High Stakes Trial

by Mindy Klasky

  I barely caught the flicker of disappointment across Chris’s face when I didn’t respond. I let him sit up and clear his throat, as if he hadn’t been waiting for anything at all.

  “Let’s get going,” he said.

  Six o’clock. That’s when our mysterious contact would be home.

  I grabbed a quick shower and twisted my damp hair into a messy bun. I threw on clothes that were appropriate for the office. Chris and I both grabbed slices of toast, standing as we ate in the kitchen.

  “You’ll need a coat,” he said.

  I gave him a curious glance, but I grabbed a light jacket as we headed out the front door. Of course, he was right. The temperature had dropped precipitously from the morning. The wind had picked up as well. I felt as if I was leaning into a storm as we headed into the night.

  No car for us this time. We walked down the sidewalk, matching our long strides. And as we walked, I considered our destination. Clearly, we weren’t heading out to the suburbs; we would have taken the Corolla for that. We probably weren’t hitting a major tourist site, or we would have taken the subway.

  We passed century-old townhouses and modern office buildings. We came within half a mile of the White House as we skirted the eastern edge of George Washington University.

  At the far end of campus, smaller townhouses began their march to the Kennedy Center. These were modest two-story structures, each faced with clapboard or painted brick. Tiny front yards were mostly covered with flagstones, with the occasional brave herb garden sheltered in terra cotta pots.

  The sidewalks here were rough, the brick paths long since broken by the eruption of tree roots. After turning my ankle on one slippery corner, I kept my eyes down, the better to keep from sprawling flat.

  That was why I pulled up short when Chris stopped in front of the next building. He bent slightly to open the catch on the knee-high gate—more of a decoration than a deterrent. I let him lead the way to the front door.

  Chris rang the bell. There was a pause, and then the door opened on a chain. A man looked out at us, half his body sheltered behind the glossy green-painted panels.

  The guy could have made good money as an extra on a movie set. He was white, with an average frame and a medium complexion. He had unremarkable brown hair and muddy eyes. Nothing about him leaped out in any way. No one would look twice if they saw him passing on the street.

  His face was impassive as he waited for us to speak.

  Chris asked in a conversational tone, “Have you had a chance to see the moon tonight?”

  The man shifted his weight, hiding more of his body behind the door before he answered carefully. “I expected a lot of cloud cover.”

  Chris completed the exchange: “The sky is clear. You shouldn’t miss the view.”

  The man obviously wasn’t put at ease by the formula. Instead, he cast a probing look at me. I considered informing him that the eagle had landed or Elvis had left the building. Instead, Chris said, “I’ll vouch for her.”

  After a long minute of silent debate, the man closed the door, but only for long enough to slip the security chain from its track. As he gestured for us to enter, I belatedly realized the chain was silver.

  I didn’t see the stake until I’d stepped into the foyer.

  The man held it tightly in the hand that had been hidden behind the door, his knuckles white against the oak. He wasn’t taking any chances against vampire invaders.

  Chris stopped just over the threshold, extending his hands in ostentatious proof that he wasn’t armed. Of course, a sphinx didn’t need weapons to defeat a human.

  The man jutted his chin toward a casual living room. I led the way, taking in the Crate & Barrel couch, the television on the wall above the fireplace, a couple of scattered books and the Banner’s sports section left open on the coffee table.

  None of us sat. Instead, the man planted his feet just inside the doorway. He tapped the stake against his left palm, as if he were counting out the rhythm of a song only he could hear. He took his time, studying first Chris, then me. Finally, he said, “You’re sphinxes.”

  Bingo. Or, in my case, close enough for Empire work.

  Chris nodded and extended his hand, introducing both of us. “Tyler Hawkes,” the man replied, but he didn’t shake hands. At least he lowered the stake to his side.

  “We’re looking for James Morton,” Chris said.

  If I hadn’t been watching Tyler so closely, I would have missed the moment he thought about lying. But at the last instant, something made him settle on the truth. He said, “I haven’t seen him in six months.”

  Chris frowned. “What was your usual Muster?”

  “First and third Wednesday of the month.”

  Usual Muster… Recognizing Chris and me as sphinxes… The oaken stake and silver chain…

  “You’re James’s Source,” I said.

  Tyler turned flat eyes on me. “I was.”

  I stared at him more closely now. In the past two and a half years I’d learned a lot about vampires. I knew how to fight them. I knew how to heal them. I knew how to drink their blood to cure my own mortal wounds.

  But despite all that information, I’d perpetuated some myths in my own mind. Blame it on Hollywood, but I’d always assumed James’s drinking blood had a sexual twist. I’d never imagined he’d feed from another man. Not that there was anything wrong with that.

  When I’d thought about feeding—and it had come to mind more often than I cared to admit—I’d usually pictured James in a well-appointed hotel room. He kept champagne on ice for his so-called victims. He started the evening with oysters on the half shell and ended with thousand-count Egyptian cotton sheets. He brought along gifts for his women—boned corsets or sheer thigh-high stockings or, once in my overheated imagination, a studded leather collar.

  Sometimes, I pictured him prowling through a brothel. He chose his Source from a chorus line of waiting pros. He ordered her to bathe before he took her to bed, and he drank her blood without looking her in the eye.

  As a sphinx, or whatever the hell I actually was, I should have known better. I’d been taught about vampires’ needs. Blood meals were no more about sex for vampires than K-rations were seductive for soldiers on the march.

  And yet… I’d felt something when James fed from me. I’d shuddered when his fang sliced into my jugular. I’d almost fainted at the delicious pull as he sucked blood from the wound. He’d made me feel safe and protected. Cherished.

  But Richardson certainly hadn’t done the same. He’d ripped through my flesh like a scythe downing reeds. I’d been stunned by the pain, paralyzed.

  Feeding was different for every vampire. But I knew one basic rule applied, at least for vampires on the right side of the law: Sources were like campgrounds. Vampires were supposed to leave them better than they found them.

  I wondered if Tyler found sexual satisfaction serving James. Or maybe he’d reaped other benefits—tuition at the nearby university, or tickets for the close-by Kennedy Center…

  Whatever the arrangement, Chris had clearly been aware of the relationship long before we’d arrived on the doorstep. “Six months,” he said, tinging his words with disbelief. “And you haven’t taken on another vamp?”

  Once again, Tyler considered lying to us. Once again, he chose to tell the truth. But his fingers tightened around his oak stake. “James said it wouldn’t be safe. He said not to trust any other vampire, not to welcome anyone across the threshold. He said they’d take me for a blood herd.”

  A blood herd. A group of captive Sources. Richardson had been convicted of running them at least twice in the past. Convicted, but always let go, because of technical mistakes, procedural irregularities…

  Once again, Chris displayed his ostentatiously empty hands. He kept his voice low and his tone casual. “Is James seeing another Source?”

  “You’ll have to ask him.” Tyler’s tone was instantly flat. I suspected a Source didn’t last long if he couldn’t keep hi
s vampire’s confidences.

  “I want to,” Chris said, his voice purposely unruffled. “But I have to find him first.”

  “I can’t help you.”

  “Can’t?” Chris asked, as if he were reading a crossword puzzle clue out loud. “Or won’t?”

  Tyler settled a little more solidly on his heels. “You knew enough to find me. So you probably know I’ve Sourced James for thirteen years. In all that time, he’s never done anything to hurt me. The least I can do is return the favor.”

  I had to answer that. “We don’t want to hurt him. We’re trying to help him.”

  Tyler gave me a tolerant smile, but the expression didn’t move past his lips to the rest of his face. “If I see him, I’ll tell him you stopped by.”

  “Please,” I said. “We need to talk to him tonight.”

  “Then I hope you have another option.” He pointed toward the front door with the stake. “Good evening,” he said.

  Our interview was clearly done.

  Chris must have reached the same conclusion. He followed without another word.

  Neither of us tried to shake Tyler’s hand. Before the door closed, though, I tried one more time. “If you have any way of reaching him, please tell him…”

  What? I needed his help? I wanted to apologize for executing his mentor? I was willing to beg for anything, any scrap of information he could share that would end my legal prosecution, that would let me keep my job?

  “Good evening,” Tyler said again, and this time his tone of dismissal was final.

  An hour ago, I hadn’t known James had a Source in the West End. Now, I felt like I was leaving something valuable behind as Chris and I walked away from Tyler’s home. On the one hand, I was thrilled that James had kept his Source safe from Richardson’s blood herds. James had had enough presence of mind to worry about his human ally. He hadn’t been completely destroyed by the events on the steps of the Jeffersonian Memorial.

  But on the other hand, James’s caution only made me more concerned. If he wasn’t feeding from Tyler, where was he getting his meals? Was he actually using Richardson’s blood herds? Was he risking discovery by stalking random humans?

  I rubbed my arms, trying to chase away a chill that had nothing to do with the weather. My voice was miserable as I asked Chris, “Now what do we do?”

  “Now,” he said. “You go to work.”

  “And the ransomed files?”

  Chris took his time answering. We passed another three houses. “You’d better hope whoever has them is bluffing. Because the way I see it, we’re fresh out of moves.”

  15

  I shuffled up the sidewalk in front of the courthouse, automatically taking my phone out of my pocket in preparation for passing through the metal detector. I reached for my absent hematite bracelet as well. Failing to find it, I automatically swiped at my missing coral ring.

  With the court’s security ratcheted up to Orange, the magnetometers were set on stun. I half expected them to alert to the metal eyelets on my walking shoes.

  “Look what the cat drug in!” Earl exclaimed as I passed through the machine.

  I tried for a wan smile, the best I could manage under the circumstances. Before I could retrieve my phone, Earl passed me a padded manila envelope. A scuffed label was slapped on the front of the package, bearing my name and the court’s address.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “A kid dropped it off, about ten minutes ago.”

  I looked over my shoulder, at the plaza in front of the courthouse. Full night had fallen as I made my way from Tyler’s townhouse.

  “A courier?” I asked, studying the envelope with suspicion. I wasn’t expecting any special deliveries.

  Earl shrugged. “He rode up to the door on one of those scooters. Took off down Pennsylvania, after he left this.”

  I turned the envelope over. The back was smudged, and the sticky seal had been imperfectly applied. There was no indication where it had come from.

  Earl was a human security guard. Built like a linebacker, he had the patience of a boulder. Night after night, he and his colleague Bubba kept watch at the courthouse’s front door, utterly unaware of the courthouse’s subterranean dimensions.

  But they still followed the edicts of the court’s Director Of Security, whether they understood supernatural threats or not. Earl nodded toward the envelope. “I put it through the scanner. No ticking time bomb there.” He laughed at his own joke, one I might have found funnier if I hadn’t been worried about the ransom bomb ticking away in my office.

  “I swabbed it, too,” he said. He pointed a blunt finger toward the sniffer, the machine that analyzed squares of activated cotton to determine whether any given item had been in contact with explosives. “You’re good to go.”

  “Thanks,” I said, conscious as always about giving away too many imperial secrets.

  Holding the envelope by one corner, I made my way to the clerk’s office. There, I found a handwritten sign on the door: Clerk’s office temporarily closed. A scrawled URL directed people to the mundane night court’s website.

  Steeling myself, I headed into the battlefield of my office.

  I was granted one small mercy: My boss wasn’t standing in my desk alcove. But she—or some other imperial—had logged in to my computer.

  The garish green screen hurt my eyes. The ransom demand screamed its long string of nonsense letters and numbers, the Bitcoin account where I was supposed to send funds.

  The countdown clock raced beneath the demand, a constantly decreasing flow of numbers. The “days” field was zeroed out. As I watched, the “hours” field slipped from four to three. The numbers continued to spin away as I crossed the room.

  As always, one of the day clerks had moved things around on my desk. I twitched the stapler back to its proper place. I turned the pen holder to the correct angle. I shifted the computer keyboard, lining it up properly with the edge of the desk.

  Only then did I slip my finger beneath the sealed flap on the padded envelope. Sure, Earl said it was safe. But he didn’t know the full range of threats that could destroy the Eastern Empire.

  I tilted the envelope, and a cell phone slipped into my palm.

  Keeping in mind Earl’s assurances that the package wasn’t laced with explosives, I caught my breath as I pressed the phone’s power button. The screen sprang to life with a photograph of a hastily scrawled note: Open Me.

  I recognized the urgent slant of the words, the quickly dashed links between the individual letters. I would know James Morton’s handwriting anywhere.

  My heart squeezed hard enough to hurt. I reached behind myself blindly, fumbling until I found the arm of my desk chair. I sank into it and pulled the phone close.

  I stared at the virtual number pad, at the four blank spaces waiting for numbers. I’d taken this test before. I’d broken James’s code, when I’d forced my way into the credenza.

  1911, I typed. The address of my apartment.

  The screen wavered and cleared.

  A single icon sat in the middle of an empty black screen. I could make out the outline of an old fashioned wallet, the kind with a snap-tab to keep it closed in a man’s pocket. A stylized letter B blazed from the center of the icon.

  I tapped the wallet.

  A new screen phased into focus. The same stylized B decorated the upper left corner. Below the letter, a legend read, “Your Bitcoin address.” A long series of letters and numbers ran on for three lines. Beneath the address were the letters BTC and a number: 144.75969889. Beneath that, in letters almost too faint for me to read, a notice said, “Worth about $1,000,000.”

  I stared at the phone, waiting for the screen to fade away. Surely, it would shift to the same noxious green as my computer screen. It would start to scroll with its own crimson letters, another mocking countdown.

  But the message remained: Solid. Placid. Reliable.

  An arrow blazed at the bottom of the screen, next to the words, “Tran
sfer Bitcoin now.” My finger shook as I touched the emblem.

  A new screen opened. “Enter Bitcoin address,” it said at the top of the page. A convenient virtual keypad opened.

  It couldn’t be this easy. I couldn’t simply stop the ransomware by transferring funds from a random account.

  It wasn’t a random account, though. James had written the note on the first screen. He’d programmed the passcode, four digits that only I would guess.

  He was giving me the funds to save the court’s files.

  I glanced at my computer screen. The numbers seemed to flow away faster now, draining into the ether.

  The index finger of my left hand trembled as I set it beneath the first letter on my computer screen: Z. One by one, I edged beneath the scrambled letters, typing each into the new phone with my shaking right hand.

  ZzZ9y4fRgvf5Rx4HupbE5JjQqXx.

  Ignoring the hurtling clock, I read the sequence twice, to be certain I’d made no mistakes. I shifted my grip on the phone. I hovered over the button that said, “Transfer Now.”

  I tapped it.

  The screen shifted. A notification popped up telling me I’d transferred 144.75969889, and asking me to please be patient while the blockchain was verified.

  Please be patient. I wanted to throw the phone against the far wall. I’d read enough about Bitcoin to know that the currency consumed massive amounts of computing power. The blockchain was an impenetrable tangle of electronic encryption.

  How long would it take for a computer to sort out that information? Could the operation be done in three and half hours?

  I couldn’t leave my desk. I couldn’t stop staring at the cascade of numbers in the countdown. I couldn’t stop thinking about everything I’d done as the clerk of court—the files I’d created, the records I’d organized.

  Everything I’d done for the night court would be destroyed if the Bitcoin transaction didn’t process in time. But there was nothing else I could do, no one I could talk to, nothing I could say. I could only offer up a silent prayer to Sekhmet that I’d used James’s gift in time.

  The Staff Only door opened behind me. I wasted a moment thinking James himself might be there, coming in from his office as if nothing had ever changed. My greeting caught in my throat, though, as Angelique pounced.