“I’m interested, but not quite sure,” Sharon said. “My mother is in poor health, and we’re very close—”
“And since we’re madly in love, I wouldn’t do anything without her,” Gordon finished.
I gave them my best cop stare. “You rehearsed that.”
Both broke out laughing.
“We really didn’t,” Sharon said, “but we seem to work well together.” She cast a glance in Gordon’s direction. “We barely knew each other before this assignment. We’ve each always worked with older partners.” She sobered. “May be one of the last times, too. He’s getting married this spring, and he’ll probably have to go into the Family business.”
I wasn’t about to touch that one. Perhaps Gordon was in love with his fiancée, but it probably didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to get out of a business marriage no matter how Sharon felt about him.
“How does the church’s process work?” I asked.
Gordon took a sip of his beer. “They continually encourage you to spend more and more time at the church. Once they think you’ve swallowed their line, then they start talking about what a great life and career you could have with them.”
“That happens only with single people or couples of a certain age,” Sharon said. “While there are people of all ages at the church, they don’t recruit older people with kids, and they don’t recruit kids under about seventeen or eighteen to join the clergy.”
“We took a trip down to the church in Annapolis,” Gordon continued. “Same thing, only the priest there is pushier than Wilding. Anyway, they want us to go down to the Grand Temple in Kensington to see their way of life for ourselves. We’d go down on a bus with other people they’ve recruited.”
“And how many come back?” I asked.
“Dunno. That’s why we wanted to meet with you. Personally, a trip across the Rift doesn’t sound like a good idea.”
I told them to hang on, not make any commitments, and to let me talk to our boss.
“And if you can get a schedule of that bus going to the temple, let me know,” I said.
Whittaker asked very few questions when I briefed him on Gordon and Sharon’s report. When I finished, he sat in silence for a minute or so, then got up from his chair, went to the side table where he kept his liquor, and poured two glasses of whiskey. He handed me one, and sat back down behind his desk.
“I hate to drink alone, and after that, I need one,” he said, holding his glass up in a toast. We both took a sip.
“And what does this church do when the Rift moves again?” he asked. The Rift had a disturbing habit of disappearing from one part of the world and reappearing at random somewhere else.
I shrugged. “Ship their adherents across the globe? Considering the number of people they’re talking into doing this, I’m not sure that’s their main goal. I think the establishment of an anti-Magi cult is something we should be concerned about.”
He seemed to think about it. “Who would that benefit?”
“Besevial and the demons. But the important thing the Council needs to consider is the number of anti-Magi movements we’re seeing. The HLA is growing around the world, but they aren’t the only ones. I did some online searches, and there’s a growing resentment against us. Dozens of grassroot organizations mirror the HLA’s complaints. And the only winners in a human civil war would be the demons.”
Gordon texted me the bus schedule, and there was one leaving that afternoon. I called Aleks and asked him if he wanted to go for a ride.
Aleks and I sat in my car at the end of the alley behind the church and watched the bus pull in, seemingly without any problems from the veil. A dozen people filed out the backdoor and onto the bus—seven women and five men, all young.
We followed at a discrete distance until we reached the freeway, then I took to the air. The bus got onto the freeway, heading south to the DC beltway, crossed the battle line separating the Council forces from the demons holding Washington, and proceeded to the exit leading to the temple.
As we flew, we could see the Rift in the distance off to our left. A line of sparkling colors cut across the city and out into the Chesapeake Bay, ending just southeast of downtown Silver Spring. The colors rose as high as we could see, so we couldn’t see anything on the other side of the Rift. I knew from scientists’ repeated measurements all over the world that the breach in reality was exactly sixteen and one-quarter mile wide and seventy-two miles long.
“Absolutely amazing,” Aleks breathed. “This is the closest I’ve ever been to it.”
“I’ve been within about a hundred yards,” I said. “I’ve been told that there isn’t any spillover. Once, a robot was sent right to the edge, then it went an inch farther, and disappeared.”
“And what’s left when the Rift moves on?”
“Devastation. The buildings, streets, all that stuff are still there, but it looks like the aftermath of a battle. No living trees or grass or insects. All that is gone. I have been in such areas, between where the Rift opened and the Waste, which is where the nukes blasted the city. Eventually, the cockroaches, rats, Rifters, and some humans reoccupy the space. Until the Rift comes back again. It’s been seven years between the last time and this time.”
And in between, it had appeared in a dozen different places between the Mid-Atlantic and China. It never opened in exactly the same place as it had before, but usually nearby. The only exception was White Sands, New Mexico, where my grandfather set off the magikally enhanced nuclear explosion that opened the Rift the first time. It always opened in exactly the same place, signaling a new cycle of movement. Nothing ever came through the Rift at White Sands. We had no idea what was on the other side.
“We have company,” Aleks said.
I stopped my woolgathering and looked around. Ahead and to the sides above us were winged demons. The nearest was about three hundred yards away, but there was no mistaking their forms.
“Damn! That really sucks.”
“The shield I have around us is pretty good,” Aleks said, “but I’m not sure I’m up to taking on a dozen demons.”
About that time, there was an explosion ahead and about fifty feet above us. Anti-aircraft fire from the Akiyama troops on the ground. I pulled the car hard left and down, continuing the turn as I leveled it out until we were pointed east, away from the temple and the demons.
Or most of the demons. I immediately spotted two in front of us. One loosed a fireball, and I instinctively pulled the car to the left. The fireball hit our shield on the right side and slid past us.
“How fast will this thing go?” Aleks asked.
“About one-sixty,” I said. “Two hundred sixty KPH for you European types.”
“The demons behind us are gaining on us.”
I took the hint and kicked the Toyota up to its top speed. “Unfortunately, this is just a jury-rigged car, and not an airplane,” I said. “Even at this speed, it’s not very stable or maneuverable.”
An explosion hit us. The shield deflected it, but it knocked the car sideways and rattled our teeth. The gunners on the ground had our range. As soon as I got the car under control again, I cut the power. The car dropped two hundred feet in an instant, and I applied power again, turning more to the north toward friendly territory.
A fireball hit us from behind. The demons were closing in. I began to zig-zag, hoping to throw their aim off.
“There isn’t any way to shoot back at them?” Aleks asked.
“It’s just a car,” I said. “I don’t have any high-powered offensive weapons. Besides, even if I did, you’d have to lower your shield to use them.”
“Yeah, I don’t think we want to do that,” he said. “So, Whittaker told you not to come out this way?”
“Yeah. I thought it would be safer in the air.” I hadn’t given a single thought to flying demons.
Aleks didn’t say anything, but he didn’t need to.
Something small, maybe a quarter the size of a demon, flew past us go
ing the other way.
“What was that?”
I smiled. “A drone. Someone on our side has decided to help us.”
Several more drones whizzed past, one close enough that I could see the three-headed dog painted on the side. A glance in my rear-view mirror showed a drone engaging a flying demon. The demon lost.
Shortly thereafter, a squadron of four fighter planes streaked past overhead, coming from the direction of Baltimore. We weren’t being chased any longer, so I took the car lower, found an open stretch of highway, and set us back on the ground.
I woke up to find Aleks crouched down in front of me. I was huddled in a ball in the corner of his bedroom.
“Are you all right?”
“Uh, yeah, sure.”
“You were screaming.”
Probably not as loud as the guy in my dream, still alive and watching the Demon Queen munch on his liver.
“I guess I had a bad dream.”
He reached down and pulled me up, holding me close against him. “Considering some of the things you see on your job, I’m not surprised,” he said.
The dreams were coming regularly. Not just of my father with Akashrian, but of her torturing and devouring other humans. Most of the time my father was there, watching. Sometimes Besevial was there as well. I considered asking Kirsten if she could make a charm that would block my dreams, but I was afraid of what that might do to my sanity if I couldn’t dream at all.
The worst part was that I recognized some of the people Akashrian was torturing in my dreams. The faces were those I had seen in pictures of missing persons we were investigating.
Chapter 20
“Other than discovering that I’m not as stupid as I look, did you learn anything useful?” Whittaker asked me the following morning.
I was standing in front of his desk. I hadn’t received an invitation to sit.
“Not really. I didn’t have a chance to go in and see the place for myself.”
“What a surprise.”
It didn’t appear as though he was angry enough to start shouting at me or demote me—things that had happened in the past. But his eyes were hard, and the sour twist of his mouth hadn’t changed since I walked through the door.
“You know, a couple of million in munitions, aviation fuel, and drones usually have to be authorized in advance. Unfortunately, even if I garnish your wages from now until eternity, I don’t think you make enough for us to recover the expenditures. Stay the hell away from that place, Captain James. You’re employed as a policeman, not as a soldier, general, or a covert vid-star intelligence agent. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You have more important things to take care of. Someone managed to smuggle thallium-laced salt into the jail kitchens. We have a hell of a mess in the basement. Now get out of here.”
I tried not to let my relief show as I let myself out of his office. When I got downstairs, I found Carmelita, Mychal, Billie, and Luis Cappellino, leader of the HLA task force, in my office, huddled around Luanne.
“What the hell happened while I was gone?” I asked.
Luanne handed me a piece of paper. The statistics in black and white were almost overwhelming. There had been five hundred forty-three prisoners in the jail. Fifty-seven were on low-sodium diets and weren’t affected. One hundred and two received medical attention and the antidote and survived. Three hundred eighty-four prisoners, twenty-three kitchen workers, seven guards, and three policemen died.
“Ten of our own?” I asked. Neither the guards nor the cops were supposed to be eating prisoner food.
“It should make enforcing the rules on stealing food a little easier in the future,” Billie said.
“How in the hell, with an all-points bulletin out to every restaurant and Magi family in the Metroplex, did someone manage to smuggle that crap into Police Headquarters?”
Luanne turned her screen so I could see it and started a CCTV vid. I watched a man in a guard’s uniform, with an identity badge, walk into the kitchen with a large bag in his arms. He entered a closet or some kind of storage room. Luanne fast-forwarded about five minutes, then the man came out and left.
“Elesio Gomez,” I said.
Carmelita nodded. “Yeah. He finally graduated to the big time. I’ve already called the police station in College Park and asked them to have a couple of detectives watch his house.”
“Tell them to get a warrant. If they see him, pick him up, search the house, and arrest everyone inside. And tell them I want Elesio alive. I’m going to assume that Fast Freddy and Mark Clifford were casualties in last night’s poisoning?”
“Yeah,” Carmelita said, “they’re both dead.”
“So Elesio is the only person we know of who can connect Susan Reed to the thallium.” A thought struck me. “What about Julia Danner?”
“She’s gone,” Luanne said. “Her uncle took her to Denver about ten days ago.”
I surveyed the group. “I don’t think I have to tell you that Commissioner Whittaker considers these poisonings as our top priority. We need to find Susan Reed, find the truck the HLA has been using to transport the thallium, and find their stockpile of the poison. Think about it, and let’s meet in the conference room in one hour. I want some solid suggestions as to how we’re going to do that.”
I wracked my brain about what to do about Susan. If she was ensconced at Findlay House, the place was a fortress. Whittaker’s mercenary troops had attempted to take the estate during the last major battle between the Akiyama and Council forces but were repulsed. Even bringing in fighter-bombers to attack it from the air hadn’t worked.
In addition to the defenses put in place by Osiris Dillon—using a boatload of magitek devices designed and built by me and my father—my aunt, Courtney Findlay-Moncrief, was a powerful weather mage. Any attacks on Findlay House usually had to deal with both its human and magikal defenders, but also the nastiest weather imaginable.
Sitting alone in the conference room, waiting for my team to assemble, I hoped they might come up with a more feasible plan than I had.
“We didn’t come up with any magik beans,” Carmelita said when everyone appeared and took a seat. “But we do have an idea that might draw Susan out of the Findlay estate.”
Luis spoke up. “Have Whittaker and the Council declare the HLA a terrorist organization. They have yet to do so. That will allow us to arrest every known member of the group and go after their associates. No dancing around the pretty niceties, such as search warrants and finding reasonable cause. Suspicion of terrorist activities. We can apply it to all of her criminal contacts as well. Hit her drug operations, prostitution, weapons dealers, and anything else. Throw the whole police force at her. Totally disrupt all of her activities.”
I took a deep breath. “That’s almost like declaring martial law. Suspension of civil liberties.”
“We are at war, you know,” Mychal said. “This is less authoritarian than martial law since it affects only those designated as terrorists. None of the law-abiding citizens would be affected. And if an HLA member buys a drug from a human dealer who got the drug from a Rifter, we can crack down on the whole chain.”
“And you think that will draw her out of Findlay House so we have a chance at capturing her?” I asked.
Carmelita shrugged. “It will cause enough chaos that it will disrupt any plans she has. If all the rats are searching for bolt holes, they aren’t going to have time to poison anyone.”
“We have an empty jail,” Luanne said. “What do we have to lose?”
A detective knocked on the door, then came in.
“Captain? Did you put out an APB for an Elesio Gomez?” he asked.
“Yeah. Did you find him?”
“This morning,” he replied. “He was found in an alley about five blocks from here with a bullet in his head.”
Chapter 21
Two days later, Whittaker formally declared the HLA and three affiliated groups as terrorist organizations. The de
claration included all areas under the jurisdiction of the Council—North and South America, Europe, and Western Russia.
We drew police officers not only from Major Crimes and the HLA Taskforce but also from the Drug and Vice divisions. In the Metroplex, Whittaker assigned two battalions of soldiers to back us up.
The first raid I personally conducted was on the house Elesio Gomez rented in College Park. Carmelita knocked on the door, and a smiling young woman opened it.
“Hi Dolores. What’s up? Come on in. Elesio isn’t here right now.” She turned and walked back into the house.
Carmelita followed her, I followed Carmelita, and seven SWAT guys followed me. There was a lot of shouting and screaming, people running around, and some futile attempts to escape out the back door. When all the commotion settled down, we hustled twelve young men and women of university age out of the house in handcuffs.
Carmelita and Luanne began searching all the rooms—Carmelita upstairs, and Luanne in the basement. I sat down at the computer in the family room, where a large conference table was set up, along with bulletin boards, a white board, and a projector screen.
The computer screen presented me with a request for a password. Using my magik, I bypassed that and delved directly into the contents of its data storage. It took me about fifteen minutes to wade through all the propaganda, pornography, university coursework, and emails to find what I was looking for—the secure connection to the HLA’s dark network. Another five minutes to hack that, and I was in their main server complex.
Forty-five minutes later, I checked to make sure there was a printer with paper attached to my workstation, then plugged a data chip into a slot. I sent the North American member list to the chip and to the printer simultaneously, and sat back.
Carmelita came in, checked the printer, then came over to where I worked. She held out her hand and showed me half a dozen storage chips. “Don’t know what’s on them yet, but I found these behind a drawer in Elesio’s bedroom.” She gestured toward the printer. “I also found a lot of paper. Documents, emails, maps. All kinds of stuff.”
Soul Harvest (The Rift Chronicles Book 3) Page 11