American Craftsmen (7 page)

“Grandpa?”

“Yep, boy.” My grandfather manifested in a blink; one second nothing, the next as solid-looking as life. The glass of bourbon in his hand gave a whole new meaning to “spirits.” “Ready to tell me about the trouble you’re in?”

It was best to be calm talking with an ancestor. If they saw you angry (or scared), they might get too sympathetically agitated to be of any help. So I asked, as casually as I could, “Grandpa, did you know Sphinx?”

At Sphinx’s name, Grandfather came unstuck from the floor and didn’t float back down to Earth immediately. “If it’s the same code name, yep, I knew her.”

“Who is she?”

Grandpa sat down in his old chair like he used to when he told me long stories of Morton wars. “We found her at Woodstock.”

“No shit?”

“No shit,” said Grandpa. “And watch your language. She was prophesying the end of the war in Vietnam.”

“Hell,” I said, “I could have told you that.”

“She spoke like a goddamned teletype, giving cold specifics of body counts and operational code names, then painting sweeping vistas of helicopters taking off from the American embassy roof.”

I whistled. “Still, would have been difficult to find her in all that noise.”

“Hell yes,” said Grandpa. “We might have lost her in the sixties sea of anarchic craft, but our intel had been checking all purported prophets against the facts.”

“How did you know her?”

“I helped bring her in. She was non-Christian, one of ours.”

Grandpa took a sip of his bourbon. In life, a sip after a bet in poker had been Grandpa’s nervous tell. I said, “That all?”

Grandpa stared down at his bourbon. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing,” I lied.

“I was about twice her age,” said Grandpa, still defensive.

“Right. Sorry.” Had the old goat slept with Sphinx? That might bias his story, but it wasn’t what I needed to know. “So she joins the Peepshow to foresee the bad news professionally. She ever call in a bad mission?”

“No, never,” said Grandpa.

Until me
. “That you knew of,” I said.

“No,” repeated Grandpa. “They
gave
her the bad ones. They thought she was insubordinate. She would use ancient names for locations rather than military coordinates because they sounded cooler, so they gave her punishment detail. They had her looking years down the road. Anyone else observing that far ahead would mostly generate meaningless noise. But she was too good. She would see the shit long before anyone was ready to understand it.”

“Oh come on,” I said, deliberately provocative. “Nostradamus quatrains aren’t intel.”

“How about these verses?” said Grandpa. “
Evacuate the embassy in Tehran. Close all the airports in September.
”

“Oh.”

“Her most famous warnings marked America’s spectacular failures,” said Grandpa. “No wonder that, despite her record, she was as ignored as Cassandra. But they must take her very seriously by now. She must be a director or a DD.”

“Maybe she didn’t want to be understood,” I said. That was enough tiptoeing around. “If she lied…”

“She never lied,” said Grandpa.

“If she’s lied,” I repeated, “if she’s warned the Peepshow against me, that would explain what happened in the desert.” Grandpa stared at his boots, lost in dead thoughts, so I got in the old man’s face. “This is Morton business, Grandpa. This is family survival. Can she see inside this House?”

Grandpa sighed, “If anyone could, Sphinx could. But no. The Left Hand pulled all kinds of wicked shit in this place, and no one saw. They can’t see everything.”

“What’s her real name, Grandpa?” With that simple question, I crossed a line. It wasn’t like the fairy tales, where names meant magic vulnerability. Disclosing your real name meant vulnerability in the flesh, in your ordinary home, with your ordinary spouse and kids. Grandpa had brought her in, so he must know her name.

“It won’t do you any good,” said Grandpa. “Last I knew, she lived alone at Langley. She’s Dare Smith of the Virginia Smiths.”

Shit, that was an old lineage, going all the way back to Captain John Smith. Grandpa was right: if she kept within Langley, she wasn’t vulnerable in the mundane world. But no one stayed in a secure site forever. I would still track her.

Grandpa’s image rippled with restlessness. “Now, I’m tired. And I think you’re tracking the wrong cat. Sphinx was many things, but never evil.”

He vanished. It couldn’t be easy to hear that your grandson planned to kill an old friend. Though the target was still uncertain, that was the direction I was traveling. If the top farsight had gone bad, then America’s existence might be at stake. But even if I decided that Sphinx was a mole, how could I kill someone who could see me coming?

*   *   *

I packed my camping gear, flung myself into my souped-up ’57 T-Bird, and peeled out of the stable-garage. I would drive to northern Virginia to stake out the area around Langley. I wouldn’t fly to DC. They would watch for me, particularly at those airports.

“You shouldn’t be out.”

I nearly veered off the road at the sudden voice. My father sat solemnly in the T-Bird’s passenger seat. “Shit, Dad, are you trying to push me to the other side early?”

“God, I still love this car,” said Dad. “Go home, Dale. Too much bullshit in the air. This is where it all goes wrong.” Then Dad was gone.

“Dammit, Dad.” Ghosts couldn’t do precog, so I wasn’t stopping.

I was close to the freeway ramp when I saw the first surveillance vehicle: a black sedan carrying three agents in stylishly cut black suits. They pulled up close to make sure I knew they were following. Their windows weren’t tinted; they wanted me to know who they were. One man had curly blond hair and the other had no hair at all, while the woman appeared Celtic fair and red-haired. I hadn’t seen them myself before, but knew them by reputation and code name: blond Bumppo, bald Carson, and Sakakawea. The Gideons, the trained trackers who hunted down rogue craftsmen, were on me.

The T-Bird wasn’t the best car to shake a tail, but I might manage. With a growl from the old motor, I veered away from the ramp and went back into the tight blocks of College Hill. I was pretty certain my tailers weren’t Providence natives. Sure enough, a couple of sudden turns later and I had lost them. I got on the highway.

Two women in a convertible bopped along to the radio, nice lookers in summer colors that might have gotten a smile from me on another day. Something very wrong about that, about attracting my interest without scrutiny. Despite my oath, I did some craft that nobody else would detect: I checked the women’s sins. Big capital red letters flashed moralities more suited to counterintelligence professionals than party girls. A leapfrog surveillance, with at least two cars devoted to me. Not good.

I got off the freeway at the next exit. Now I was on my way to the reservoir in fucking Pawtuxet, which they insisted on calling Cranston. Not my territory, and craft stealth wasn’t my strength. Frustration burned.

You should just kill them.

And that seemed like a grand idea. I had a pistol in the glove compartment. The two women weren’t craft. I could take them before the Gideons arrived. I could …

Cease fire!
Shit. I spun the wheel violently, and the car squealed painfully to a stop in the parking lot of a strip mall. The tail drove into the lot and past me as if nothing were amiss, parking a few rows down.

I held my throbbing head in my hands. Between the sorcerer’s curse and the Left-Handish voice, my skull was about to explode. I wouldn’t get to Virginia tonight. I’d find another way, with more appropriate transport, or maybe the surveillance would loosen up. Time to develop an alibi for this excursion. An out-of-place heavy metal club occupied one section of the mall.
I’m just out for a drink.

I pulled into a parking space and shut off my car. A drumbeat of craft malice pulsed around me, red like blood. A sudden squeal of rubber. The tailing convertible pulled out of its space and out of the lot, nearly creaming a pedestrian. Something was wrong. Before I knew why, I grabbed the gun from the glove compartment.

My brain caught up: the agents must have been ordered away from me ASAP, meaning someone didn’t want them to witness what happened next. I tucked the gun into its holster built into my leather jacket. Again driven by instinct, I sprung from the T-Bird.

I spun around, searching for the next strike. Down the road, the Gideons’ sedan came barreling toward the mall. The pedestrian had moved on, and no other person stood close enough to see details. Good. If my own government was trying to kill me, then any witnesses would be at serious risk.

That was why I wasn’t going to drive home. If they had decided on my death, then termination in a speeding car would just lead to more collateral damage to innocents and my spirit.

Behind the mall was a wooded park area, which might even the odds a little. As good a place as any for a showdown. I ran for it, past the storefronts toward the edge of the mall building, where I would turn and enter the woods.

The Gideons’ sedan screamed to a stop, and two of them were already out the doors and in pursuit, fast as feral cats.

I reached the end of the building. A woman stepped out from the corner restaurant. I stepped to dodge her. I was going to yell a warning—
Get inside, bad people are behind me!—
then draw my gun.

But then, drawing breath to speak, the smell hit me, savory and dreadful. Cumin, nutmeg, cardamom, lamb, exhaust. The scents of a “Mediterranean” restaurant blended with the low stink of auto fumes.

I stumbled to a stop, my way blocked. Zee was standing in front of me. “You’ve been a bad boy, sir.”

I fell to my knees. All went blank, except for foreign gutturals from somewhere close. From my own mouth.

Then the woman from the restaurant was speaking low, angry and close, using the same Farsi-sounding syllables, and I could see again. The woman had bent down so that her perfect almond eyes and short gamine hair were only inches from my face. Her eyes seemed wide with surprise and outrage. Her right hand had gone straight into her purse, forearm tensed, probably packing a knife.

My limbs were lead, but I could move my neck. I looked over my shoulder, expecting a bullet or some unsubtle craft to blow my head clean off. But Sakakawea and Carson stood still, fifty feet away, weapons concealed. Tall and lean, Sakakawea held a hand out to her side, restraining her colleague, speaking low into her headset. Maybe they didn’t yet have authorization to act with witnesses. But they would get it soon.

“You need to get inside,” I said to the woman from the restaurant. I struggled to get up off my knees. No good.

She repeated the Farsi syllables with emphasis, as if I were a particularly thick child. I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”

She stared, incredulous. Beautiful too. More than a few of my kind had perished at the hands of terrible beauty. She asked, “Are you threatening me?”

“What was I saying?”

“The dogs will lick your blood.”

“Oh. Sorry. Wasn’t talking to you. Can we discuss this inside?”

“To whom were you speaking?” she asked, with unusual grammatical precision.

Someone higher up must have found the Gideons’ leash, because they went walking away at a fast clip, and the paralyzing red drumbeat of craft malice seemed to be withdrawing with them. I stood up and brushed the bits of asphalt from my knees. “A flashback. I think this restaurant caused it.”

“Then you are threatening me,” she said, but she relaxed the arm in her purse. “This place belongs to my family.”

“Oh. Really sorry.” I breathed through my mouth to avoid the restaurant’s exotic odors. The Gideons’ sedan was pulling out of the lot. “I should go.” I walked toward the T-Bird.

The woman trailed me. “You’re a soldier. You were in Iran?”

“No. Long story.”

“Where, then?” she asked. “Iraq? Why Farsi? Who were those people running after you?”

Then both the Left Hand and the curse exploded in my head, for once in total agreement, screaming at me.
Kill her now.
“I need to go.” I stumbled and fell again into blackness.

CHAPTER

FIVE

“Sir, we had him. Why did you stop me?” Leaving Bumppo and Carson behind in the sedan, the woman they called Sakakawea was speaking on her headset with her commander. On the opposite side of Prospect Street from Brown’s Carrie Tower, she paced back and forth on the sidewalk like a freshly caged predator, neon green eyes still hunting for prey.

Sakakawea had seen power radiating from where Morton had knelt, driving back Chimera’s force. But she had felt no limitation on taking a clean shot—or two, if one counted the mundane witness. H-ring would have rubber-stamped it as killing a rogue with collateral damage.

“Chimera said this wasn’t the time for us to act,” replied her commander. He masked his emotions, but she could hear his frustration.

“A half hour before, Chimera said this was the damned time. What’s the holdup?” Chimera had been predicting for months that the last of her kin might kill her and her commander, and destroy Chimera as well. The good news was that the old Endicott would slay the younger, which wouldn’t be a problem no matter how interpreted.

“You know his deceptions better than anyone.”

“Yes, love,” she said, dropping their formality. Thank the dark gods that, unlike her commander, she did not have to see Chimera on a daily basis anymore. Her commander had taken the body of Chimera’s technician in the Pentagon’s secret H-ring. She would have killed Chimera long ago if that hadn’t been exactly what he had wanted.

Her commander ignored her endearment. “Morton will report this up to Hutchinson. She’s the only one he trusts. We need to remove her.”

“When?” asked Sakakawea, not hiding her eagerness.

“Soon. Chimera suggests immediately bringing our force to bear on the House, followed by a coordinated attack.”

Sakakawea demurred. “He’s a Morton. He’ll have a foreboding of his death.”