The other god seemed to relax.
Briefly, Tyr saw past the part of Loki that always seemed to be on guard––always ready to take advantage, to pull some kind of con, ready to evade or do battle, ready to lie or cheat or steal his way out of some difficult situation.
Behind that, Tyr’s brother just seemed––happy.
“I am quite happy,” the god admitted. “And feeling a bit possessive of that happiness, I confess.” Loki gave him a worried look.
“You’ll let me know, yes? If you need any assistance with this thing? My wife understands it far better than I. She used to work for this group, this ‘Syndicate.’ In fact, I arranged to more or less fake her death as far as they are concerned, so that we didn’t have to worry about them bothering us again.”
Sighing, he flicked his fingers towards the memory stick.
“As for what’s on here, and why she wanted me to call you, all I can tell you is, she was doing surveillance at the instruction of her old boss. She watched the recordings only recently, after finding them in her bag… but what she saw concerned her. She tells me she pulled out the part she particularly wishes for you to see, and labeled it somehow inside here…”
Loki tapped the flash drive lightly with one finger, looking at the small piece of metal and circuits as if he was afraid it might explode.
Following Loki’s finger with his eyes, Tyr only nodded.
“I am sure I can find it, brother. Thank you again. And thank Lia for me.”
Loki looked up, his green eyes serious.
“I figure I owe you.” A touch more reluctantly, he added, “…I figure I owe you and Thor. For speaking to father about me. For letting me keep my life here, and not separating me from my wife.”
Tyr smiled, patting his brother’s shoulder warmly.
“I see no debt between us, brother. Therefore, I view this as a gift.” He gripped Loki’s shoulder tighter. “And congratulations, brother. I am thrilled and moved to hear you will be adding to the family soon. Be sure and congratulate Lia for me, as well… and tell her I am very much looking forward to meeting my new niece or nephew.”
Loki nodded.
There was a silence between them.
Somewhere in that silence, Loki seemed to decide their meeting was over.
Sliding off the barstool, the God of Mischief abruptly regained his feet. He stood there awkwardly for a beat, then thumped Tyr briskly on the back.
“Call us,” he urged. “You are always welcome, brother. Thor said something about dinner one of these days, as well. With the wives. You should come, too.”
Standing there a beat longer, Loki added,
“And call Lia if you need help with that… thing…”
Loki motioned vaguely at the flash drive he’d left on the wooden bar.
Tyr hid his smile politely.
“I will. And dinner sounds lovely. I would be most happy to come.”
“Okay. I’ll tell Thor.”
Loki stood there, hands in his pockets.
Then, without another word, the god turned on his heel and walked away.
There was a flash of light when he opened the door to the street, letting in the afternoon sun.
Then Loki, God of Mischief, was gone.
2
God Of War
T yr stared down at the memory stick Loki had left him.
For an instant, he smiled wanly at Loki’s muttering discomfort, coupled with his awkward but touchingly sincere affection… all delivered right before he vanished back into the light of day and presumably back to his pregnant wife and family.
After that brief smile, Tyr’s mood grew more somber.
Tyr had met Lia.
He had attended their wedding.
Loki’s new wife struck Tyr as not the type to spook easily.
Lia, Loki’s wife, was someone who had been unfairly jaded by the world. Tyr wondered what she could have seen on that flash drive that would make her so nervous.
The technology itself did not worry Tyr.
As a function of his job, he more or less had to be proficient with the machines of this world. Most wars in the modern era started with those machines, in one way or another.
Therefore, before he bothered Loki’s wife, Tyr thought he should look at what Loki had brought him, first.
Sighing at the thought, Tyr opened his coat, pulling out a small computer tablet.
Opening up a port on one side, he attached the memory stick, and waited for it to load. As he did, he tugged a wireless earpiece from his pocket and fitted it into his ear. As soon as the icon for the drive appeared on the desktop of his tablet, Tyr clicked on it to view the contents.
A list of audio-visual files appeared.
At the top, in capital letters, was a file named “TYR WATCH THIS FIRST.”
He clicked on that.
A movie file opened, showing a view of a white stone balcony covered with plants, chairs, and striped sun loungers. The loungers and chairs sat next to wrought iron and glass tables, painted white. Short white pillars ringed the far edge of the rounded balcony, covered in dark vines and purple flowers, decorated by potted rose bushes and dark green palms, despite the fact that winter was fast approaching this part of the world.
Whenever the video had been filmed, the sun shone brightly.
Tyr guessed the video might even have been made that morning.
He recognized the balcony as Loki and Lia’s.
The camera itself seemed to be placed on a larger glass table, with a chair with thick cushions that matched the patterns of the sun loungers.
Tyr saw a person walk around to sit in the white, wrought-iron chair, wearing dark blue pants and a white crop-top.
That person leaned back, and a face appeared.
It was Lia, Loki’s wife.
The blond woman with the dark-green, catlike eyes and the full mouth smiled into the camera, but Tyr saw the worry there, reflected in a visible tension on her face.
“Hey, Tyr,” she said, relaxing back into the chair. “There’s a lot here, so I thought I’d try to make it easier for you. In my last job for Gregor, I was doing surveillance at a kind of ‘banking’ conference in Kathmandu. At the time, I didn’t listen to all of it.”
Combing her fingers through her long, thick blond hair, she sighed.
“Truthfully,” she admitted. “I didn’t listen to most of it. I just bugged the guy Gregor wanted me to bug, did some surveillance to make sure I was getting roughly the intel Gregor wanted, and bagged everything at the end. Gregor had me hire a prostitute and a few other things to compromise the guy further, so I knew I had enough to give him leverage. As for the rest of it, I just copied it all on this drive. I planned to give it to Gregor when I got back to L.A.”
Lia adjusted her back in the striped cushions, folding her lean, tanned arms. She looked off to the side, lips pursed, then back at her laptop’s camera.
“Well, you pretty much know what happened after that. And when Loki got me away from Gregor, and away from that life, I forgot all about it. But the drive fell out of my old travel bag last night. I started listening to some of the files. Loki was curious, too, so we ended up listening to and watching a lot of it. Most was on the corrupt banking practices I mentioned. Money laundering for a lot of super illegal stuff. Trafficking. Drugs. Weapons. Prostitution. Children. Professional hits. Even things that sounded like terrorism, mostly in Africa and the Middle East. But I also found this…”
She reached up for the camera.
The screen cut away to black, showing nothing.
After a blip, another video clip started, this one fuzzier than the previous, and coming from a strange angle, one lower than face-height, but pointed upward.
The lens was wide-angle, so picked up a lot.
It struck Tyr that it must be coming from the front of someone’s body. Given what Lia said, he guessed it was her planted body-cam, a video surveillance bug planted on her target’s clothing to monitor his con
versations and meetings.
“That seems risky,” a man was saying in Mandarin. “Are you sure you want to go that far? You could start a war. A real one.”
Tyr leaned forward, his attention sharpening.
Due to who and what he was, Tyr understood and spoke the vast majority of human languages. He knew them well enough to know this man was likely native to the tongue.
The other person in the recording answered in American-sounding English.
“English, damn it!” he snapped. “We’re in here alone now. Don’t make me translate every damned thing you say.”
The other switched languages fluidly.
“I apologize,” he said politely in English. “I am asking if you are comfortable with the risks inherent in this approach. There could be wide-scale consequences… even military conflict.”
“Military conflict?” The second voice grew incredulous, then sarcastic. “Ya think?”
The first voice grew confused. “Sir?”
“Of course it’ll result in military conflict. It’s designed to result in military conflict.” The American snorted, his Southern accent growing more pronounced. “Jayzus on a popsicle stick, Lie Jie. I think you might be missing the point of this whole thing. War isn’t just some acceptable byproduct of this mess. It’s the whole damned point.”
Tyr leaned forward, his mental ears pricked forward.
“…The bastard won’t toe the line,” the second man complained. “We can’t afford to have him obstructing every damn’d thing we try to do. So we send the message. Either he gets off his high horse and learns to play ball, or we’ll burn his administration to the ground.”
Pausing, the American added,
“We have our own reasons for wanting war, anyway. War is good for business. Chaos on the international front is good for business. It sells weapons, Lie Jie. Girls. Drugs. Even apart from Ravenscroft’s bullshit, war is a completely acceptable outcome for the Syndicate. It might even be better for us… even if Ravenscroft were to cooperate. We take the girl, blame it on the Chinese, and he has to declare war.”
The camera shifted angles.
From the way it moved, Tyr guessed the person wearing it turned to face the second speaker directly. It struck Tyr that the man who’d initially spoken Mandarin was likely the person wearing the camera. Lie Jie also must have been the person Lia’s ex-employer, “Gregor,” wanted bugged and surveilled.
Perhaps Lie Jie wasn’t playing ball, either.
The second face swam into view.
Tyr found himself looking at a hard-eyed man with a scar that ran straight down one side of his face, from his forehead to the middle of his cheek. The scar marked him strangely, starting above his eye socket, then leaping over it to continue directly below, drawing a trail down his cheek, almost like he was crying.
He had one blue eye and one brown one, and short-cropped, military-style blond hair.
His heavily-accented voice grew hard as glass.
“In any case, me and the bosses are sick to death of screwing around with this piece of shit Boy Scout,” the man growled. “His daughter is his weak spot. She’s been partying all over Europe for months. We can pick her up easily on the Amalfi Coast. Or in Ibiza, or any number of other resort-type shitholes she goes to flash her tits––”
“But,” Lie Jie cut in. “War or no war, this is not a rival criminal we are talking about. This is the daughter of a world leader. Someone with an entire country behind them.”
At the other’s scowling silence, Lie Jie cleared his throat.
“You are talking about kidnapping the daughter of a head of state,” he reiterated, an audible tension in his painstakingly polite voice. “…Not just any head of state, but that of the most powerful country in the world. A nuclear power. Fooling a country of this size would be very difficult. The people could be fooled, yes… perhaps, through a concerted propaganda effort. But the military? The intelligence services? We would be labeled terrorists. Hunted by the full investigative power of the United States, and likely all of their allies––”
“You’re assuming we don’t have people on the inside already,” the second man said, giving him a cold look. “Don’t assume me a fool, Lie Jie.”
“Okay,” Lie Jie conceded diplomatically. “That would help, certainly. But I think it is foolhardy to assume we would not be found out by those loyal to the administration and the country as a whole. Ravenscroft will want to know the truth before he declares war. He would ask the Chinese. Not to mention, there will be local police involvement. Investigations. That is in addition to whatever military action Ravenscroft feels compelled to take––”
“You really think he’d be measured and rational?” the scarred man scoffed. “With his only daughter’s head on the chopping block? You know he lost his wife and other kid less than a year ago, right? In some car accident? They say his surviving daughter can do no wrong in his eyes. He thinks the slut walks on water––”
“Perhaps,” Lie Jie said, again diplomatically. “But there are other considerations.”
Lie Jie leaned closer, his words soft, yet infused with a darker meaning.
“The Syndicate leaders will not be pleased if we allowed this to get out of control,” Lie Jie said, quiet. “There is a very real danger of exposure risk, of our identity being discovered by the outside world. The Syndicate leaders may find profit in war, but like most business people, they dislike situations they cannot control. When it comes to destabilization, they can be quite… conservative… in their outlook.”
“Then don’t lose control of the situation,” the scarred man growled. “Make sure you’ve got all your I’s dotted and T’s crossed, brother. They need everything locked down and ready to go by the summit at Helsinki. That’s the go-time I was given by the higher-ups. They seemed to think you could handle that, Lie Jie––”
“I am always at the disposal of our leaders,” Lie Jie cut in hastily. “I simply wish them to be aware of all the risks. I would not be doing my job if I did not say these things. If this were to lead to nuclear war, it would not be good for any of us––”
“Well, you just make sure it don’t lead to that, Lie Jie,” the man said coldly.
His mismatched eyes grew flat, empty.
“This isn’t a negotiation,” he added. “I’m here to tell you how it’s going to be. You’ve got until Helsinki. That’s nine months. I’d hate to think someone with your abilities and connections couldn’t get this done in nine months––”
“I will not fail you, my friend,” Lie Jie cut in hastily, now sounding overtly worried. “…Or the Syndicate.”
“Let’s hope not. For your sake.”
The scarred man scowled at the camera, and presumably at Li Jie.
“I’ll let the bosses know I’ve delivered the message… and made you aware of the timeline at Helsinki.”
Those different-colored eyes grew colder.
“I’ll tell them you’re on top of this Lie Jie,” the American added. “That you can handle it. That the job’s not too big for you. In the meantime, I’d get to work, if I were you. If you’re that worried you can’t handle one little girl, maybe you aren’t the man for this job after all. If that’s the case, I sure wish you’d tell me now. So we don’t run the risk of ‘losing control’ of the situation, like you said.”
“I can handle it,” Lie Jie said hastily.
From the way the camera moved, he must have bowed.
“Tell them I understand what is required of me. I wished only to look out for their interests. I meant no disrespect, my friend.”
“I know you didn’t, Lie Jie. I know.”
“I think if we take the daughter, war may not be necessary,” Lie Jie added. “Ravenscroft will be reasonable. For all the reasons you said…”
The second man grunted, but didn’t answer.
It was pretty clear from his expression what he thought of the other’s words.
He didn’t think Ravenscroft would be
reasonable.
He didn’t believe that for a second.
Tyr was still studying that scarred face, the empty, mismatched eyes, when the video cut out, leaving a brief fuzz of static.
The screen went dark, then jerked.
Lia’s face reappeared.
With her, the stone balcony covered in vines and purple hanging flowers reappeared as well, showing the morning sun on a fall day in Paris. Amid the potted palms and rose bushes, a hanging tree filled with chirping birds, Lia smiled at the camera.
Her smile looked just as tense as before.
“The Helsinki conference is in two days,” she said, her voice grim. “I’m sure you gathered the gist from the recording, but I’m worried Lie Jie is right, that there could be a real problem if they kidnap that girl. Like a world war level problem. I’d be surprised if it’s not going forward, though, even with Gregor out of the picture. It sounded to me like Lie Jie was too afraid of his bosses to say no.”
Lia continued to frown as she leaned closer to the laptop’s camera.
“…I also think the guy with the scar is right,” she added. “It’s unlikely Ravenscroft will play ball. From everything I’ve read, he’s a white hat. He’s also extremely stubborn. And maybe a bit naïve. I don’t know what the Syndicate wants from him exactly, but I’d be surprised if they got it. Which means they’ll likely opt for war.”
Giving the camera another grim look, Lia fingered hair out of her face, adding,
“I looked up the daughter. Her name is Marion Ravenscroft, and it seems she’s still hanging out with the rich party crowd she latched onto after her mother and sister died. She did go to Ibiza, like the one guy said, but the season there ended in October. It was rumored she went to Los Cabos after that, but images I saw of her from this week were taken at St. Barts. So maybe start there.”
Hesitating, Lia leaned closer to the camera.
“Tyr, I hope you know this might be nothing,” she said, apologetic. “Marion Ravenscroft might be perfectly safe. She’ll have Secret Service protection. She might even have extra protection, if Ravenscroft’s received credible threats. I just know the Syndicate. I know what they’re capable of. Whatever Ravenscroft has keeping an eye on her, it may not be enough––”
Gods on Earth: Complete Series (Books 1-3): Paranormal Romances with Norse Gods, Tricksters, and Fated Mates Page 33