Dragon Knight (The Collegium Book 3) (8 page)

Gina wound her red hair into a knot and secured it with a pencil. She’d spent the morning meticulously tracing the activities of the people Lewis had noted, paying particular attention to the times leading up to and away from the dates he’d listed. It was fascinating.

He was right. Money had been made around the events he’d noted. Well, money was always there to be made, if you had the intelligence and ruthlessness to exploit tragedy. Corey Gagnon, Nathaniel Smythe and Brad Wilson apparently had that ruthlessness. Their intelligence, she was less sure about. They were hackers, but not inspired ones. They had the requisite skills and a resentful attitude, but a little cautious prying soon revealed their presence at the end of strings leading to and from the events Lewis had listed.

The fourth group member was a woman, Lindsay Perez. She’d hidden her identity more effectively. In fact, Gina had only just cracked it, having broken her hours at the computer with a cheese sandwich and a walk along the beach. Maybe it was the soaring flight of a gull that had inspired her to creep up on the woman’s identity by riding the eddying waves of activity from the other three.

Lindsay Perez had obscured her links to the events that had caused devastation in thousands of lives, and made her rich. However, she hadn’t been able to prevent the lesser talents of her fellow group members from revealing her. From the movement of their money, Gina had looked for echoes elsewhere. That and their veiled contact with Lindsay had revealed her.

It hadn’t revealed the fifth member of the group. He or she was smarter than all of them.

“I will find you.” Gina sipped her lime and soda water, and set the glass down, its ice gently tinkling. But if the fifth member had hidden their identity so well then they’d also have installed virtual tripwires. Gina had to be careful she didn’t alert them to her pursuit. “Good thing I love a challenge.”

She was whistling in the dark.

Lewis had understated the Group of 5’s activities. The more she learned of them, the more they scared her. It was the cumulative effect of all they’d done. She was aware of a growing sense of menace. Since she trusted her instincts, she moved even more cautiously online, but she wasn’t abandoning the puzzle. She would unearth the fifth member’s identity.

So far, the four she’d identified all shared a legitimate public persona. Each either ran, or had founded and sold, a software company. Each had built software that solved a logistical problem. That meant they had minds that saw the world as flows of demand and supply. No wonder they were so good at scheduling disruptive events where relatively minor actions could have cascading, multiplying effects. They saw the world as a set of problems and opportunities.

But just because four of the five were ex-hackers now supposedly legitimate, didn’t mean the fifth was. The fifth could be a more skilled hacker who’d never surfaced, preferring the dark web. Alternatively, he or she might have limited coding skills, but a grasp of organization and logistics.

The fifth member might be a psychologist or a confidence trickster, someone skilled in people rather than code, because when she thought of the events Lewis had listed, they shared one other element in common: they instilled horror.

“Definitely something to consider.” Gina chased an unaccounted-for one hundred thousand dollars from Lindsay’s Cayman Island secondary account. It had been sent two days ago. Where to? For what purpose?

Bring people’s nightmares to life and they respond with frenzy. Money would be spent beyond rationality—or resources abandoned as they fled. Greed could take advantage of fear. People afraid for their and their children’s lives didn’t think logically, and that’s when the vulpine Group of 5 swooped in.

On screen, Lindsay’s hundred thousand dollars disappeared into a Swiss bank account.
Damn
. Gina recognized the bank. It was run by people who understood magic. They’d hired mages to ward their vaults, both the physical ones and those in cyberspace. The bank was not for hacking.

Gina pushed back from her desk, idly picking up a piece of paper she’d scribbled notes on and folding it into a paper tulip—a trick one of her ten-year-old cousin’s had recently taught her. With the International Children’s Conference convening and children everywhere around the world encouraged to send their wishes written on recycled colored paper to accompany their nation’s youthful representative to the conference in Mexico, children were going wild for origami. Gina found it soothing to fold and shape paper while her thoughts drifted.

Would it be so bad to hack the bank? She was very tempted. Who owned the account Lindsay had sent her money to? But that was the teenage part of herself whispering temptation, the bit that had only just avoided FBI scrutiny at fifteen. Surely she’d learned prudence since then?

Gina set the paper tulip down beside her computer, next to a paper rose, three paper irises and a paper peony.

By some measures, one hundred thousand dollars was a small amount of money. Small enough not to trigger mundane intelligence agencies’ attention unless Lindsay repeated the financial action—which she hadn’t.

But one hundred thousand was also sufficient to hire a rogue mage to undertake a destabilizing activity; that is, if the activity was small enough and its consequences not immediately obvious. Rogue mages weren’t stupid. They knew the line they couldn’t cross without capturing the Collegium’s attention.

Gina mulled over the problem. The important thing was not to act impulsively. She had a tendency to do that…as with kissing Lewis. Although kiss was an inadequate term for what they’d shared. Her body heated and melted just thinking about it.

Work!

As a distraction, she started typing up the information she had for him. She had Lindsay Perez’s identity and Lindsay had some interesting contacts.

The attack came out of nowhere. The first of Gina’s alerts flashed across her screen.

She abandoned her report to Lewis and opened the alert. The second layer of her security pinged. Someone was attempting to uncover her identity.

Good luck with that. But annoyance flickered. Out of respect for Lewis’s judgment, from the first she’d used one of her most secure identities while undertaking this search, and she’d ventured cautiously. Evidently not cautiously enough. The timing couldn’t be coincidence. She’d tripped some flag set by one or more of the Group of 5, and they wanted to know who was snooping.

However, she’d spent a week setting up this online identity, and the layers and obfuscations she’d employed would keep a hacker occupied a while. Perhaps long enough for her to circle around and identify them?

If she was lucky, the person coming after her was the group’s secret fifth member.

She flexed her fingers and started typing. This particular false identity was one she used when she wanted to elude other hackers. It flaunted its credentials, not too obviously, but enough to support the illusion that she was a teenage boy, someone roaming with aimless curiosity into a lot of not-so-obvious areas. People she encountered might subconsciously dismiss this identity as a lesser threat. Boys will be boys, and all that.

And if they kept pursuing her, well, she’d installed a virus along two of the paths to her true identity. They were the sort of virus a teenage boy would delight in. It lacked subtlety, but the virus taking over her pursuer’s computer and flashing up pictures of pratfalls would appeal to a teenager. She’d called that virus, “Loser”, as a kid might. Hiding behind the virus was a substantial layer of security, and behind it, her magic wards kicked in.

No one was going to track her back.

Three hours later, her confidence received a kick.

She still hadn’t identified the person chasing her false identity, but that person had deflected her virus and hit her security layer hard. There they’d stopped, apparently defeated by the encryption and server bounces. They might return. Then again…

Gina stared at her computer screen.

Her opponent had been fiendishly clever.

In her false identity as a teenage boy, Gina visited a couple of chat rooms in the dark web on a semi-regular basis. What no one knew was that in yet another false identity, she hosted those rooms. That enabled her to see who joined and participated in the chats. The same newcomer had just joined both chatrooms with the user identification: Believer5.

That wasn’t the fiendishly clever bit.

The fiendish cleverness was the all-out attack on the security of the chat rooms, aimed at accessing users’ records.

As owner, Gina could fight back, or she could allow Believer5 to wrest the false teenage boy’s identity details from the chat room’s data files.

She fought back, and adrenaline surged as her opponent threw bots at breaking down the chat rooms’ security through mass attack. Her fingers flew over the keyboard. A patch here, a workaround there, her own army of bots (legal ones) activated. She lifted her hands off the keyboard and sat on them a moment.

The risk of vigorously defending the chat room was that in the battle she’d reveal her style of coding. That was a risk all hackers faced. You came to recognize each other by certain characteristics and quirks.

Already, some of those who used the two chatrooms had picked up the destabilization of the attacks and were curious. She could tell them about the threat to data and unleash them after her opponent, or—

“We’re under attack. Probably some idiot high on red cordial.” That is, a juvenile hacker. “Don’t have time for the drama, today. Say, bye-bye.”

Thirty seconds later, time enough for someone to see and repeat the message to other users, she deleted both chat rooms. Then she went back and scrubbed them from the more obvious places. Finally, she sat back and stared at her computer screen.

Believer5 had to be the fifth group member, and he or she hadn’t wasted any time responding to her investigation. They’d gone after Gina’s false identity with energy and an aura of ruthlessness. It would have been worth it if their actions had revealed anything useful about them, but other than confirming that they did have some tech savvy, Gina had learned no more about them.

Would they believe she was a teenage hacker?

In their shoes, she wouldn’t. The name of the game in the dark web was to stay suspicious and stay anonymous. Anonymity gave you power. Believer5 wanted to wrest that from Gina’s teenage boy identity, hence the attack on her chatrooms. People got careless around chatrooms, either in what they said or how they entered and exited. They were a good place to try to track someone back to their real world identity.

Gina sent her house witchery magic out and felt the reassuring strength of her privacy wards. Even better, nothing had tested them. She’d escaped discovery.

And she did have the fourth group member’s name to give Lewis. Lindsay Perez.

She also ought to warn him that the fifth group member might be on heightened alert. She reached for her phone, and stopped. He’d asked her if he could use a burn phone. So, it probably wasn’t safe to phone or email him on a known account.

A small smile, that of a woman consciously playing with fire, curved her mouth. The wicked, impulsive part of her had wanted to see Lewis, again. Now, she had the perfect excuse. “I guess I’ll just have to deliver this message in person to my pretend boyfriend.”

The Collegium boardroom had the hushed magnificence of money. Wood paneling on the walls and luxury chairs at the mahogany table were tangible expression of its wealth. The Forecasting Department was mostly responsible for that wealth as they invested the money other Collegium mages earned hiring out their skills and experience. For while the Collegium served the magical community by working to neutralize threats, other work, commissions such as holding back a river while a dam went up or changing weather patterns, were undertaken on a fee-basis for those who knew to ask.

Lewis questioned to what extent that ability to make money had skewed the Collegium’s operations. He’d told Gina that ninety percent of the work the Collegium undertook was in response to the magical community’s reports of risks. He hadn’t added that the Collegium assessed those risks, and by its own judgment, responded to some freely and others at a price.

About a third of the senior mages who headed the Collegium’s twelve departments were present when Lewis walked in. The meeting was due to start in three minutes. He had two hours, then they’d break for lunch. At which point the mages would scatter to consult with the other senior mages in their respective departments before returning at two o’clock to resume hostilities.

Hostilities was too strong a word.

He set the stack of reports on the table in front of his chair, aligning the pages with sharp, impatient nudges.

Bad temper still rode him. To return home and discover Shawn lurking to inform Kora, the commander of the guardians, of Lewis’s whereabouts and activities brought back the rage he’d buried. The dragon Morag had removed three significant spells from him. It was a point he intended to open with. It was intolerable.

The Chair of Demonology took the chair to his left. “Good morning, Lewis.”

“Good morning, Gilda.”

The last two senior mages wandered in, a weather mage and geomage, elderly men both. They set cups of coffee on the table.

Lewis looked over their heads and nodded to Haskell Mondo to close the doors. His PA and guardian bodyguard would also seal the doors and wait outside.

Kora sat midway down the table, two seats from the Chair of Demonology, and opposite the doors. Her expression was calm and watchful. How had she reacted to his suggestion, conveyed via Shawn, to disband the Collegium? Which of the spells on him had she cast?

He stood, and that silenced the conversation around the table. He didn’t waste a good morning on the gathering. “To bespell the president of the Collegium without his permission is tantamount to treason. On a personal level, I consider it a betrayal. Last night, I had three spells removed from me. One to track me, one to lock my words in my throat, and one to poison those around me.”

“Hellfire and toad’s skin,” Gilda, the Chair of Demonology, swore.

He hadn’t thought any of the spells her style. She was as new in her role as he was, taking over after her predecessor’s death, the man having repulsively aligned himself with the demon and dying for that wrong a month ago. Gilda had her own concerns without worrying about Lewis’s actions as president of the Collegium. She had to restore the Demonology Department’s reputation. It would be a long, fraught process.

The other mages responded with disbelief, anger and open doubt.

Kora regarded him straightly. “Who did you have identify and remove the spells?”

The tracking spell had been hers. He knew it without proof.

Unexpectedly, Zhou Tan, the Chair of Forecasting, turned on her. Apparently, he shared Lewis’s suspicions. “You! This is intolerable. The president might have no magic, but he has rights as a person. It is to protect such rights among the mundanes that we serve the Collegium. To bespell him without his consent is unethical. You are unfit to command the guardians.”

Kora’s head jerked at the verbal blow. Her eyes narrowed. “Be careful, Zhou. Many are already questioning why your mages did not see the demon’s taint within the Collegium. All those patterns you study, all the data you collect, all your secret ways and—”

“Are you responsible for the other two spells, Kora?” Lewis intervened.

She stared at him, defiant and guilty of her sins. “No. I admit to the tracking spell.” She scowled at Zhou. “But if I had asked your permission, Lewis, you’d never have agreed.”

“That makes what you did worse,” Zhou said. “You knowingly acted against his wishes.”

“Who cast the other spells?” Gilda stayed focused.

Lewis didn’t bother trying to read the body language around the table. Guilt, shock and suspicion could blur into one another. Everyone looked uncomfortable. Dismayed.

“Do you know who cast the spells?” Gilda pressed.

He’d expected the question. “The spells were cast on me. As such, I consider them a personal attack and will deal with them personally.” He might have burned out his magic, but no one ridiculed his intention.

In fact, Kora’s gaze dropped. She stared at the unmarked notepad in front of her. She was a tall woman, leanly muscled, in her early forties. Her hair was short and brown, her eyes light brown, her lips thin, not softened even by the pink lipstick she’d swiped over them.

He’d known her for years. They’d never been friends, but he’d respected her work ethic, and when he’d been a guardian trainee, he’d respected her as a new guardian, someone to emulate.

Times changed. Did people?

He brought the meeting to order. “We have one agenda item, today. We are to decide the new structure of the Collegium. However, I realized last night that there is an option we had not put on the table, and I’m putting it there, now. We can disband the Collegium.”

Stunned silence greeted the suggestion before Zhou ventured carefully. “Is this because you don’t trust us?”

Zhou was a forecaster and a very clever strategist. He’d have always known that disbanding the Collegium was an option. Zhou prided himself on considering all contingencies, even the most unlikely.

“No.” Lewis sat down. “If my inability to trust you all was a problem, I’d resign as president. I wanted this final option on the table so that we make our restructuring decisions in a clear light. Either we serve the magical community and the mundanes, or we disband.”

Gilda’s voice pierced the hubbub of everyone telling Lewis he was overreacting. “Be quiet,” she snapped. She glared around at her fellow department heads. “This is not a small point Lewis is making. The Collegium has fallen into the trap of most large organizations. We began for the purpose of serving others, but now we act to serve ourselves.”

“Lies.” The weather mage and geomage denounced her together.

“Not lies.” Gilda glared at her colleagues from under drooping eyelids, her gray hair messy from a hand pushed agitatedly through it. “My department is proof of it. Do not wish for more proof.” Her voice shook before she steadied it. “Demonologists were among the first to join the Collegium. We joined knowing that we need oversight and a formal structure to protect against demon summoning. With the world so small and interconnected, there is little limit placed on what a demon unleashed can achieve. Geography doesn’t contain them anymore. We need an international organization to detect and banish them.”

She leaned forward, hands flat on the table. “You know what Angus did.” Her dead predecessor. “He used his power here in the Collegium to collect demons instead of banishing them. That is how serving others was perverted into serving himself. I speak for all the demonologists in the Collegium. We want to serve. We will abide by a restructure even if it deprives of us of resources and influence. That Angus abused his position is reason enough for us to be punished.”

“The restructure is not about punishment,” Lewis said.

Around the table, a couple of the mages shifted. For them, it was.

Lewis noted the slight movements of disagreement from the weather mage and the healer, William Mimea. When he’d been commander of the guardians, and given the guardians’ propensity for injury, Lewis had had frequent dealings with the man. William was a gifted healer, but he was also puritanical. For him there was only right or wrong, no shades of interpretation or ambiguity.

Silver light imposed itself over Lewis’s physical sight. His breathing stopped an instant in shock even as he guessed the trigger. He suspected William of responsibility for the poison spell that had enclosed him, and his emotions had triggered the silver sight. William had the ruthless assurance of a first class surgeon. If poisoning others kept the Collegium’s president safe and the Collegium stable, William would do it.

The silver light was so different to the golden threads of magic Lewis had previously seen. It deconstructed the people around the table, shining along their energy meridians and in odd patterns across the furniture and out through the walls. Lewis blinked as the walls vanished and the lines of silver went on.

A second blink and he banished the silver light. Clarity of sight was disconcerting. But his self-discipline held. No one appeared to have noticed his moment’s distraction. He ensured that continued by directing their attention firmly to the topic at hand, one guaranteed to absorb all their energies. “Let’s consider Option A for the restructure.”

Everyone opened the folders in front of them.

Five and a half hours later there was grudging acceptance of Option B in the restructure. As much as everyone hated the idea of adding a layer of management, there was no way around it. There’d be three new positions between the operational management of each department and the president.

The three departments that went out in the world responding to crises would report to the new Rapid Response Director; that meant the guardians, the healers and the demonologists. It would be challenging to lead. The natural science related departments would report to the Gaia Director; that covered the weather mages, geomages, marine, botanical and animal mages. The final grouping were the more cerebral mages—the forecasters, alchemists (not that they studied alchemy, rather they studied and tried to codify the science and history of magic), musicologists and enchanters (literally those who enchanted objects)—who reported to the Knowledge Director.

Even as they exited the boardroom, the department heads were obviously calculating the shifts and changes in the power structure and how they could best exploit them. Some might put their hands up for the new positions, but others would want to stay closer to the work of their departments.

Haskell, his PA and guardian bodyguard, began tidying the boardroom.

In other circumstances, this was the stage, with the weight of both achievement and anticlimax, when as president he’d talk to his assistant. She’d be someone to discuss the ebb and flow of the meeting with, what it revealed, and what the likely consequences were.

But Haskell couldn’t be confided in.

Lewis respected the chain of command. Anything he said to Haskell, she’d have to report to Kora. He could order her silence, but that produced its own tensions.

As always he opted for keeping his own counsel and ignored the couple of curious glances Haskell slid his way. He wasn’t lingering in the boardroom on a whim.

William Mimea stalked back in. Tall and black with graying hair, he was a skeleton with skin on. His purpose, his need to heal the world, burned in him. “We need to talk.”

Lewis nodded, once. “Your office.”

A momentary flicker of surprise crossed William’s face.

On the other side of the table, Haskell’s hands froze in their swift collection of abandoned papers and used cups. Wards and spells he’d approved kept Lewis safe in the presidential office, and the guardians watched outside. But now, he intended to leave his office.

He and William walked past Gilda as she spoke with Zhou. Alliances across the boundaries of the new structure would help glue the Collegium back together. But what would a demonologist and a forecaster have in common?

Mistrust of Kora. It was evident in their body language; their shoulders turned to her, excluding her but keeping her under observation.

The commander of the guardians stood by a window, obviously waiting for Lewis.

“My office, thirty minutes,” he said to her.

She nodded and walked back to the boardroom. “Haskell.”

Damn
. Kora was too close to his bodyguards. It wasn’t only him who disliked the reminder. Zhou positively glared after her.

“A difficult situation,” William said as they took the stairs down six flights to the Healers’ Department.

Clustered in William’s outer office were seven of the senior healers, chatting with his PA, a middle-aged woman who looked as if they were trying her patience. Her face relaxed at the sight of William.

Not so the seven mages. They tensed up to see William accompanied by Lewis.

William ignored them all. He closed the door behind Lewis and undoubtedly warded it for privacy.

His office resembled an old-fashioned apothecary’s shop. Cupboards with multiple small drawers lined the walls, each drawer with a neatly inscribed card slipped into a brass label holder. Occasional gaps between drawers allowed for open shelving on which stood a diverse array of objects, including ostrich feathers in an ugly stoneware vase, massive conch seashells, a set of brass scales, a meteorite, and books. Many books.