as the one before.
The head began to gently lower. But it never did get all the way back to the table. It hovered a mere inch above the surface for a moment, then began to rise again.
“Better try something different.”
She opened her eyes, reached out, and grabbed the head. She pressed it firmly back on the table in the center of the pentacle, then removed her hands. It stayed where it was this time.
“I thought that design meant other witches couldn’t touch it.”
“I thought so too. But there are so many arrayed against me.”
“Will you be able to keep it down?”
“With any luck.”
Holmes stared at the head as it stared at him. He called for Yank once more. Nothing.
“Are they close?” he asked the witch.
“Yes and no. I feel someone, somewhere near. But they’re also all over the astral plane. I’m having trouble hiding.”
“What happens if they find you?”
“If I can’t get away or take them down, then I’m stuck there.”
“Stuck as in—”
“Forever. Now hush, you big old SEAL, and let me concentrate.”
Holmes keyed his mike. “Ghost Two, move out and track down Ghost Four. Report everything, over.”
Laws keyed his mike twice, signaling affirmative.
Holmes leaned back against a file cabinet. He fought the feeling of helplessness that crawled on little monster feet into his thoughts. The head stared at him with laughing eyes.
* * *
Laws was three rooms over from the central hall. They’d placed him in the Ecology exhibit hall because of its proximity to the only two elevators and two sets of stairs capable of reaching the lower levels where the others were. The idea was not for him to engage any targets but to allow them to descend to where Walker, YaYa, Ian, and Trevor awaited.
But that was before Yank went silent.
Laws moved swiftly through the exhibit, keeping out of the center of the room. He l
eft his QUADEYE off, using the ambient security light, which was enough for him to do pretty much anything but read. When he reached the doorway to the central hall, he took a quick look inside, then brought his head back. He didn’t see anything.
He looked again, this time concentrating on the area where Yank was stationed.
Gone.
Where could he have gone?
Then Laws heard scuffling.
He spun around the corner, his sound-suppressed HK416 sunk into his shoulder and ready to fire. There, at the far end of the gallery, was a man being dragged by two immense dogs. Not just any man, but one clad in black with body armor.
Laws sprinted toward them. The immense dogs were the same he’d seen in the still photos the girl had provided to the media. On the screen they had looked strange, but in person they were truly disturbing, especially the reverse bending elbow of the too-human arms each beast had for its front legs.
Of more immediate concern was that Yank wasn’t moving.
Laws opened fire, catching each hound with half a dozen rounds. He’d taken down chupacabra bigger than these things with less. For good measure, he unloaded the rest of the magazine into them.
They blinked at him, then dropped Yank and sprang toward him. He did the only thing he could think of—he ran. He took a dozen steps and leaped into the air, grabbing the rear right leg of the Apatosaurus skeleton that dominated the center of this part of the central hall. He pulled himself up frantically and found his perch on the skeleton’s back before the creatures were able to follow.
One leaped and failed to find purchase, sliding back to the floor, falling on its back, then twisting to its feet.
The other, however, was able to hang on using the fingers of the human arms. It pulled itself up, where it found its balance on the Apatosaurus’s back.
Laws backed away and began to climb the giant dinosaur’s neck, using the vertebrae as stepping-stones. The display wasn’t meant to hold a man, much less a mythical monster. It creaked and shifted. A low tremble went through the entire skeleton, but it seemed to hold. He climbed as high as the head; then there was nowhere else to climb.