She was his white whale. His Holy Grail. The culmination of his life’s work.
He was sorely mistaken about her, but she was convinced that he believed every word he was saying.
Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was continuing to miss something. As big, or even bigger than, what she had just uncovered. But an exploration of what this might be would have to wait.
“I don’t have time for this right now,” she said. “I need to call my captain and alert him to what happened tonight. I need to explain that Neil Marshall and Shane Frey have just spent inordinate money and resources trying to frame me. If I don’t get ahead of this, and quickly, I could still get steamrolled by it.”
Vega nodded. “I understand.”
The detective frowned. “My phone didn’t make it. Can I borrow yours?”
“Of course,” he said cheerfully. “I’ll help you in any way I can. All you have to do is ask.”
11
Eldamir Kor sat as surreptitiously as he could in the lobby of the Camden International Hotel, pretending to be absorbed in his cell phone, unable to keep his skin from crawling. He could never get used to the low lighting on this planet, no matter how much experience he had with it, and it creeped him out. Every time.
He desperately wanted to activate the implants in his eyes to amplify the light, but there was no hiding their operation. He cursed the home scientists. How much effort would it have taken to eliminate this ridiculous side effect, so they could use this feature inconspicuously?
Even without gleaming eyes, he stood out like a supernova, tall, thick, and intimidating. His features were harsh by human standards, even threatening. Like all of his kind.
He passed the time by fantasizing about killing Shanifrey and Tiparax both. Shanifrey had been responsible for forcing them to carry out, in person, what could have been a simple remote surveillance mission. And Tiparax had chosen him for this miserable hotel lobby duty, while he remained upstairs with both Fanimore and Mezzitorp, relaxed, comfortable, and making full use of their implants to provide enough light to suit their needs.
Tiparax was the second-highest ranked member of their Earth contingent, just over sixty members strong, so Eldamir didn’t blame him for staying in the room. Rank did have its privileges, after all. But Eldamir was third-in-command, while Mezzitorp and Fanimore were so low down the food chain they didn’t rate any consideration whatsoever. Even so, Tiparax had chosen to let these peons stay with him in comfort, while sending Eldamir off to suffer alone.
It was infuriating. Eldamir imagined skinning Shanifrey alive, taking his time to picture every last cut and scream, and then imagined carving a protest letter into Tiparax’s body with a sharp knife.
The third-in-command was so lost in thought that he almost missed a development of paramount importance, only realizing what he was seeing when it was almost too late. Even then he did a double-take, first thinking he must be mistaken since he was so poor at differentiating between human beings. But he was quickly able to confirm his suspicions using the facial recognition program he and his comrades had installed on their phones.
This was truly a stunning development.
He quickly reached out to Shanifrey Doe with his comm, conferencing in his three comrades in the room upstairs at the same time.
“What?” shouted Shanifrey after accepting the call. His tone was nothing short of furious. “You seriously have the nerve to bother me right now?” he barked. “I’m in the middle of something important.”
Eldamir had fully expected this level of ferocity. He desperately wanted to say, “What’s the matter, Commander, did you misplace your detective?” but knew that the human expression, poking the bear, wouldn’t begin to cover how big of a mistake uttering this particular sentence would be.
“I’m confident you’ll find this worth the interruption,” he reported subvocally instead. “We tracked our target to the Camden International Hotel,” he added, speaking as quickly as he could to reach the punchline of the report before Shanifrey’s head exploded, “where he checked in for the night. Tiparax, Mezzitorp, and Fanimore are in the room next to his, and I’m watching the lobby. Just minutes ago Detective Anna Abbott arrived here, and is now in an elevator, presumably heading to his room.”
“Are you certain?” said Shanifrey, suddenly as alert as if he had been struck with a cattle prod, his tone no longer dismissive of Eldamir, or his wisdom in arranging for the call.
“I am. She’s changed her clothing from the restaurant. But I’ve confirmed it’s her beyond any doubt.”
“How can that be, Commander?” said Tiparax from the hotel room upstairs. He rose from the bed on which he had been seated and came to full attention, carefully avoiding the bodies of a married couple whose throats they had slit when they had helped themselves to the room, and two expansive pools of crimson blood that were slowly soaking into the beige carpeting. “I thought she was slated to be killed after she left the restaurant?”
“She was!” snapped Shanifrey angrily. “But I made the mistake of leaving the operation to a group of humans. And they had a temporary . . . setback.”
He paused. “But here’s the good news. Because of your last call, which alerted me that she’s much more important than I had known, I’ve upped our game. Significantly. In light of what we now know, perhaps it isn’t entirely surprising that she managed to survive the attempt on her life. But after she did, I ordered that extreme measures be taken to see to it that her reputation is destroyed, despite our setback. Measures that I never would have considered had I not known about her dinner meeting tonight.”
His second-in-command frowned. This was as close to a thanks or a well done as Shanifrey was likely to ever give him. “Glad to be of service,” said Tiparax. “Do you have any idea why she would come straight here after she survived your ambush?”
“Not really, no. They must have developed more of a bond than I expected during their dinner meeting. But this works in our favor. She’s put herself back on our radar.”
“What would you like us to do?” asked Tiparax.
“First,” said the commander, “I need to know what’s happening in the room next to you. Use your comm to amplify the sound and transmit it to all of us.”
“Understood,” said Tiparax.
The voices of the man they had been following and Anna Abbott came though their comms almost immediately, loud and clear. They listened intently for several minutes before Shanifrey interrupted the feed. “I’ve heard enough,” he said.
“Does that mean you have new orders for us?” asked Tiparax.
“It does,” replied his commander. “I’m done playing games. I need you to kill them both. Attract as little attention as you can. But no matter what, I want them dead. As soon as possible. Understood?”
“Perfectly,” said Tiparax enthusiastically. “I thought you’d never ask.”
***
“Captain Perez,” said the detective into Tom Vega’s phone, “it’s Anna Abbott. Sorry to bother you on a Friday night, sir, but it’s important.”
“Go ahead,” said the gravelly voice of her captain. Anna sensed that something was off about him, although she wasn’t certain what. In addition, her hidden mind seemed troubled that he hadn’t bothered to ask her why her call was coming in from a phone that didn’t register on his Caller ID, although he probably just didn’t want to hold her up when she clearly had urgent matters to discuss.
Anna’s head jerked upwards and she strained to hear an inaudible sound or see an invisible threat, like an alert gazelle having detected a stalking lioness through some sixth sense.
She gasped, and then, based on nothing but instinct and impulse alone, launched herself toward Tom Vega, executing a perfect tackle and driving both of them onto the bed, just as several muffled shots screamed through the wall of the room, missing Vega by inches. One of the bullets hit her instead, but luckily it only managed to crease her upper arm, creating an inch-long groove o
f blood but only superficial damage.
The moment they landed, Anna rolled off the side of the bed farthest from the shooting, pulling Vega with her, as several more slugs penetrated the wall, clearly coming from a silenced gun being wielded from the room next door.
Two table lamps and the plasma TV monitor on the wall exploded into shards as Anna attempted to roll under the bed, but was blocked by a solid wood platform under the frame that was resting on the carpeting.
The detective pulled Vega as close to the bottom of the bed as she could, while struggling to assimilate the situation and determine her next move.
Vega began to speak but Anna slammed an open hand over his mouth, muffling his words. She put a finger to her lips, indicating she wanted total silence. Let whoever was aiming for them believe they had succeeded. Besides, the shots had been fired with pinpoint accuracy, leading her to believe that the shooter had some means of getting precise telemetry based on their voices alone.
“Anna!” came the shouted voice of Captain Perez through Vega’s phone. “Anna, are you there?” Only then did the detective realize she had kept her grip on the phone until she had hit the floor below the bed, and that it was now lying on the carpet, a foot away. “What’s going on!” he demanded, his voice booming.
Three more bullets streaked through the wall and embedded themselves into the mattress and dresser, aimed with uncanny accuracy right where the captain’s shouts had emanated from the phone. Only their position on the floor behind the bed had saved them.
Anna stabbed at Vega’s phone with such urgency it looked like her hand was spasming, and managed to end the call before her captain could advertise their position, and that they remained alive, yet again. This done, she pulled her silenced gun from its holster and held it at the ready.
An eerie quiet settled over the room, which now looked like a war zone. No more shots were being fired, at least for the moment, and Anna’s mind raced. She had to predict what would happen next to have any chance of survival. She strained to try to see the future, just in case Vega was right about her being clairvoyant, but she saw nothing.
Of course she saw nothing. The idea of precognition was ludicrous.
She needed to put herself in the head of the hostile in the room over, she realized, to predict his next move. What was he doing? What was he thinking?
Whoever he was, he would eventually need eyes on his targets. Shooting blindly through a wall had the benefit of surprise, but no matter how much confidence he might have in the accuracy of his shots, the only way to be certain the targets were dead was to be certain the targets were dead. The shooter would need to enter Vega’s room to confirm the kills. Conduct a visual inspection. Check for breathing or a pulse.
If Anna were in the shooter’s place, she would assume the targets were still alive, at least at first. She would stand at the ready in the hall outside their door. If they were alive, they’d have little interest in remaining fish in a barrel, and would bolt from the room to safety shortly after the shooting stopped. If they didn’t exit the room after five or ten minutes, only then would she enter to confirm the kills.
She became convinced that this is exactly what the shooter was doing now.
Anna put her finger across her lips once again and motioned for Vega to maintain his position on the floor.
She slowly crawled away from the bed, soundlessly, avoiding the many shards of glass and splinters of wood scattered on the carpeting and throughout the room. As she neared the door, she realized that someone was waiting in the hall outside, just as she had predicted, although as was common with her, she had no idea how she knew.
She took a deep, silent breath, raised her gun, and fired four times through the door as quickly as she could pull the trigger. She adjusted the height of her aim each time, starting at what she hoped was head height, just in case the hostile beyond was wearing body armor.
The instant she stopped firing she heard the sound of what could only be a body completing a fall and slamming into the floor. A part of her was horrified by the need to kill, but she had no time for regrets, and it wasn’t as though she had started this—or that there had been any real choice.
As she unlocked the door and pulled it open, her instincts commanded her to drop to the floor, just as several shots screamed through the air where she had been an instant earlier. A second hostile was standing behind the body of the man she had killed, firing a silenced gun of his own.
She rolled to her right and fired upward, hitting the second gunman in the forehead with an uncannily accurate shot, calculated by her savant subconscious. Part of her thought she had seen the man’s eyes on fire, but she must have been hallucinating.
Anna sprang to her feet and rushed outside of the room, surveying the corridor in both directions. No other shooters were in sight. Miraculously, no hotel guests were about, either, although even silenced guns couldn’t prevent other telltale sounds of the battle from making themselves known, and she was certain that guests nearby were even now phoning the lobby to report an altercation.
“Tom, help me move these bodies,” she said urgently, and both bent to the task of sliding the corpses inside the room. Anna quickly closed the door and bent down to inspect the two hostiles for the first time.
She shrank back in horror.
She hadn’t been hallucinating, after all. Both men, even dead, had eyes so red they were each miniature infernos, blazing with an otherworldly, sinister red fire.
And that wasn’t all. Anna’s breath stuck in her throat as she realized something at least as disturbing: both men were bleeding profusely, although she now knew that the term “men” was less than accurate. Because their eyes may have been red, but their blood was decidedly not.
Instead, the liquid that was still streaming from the two hostiles was unnaturally thick, and black as night.
12
Eldamir Kor strained to hear something. Anything. But his comm was now eerily silent. “Tiparax!” he yelled subvocally. “Respond!”
Eldamir paused for a brief moment. “Mezzitorp!” he called out again. “Respond immediately!”
Fanimore, who had also been conferenced in, pushed open a door and entered an underground parking structure. “I’m afraid they’re probably dead,” he said.
“Impossible.”
“Tiparax didn’t think so,” noted Fanimore, “or else he wouldn’t have sent me to watch the parking garage before he launched his attack. He said you and I were his insurance policy in case anything went wrong.”
Eldamir fumed. He had his beef with his direct superior, but it couldn’t be said that Tiparax was anything but a brilliant soldier. His training and reflexes were extraordinary. And while Mezzitorp might be low-ranked, he was a fierce commando in his own right.
How had their surprise attack possibly been thwarted by the unimpressive specimens in the room next door?
It was unthinkable. But it was time that Eldamir accepted that it was also very likely to be true. Eldamir may have passed the time by imagining horrible deaths for some of his comrades, but he knew what was at stake, and how important each and every one of them really were.
He wouldn’t wish their actual deaths for the world.
And now they had lost three of their people on Earth, and all quite recently. Their first casualty had occurred not much more than two weeks earlier. Isiah Schaeffer, the New York drug lord that Shanifrey had wanted to work with, had insisted on an in-person meeting, if not with Shane Frey himself, then at least with a key lieutenant.
So Shanifrey had sent Paritor in his place, who was in command of their New York contingent, and fifth-in-command overall. But Paritor had never arrived. They had later learned that he had been hit by a car, of all things, while crossing West Thirty-fourth street. Truly a humiliating end to an elite agent. An accident that had likely only occurred because of Earth’s dim lighting, and Paritor’s inability to use his implants in a city forever packed with native beings.
Three men d
own! It was devastating. They had precious few people here on Earth as it was, and they wouldn’t be getting additional reinforcements for an indefinite period, maybe never. They couldn’t afford to lose too many more.
All of this flashed across Eldamir’s mind in seconds as he hurriedly put in a call to Shanifrey through his comm.
“I asked Tiparax to report,” spat the commander upon answering. “Not you!”
“Tiparax and Mezzitorp failed in their mission. I believe they were killed less than a minute ago. Fanimore is watching the hotel parking garage, per Tiparax’s instructions. What are your orders?”
Shanifrey screamed an agonized curse upon hearing this news. “How should I know?” he shouted sharply. “You’re the one on the ground. And you’re now my number two. I’m giving you a battlefield promotion. So what are your recommendations?”
Eldamir paused to gather his thoughts. “I recommend that you send backup as quickly as possible,” he began. “In the meantime, I expect our targets to be fleeing at this very moment. There are only two ways out of this hotel. Through the lobby, or out of the parking garage. I recommend that Fanimore and I maintain our positions at each point of possible egress, until it’s clear which one they’ve chosen. Then we can regroup and take them out.”
“How?”
“I can’t say. We can’t predict the exact situation we’ll encounter. We’ll have to play it by ear.”
“Do it,” said Shanifrey immediately. “I’ll call for reinforcements as you suggest. I paid Neil Marshall a considerable sum to be able to put five of his best men under my temporary command in an emergency. I’ll invoke that now.
“In the meantime,” continued the commander, “if you think you can take them out, take them out. But if you aren’t absolutely certain, abort the attempt. In that case, continue to follow them until reinforcements arrive.”
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