Red Knight Falling (14 page)

TWENTY-FOUR

First, though, we had the bug to deal with. Jessie and I stood silently in my motel room, studying the tiny microphone. It was the size of three grains of rice, stacked end to end, encased in a dull chrome shell. Jessie grabbed the motel notepad and a ballpoint pen, scribbling fast.

That’s NSA gear. Not available on the civilian market. At least five years ahead of the tech curve.

I took the pen from her and wrote my response.

Another gov. agency in the mix?

She shrugged, took the pen, and responded.

Or black market, but someone w/ serious cash and connections. Play along, gonna throw down a smoke screen.

She padded back to the motel room door and called out, “Harmony? You in here?”

“Over here,” I said. “What’s the word?”

She sighed in mock frustration. “The word is, we’ve got nothing. The coroner just called: whoever that impostor was, they’ve got no records on him. Complete dead end. Linder says he wants us on the next flight to DC for debriefing in person. This mission’s a wash.”

While she took out her phone and ordered five tickets to Chicago, I carried the bug into the bathroom. I swaddled it in layers of tissue, rolling it into a bigger and bigger ball until it was about the size of a jawbreaker. Our enemy’s ears were plugged, for now.

We had some time to kill before our flight. Instead of heading straight for the airport, Jessie gave me the address for another mall: Orlando Fashion Square.

“Here’s the deal,” she told us in the parking lot. “We’ve been wearing the same clothes since Oregon, and getting doused by a sprinkler system is not the same as a pass through the washing machine. Frankly,
some
of you—but not me, because I’m flawless—are getting a little ripe. Go buy some carry-on luggage, any toiletries you need, and two changes of clothes. Get receipts for everything. I mean it.
Everything.
”

A change of wardrobe felt like a change of mind-set. Shedding the missteps and the chaos of the last few days and making a fresh start. I headed for the JCPenney. Shopping didn’t take long; I knew exactly what I was looking for.

Standing in the dressing room, looking myself over in the full-length mirror, I felt like myself again. Black jacket, black slacks, ivory blouse, and a deep-green tie patterned like a salamander’s scales.

“All right,” I said to my reflection, “let’s turn this around and start
winning
.”

Jessie waited just outside. She’d opted for jeans, a tunic top, and an Eddie Bauer blazer the color of aged brass to conceal her shoulder holster. She hooked a thumb in her front pocket and arched her hip when she saw me coming.

“Oh, hey, Harmony. Making a bold and original fashion statement. Really changing things up from your usual.”

“I like what I like,” I told her. “Ready to kick some ass?”

“Ready and eager. C’mon, we’ve got a plane to catch.”

Every flight since Boston, we’d traveled from night into daytime. Now we flew from day to night, the clouds turning to mountains of beaten copper as the sun went down outside my porthole window. It was full dark by the time we circled for landing, the Chicago skyline rising up like a forest of granite spears, lit up in ice blue and hard diamond white.

Our first stop was the FBI field office on West Roosevelt Road, down in the Chicago Loop. The place was a sleek fortress, over ten stories of glass that took on a sapphire sheen in the streetlights. The SAC was out to dinner, so Jessie and I ended up in a stark conference room with one of his assistants.

“Temple and Black, CIRG,” I said as he looked over our credentials. “The Critical Incident Response Group will be conducting an intelligence operation on your turf, and we wanted to give you a heads-up.”

He lingered over our badges, and I held my breath. Our screwup in Boston wasn’t a viral hit on YouTube anymore—I’d checked on the flight; our popularity had been overtaken by a video of kittens playing soccer—and I hoped our bad reputation hadn’t preceded us.

Fortunately, he just nodded and smiled. “Appreciate that, Agents. If you could let us know your staging area, I’ll put out the word and keep it clear for you. Do you need SWAT support?”

Tempting, but given we had no idea what we’d find when we raided that garage, that kind of backup could cause more problems than it solved. We’d have to go it alone.

“Just some requisitions,” Jessie said, reading my mind. “A van with a standard surveillance package. And now that you mention SWAT . . .”

That’s how we ended up in the back of a windowless pizza van, watching the world through a bank of grainy black-and-white monitors, while Jessie cradled her brand-new, pump-action shotgun.

“Remington Model 870 Express Tactical,” she cooed. “Now,
that
is the good stuff.”

While I took my place behind the wheel, Kevin in the passenger seat and April at the surveillance console, Cody climbed in from the back and pulled the double doors shut behind him.

“Got anything for me?” he asked her.

She held out a slim black Glock 23, identical to the service pieces we carried.

“Here. Tonight, if anybody asks, you’re an FBI agent. It’s a little more intimidating than deputy sheriff of Podunk, Michigan.”

“But I can’t actually
say
I’m FBI,” he said.

“Sure you can. Why not?”

“Because . . . it’s illegal?”

April chuckled, adjusting dials on the console and bringing the van’s hidden cameras into focus.

“Welcome to the clandestine services, Mr. Winters,” she said. “I assure you, false color of authority will be the least of your sins in due time.”

MacReady Auto Body waited for us down on the south side of Chicago. This was the Back of the Yards, the city’s old meatpacking district. Now the old Union Stock Yard was gone, and so was the money, leaving behind a tangle of desolate streets and abandoned factories, crumbling away in the dark. The van rumbled over broken and rusted railroad tracks, our target looming into view up on the right.

“Give us a drive-by,” April said, adjusting the cameras. “Slow and easy.”

The garage, bearing its name on a hand-painted sign above sealed bay doors, was a two-story slab of dirty concrete. No signs of life down below: they were closed up tight for the night, if they even had normal daytime hours. Up on the second floor, though, behind grimy and frosted windows, a cold light shone.

I drove the van around the corner and out of sight, pulling over at the edge of a weed-choked empty lot, while Kevin and April went over the footage she’d just captured.

“That side door,” April said, pointing at the screen, “do you think that’s a walk-up?”

“Has to be. I pulled the municipal records. Building went up in 1963, and it was registered as a single-story. The loft must have been a later addition.”

“That’s our way in, then.” April waved us over. The five of us huddled in the back of the van, eyes on the screen as the camera made a slow pan. “Here. This reinforced door most likely leads to a stairway to the second floor. Expect a second door at the top. From what little I could see through the windows, it looks like one continuous, unbroken loft.”

“Big room,” Jessie mused. “Maybe a big room full of guns.”

“What else can we expect?” Cody asked.

“Expect anything,” Jessie told him. “Let’s do this. We’re burning moonlight. Everybody suit up.”

The van doubled back, idling at the end of the block so April could keep her eyes on those big bay doors out front. I checked the load in my Glock and took slow, deep breaths, preparing myself. Performing a high-risk warrant service—a breach and clear at high speed, to contain suspects and preserve evidence—is one of the most dangerous assignments an agent can face. Often it means going up against unknown assailants, in a building they control, and adjusting the plan from second to second. One heartbeat of hesitation can mean the difference between a successful operation and a memorial on the Bureau wall.

Jessie passed me a black ballistic vest,
FBI
emblazoned on the front insignia patch. I pulled it on over my head, tugging the harness straps tight and locking them down, while Jessie and Cody did the same. The bulky vest was heavy and stiff, fighting me as I opened the van’s back door and jumped down onto hard gravel, but that was a small trade for protection. Jessie had requisitioned type-III vests with hard ceramic plates, capable of taking a full-on hit from an assault rifle.

Whoever was up there, waiting for us, hopefully they weren’t packing anything heavier than that.

Jessie, Cody, and I stayed low, jogging in a single-file line around the side of the garage. All my senses were in overdrive as I took in our surroundings: the sounds of distant traffic and the night wind, the smell of peat, and the feel of the sweat on my back, under the heavy vest, beading and turning cold. I kept my eyes up, checking for outside cameras or security measures.

We stopped at the side door, a slab covered in a sheet of dented steel. Jessie turned and pointed at herself, then at me, her voice low.

“First man, second man. Cody, you’re on long cover. Once we breach, stay at the door, call out threats, and stop anyone from getting past you if they scramble.”

“Understood,” he whispered.

Jessie looked him in the eye. “Listen. Whoever these people are, they breached Vigilant security, they’ve been spying on our operations, and they killed an innocent scientist just so they could steal his identity. Don’t try to be a good guy tonight: you see a gun and they don’t comply after the first shout, you put them
down
.”

He nodded, tight, holding his pistol in a two-handed grip. “Got it.”

Jessie passed me her shotgun. I held on to it while she got out the lock picks, crouching down by the door and going to work. I listened to the wind, and the peal of a far-off ambulance siren, while her picks scraped against the tumblers.

The lock clicked. I handed Jessie her shotgun. She covered the opening as I gave the door handle a slow, careful tug.

It opened onto a tiny vestibule and a long, rickety staircase to the second floor. Jessie took point, inching up the stairs one step at a time, the wood creaking under her boots. We moved slow and soft, all the way to the landing, and the door at the top.

Silence, now. Whatever waited for us beyond the loft door, it didn’t make a sound.

Jessie shouldered her Remington, taking careful aim at the lock on the door. She’d loaded it with slugs, all but the first in line: that was a breaching round, packed with frangible buckshot. Just the thing to start a raid with a bang.

She looked to me. I nodded. Cody did the same.

I held up three fingers, curling them as I counted down the seconds.
Three. Two. One.

Jessie pulled the trigger.

TWENTY-FIVE

The shotgun boomed, the lock blew out, and the door blasted open under Jessie’s boot. She swept left into the loft, and I charged dead ahead, shouting, “
FBI!
Show me your hands!”

I caught the loft in flashes, my subconscious mind outpacing my thoughts, building a map and driving me forward on instinct as my training kicked in. Long tables in the middle of the room. Computers, notebooks, bulky headphones on long curly cords. Four men—teenagers, maybe college age, one hitting the floor. Another jumping up, spinning, metal in his hand. The shotgun roared and the kid’s chest exploded, sending him to the floorboards in a bloodred mist.

“On the ground,” Jessie shouted.
“On the fucking ground right now!”

One of the kids hunched over his keyboard, typing fast. I grabbed him by the shoulder and threw him down, sticking my gun in his face. In the corner of my eye I could see a progress bar on the screen. A bright-blue line, counting down like the fuse on a bomb.

“April,” I said, connected by my earpiece, “send Kevin up here. We need him
fast
!”

Another suspect ran for the door. Cody caught him, swung him around like a bag of groceries, and put him down hard, pinning him on the floor under his bent knee. “Don’t even think about it,” he said.

Feet pounded on the stairwell. Kevin burst in, panting, and I waved him over.

“He triggered something,” I said. Kevin nodded and jumped into the hot seat, fingers flying.

We corralled the three survivors, zip-tying their wrists and sitting them down along the back wall of the loft. We recovered only two weapons, a cheap .22 popgun, and the .38 revolver Jessie pried from the dead kid’s fingers. Between the lack of firepower, their ages, and how all three of the perps looked one good scare away from wetting their pants, something told me these weren’t the criminal masterminds we were looking for.

“It was just a job,” one said, staring at the dead teenager five feet away. “We didn’t . . . man, we didn’t sign up for this.”

“Damn it,” Kevin said, behind me. “Harmony, problem.”

Cody and Jessie covered the prisoners while I walked over to stand at Kevin’s shoulder. He shook his head, gesturing at a black screen with a single flashing prompt.

“It was a total wipe,” he said. “All of these computers are on a shared LAN. Data’s been scrubbed, and half of it was already being overwritten with garbage before I stopped the process.”

“So can you recover anything?”

“Maybe,” he said, sighing. “I’ll see what I can do.”

I walked back to join the others and took a good, long look at the perps. I pegged the oldest at around twenty-two, twenty-three, and the youngest was
maybe
old enough to drive on a learner’s permit.

“Do you know who we are?” I asked.

The oldest one nodded. “I . . . I do. I recognize your voices. You were m-my assignment. I mean, I sorta know who you are, I didn’t understand most of what I heard. All we do is listen and write stuff down, that’s all! We’re not supposed to ask any questions. Sometimes people call in and say stuff that sounds like some kind of secret code, and we pass messages to them from our boss.”

I looked back to the tables. Each keyboard had a spiral-bound notebook and a mechanical pencil beside it. I flipped one open and idly turned the pages. The notes were written out in shorthand, like a court stenographer’s.

“Honest,” the youngest said, “we just take notes, that’s all. We deliver it to—”

His neighbor gave him a kick to the shins. “Shut
up
, bro. Don’t say another word.”

“Man, I don’t want to go to jail,” the kid shot back, eyes wide with mounting panic. He looked up at me. “Will you let us go if we tell you who our boss is?”

I shrugged. “You’re shrimp. We don’t fish for shrimp. Give us a nice fat trout, and maybe we can let you off the hook.”

“Dude,” the eldest said, shaking his head wildly, “don’t. He
told
you what happens if you do. He’s not lying, I
seen
it.”

“Man, that’s just some fairy-tale bullshit he made up to scare people, and you’re full of crap. There’s no such thing as magic.” The kid looked back to me. “We work for Anton Scu—”

He froze. His entire body trembling, like he’d grabbed hold of a high-voltage cable.

Then he started to choke.

His skin took on a blue, sweaty sheen as he struggled to breathe, his tongue protruding out between puffy lips. Protruding and bulging, swelling up to fill his entire mouth and block his throat. The tongue turned black as tar, flopping out and slapping his chin as he keeled over onto his side. He gave one last wild, desperate thrash, then fell still. He stared at the windows with glassy, sightless eyes.

“I told him,” the oldest said. His shoulders slumped. “I told him not to say it.”

I tugged Cody and Jessie to one side and kept my voice low.

“They’re under a
geis
,” I said.

“What is that?” Cody asked. “Some kind of curse?”

“More like a magically binding taboo,” I said. “That’s how their boss is protecting himself. They literally can’t speak his name without the
geis
killing them.”

“Can you set them free?” Jessie said.

I shook my head. “Eventually, with a couple of days to work on it, maybe, but we don’t have that kind of time. Hold on. Maybe we don’t have to.”

We walked back to the two survivors.

“Okay,” I said, “I won’t ask you to give up your boss. Can you tell me—either by speaking or writing it down—where you meet with him?”

They shook their heads, mute.

“Can you tell me
when
you meet him?”

They gave each other nervous, questioning looks. The eldest coughed.

“We listen to the feeds,” he said slowly, nodding at the computers, “and write down everything we hear. Then at the end of every shift, I gather up the notebooks and deliver them to him. But I can’t tell you where. If I say anything to reveal who he is or where he is . . .”

I held up my hand. “I know. I won’t ask you to. It’s okay. You had to make a promise to him that you wouldn’t talk, right? There was a ritual, and he cut your hand. Probably made you bleed onto a symbol on the floor?”

“Y-yeah, that’s right.” His head bobbed. “I tried to leave, but he pulled a gun on me and said it was too late, I was hired, and if I tried to quit . . . man, the want ad just said it was a transcription job, and it paid thirteen bucks an hour. That’s all.”

“We’re just trying to pay for school,” the other said. “We didn’t sign up for any of this freaky crap, swear to God.”

Jessie and I stepped back again.

“I believe them,” Jessie said.

“So do I.”

“Cut ’em loose and redact the story? I don’t think the one who was spying on us understood a thing he heard, but you know what Linder will say if this shows up in the report.”

I knew, all right. In Linder’s book, there was only one kind of acceptable security risk: the kind that gets silenced with two bullets at point-blank range.

“Agreed,” I said, “but first . . . I’ve got an idea. I know how they can help us find their boss.”

I walked back over and gave them a smile. “Good news and bad news. Good news is, you’re not under arrest. Bad news is, you’re unemployed. There’s just one little thing you have to do to earn your freedom.”

“Name it,” the eldest said. “Anything.”

I gestured to the notebooks.

“Do the exact same thing you would have done tonight if we hadn’t shown up. Gather up those notebooks and take them to your boss. Does he keep eyes on this place? Any cameras? Anyone come around to keep tabs on you?”

He shrugged at the corpse on the floor. “We say one word we shouldn’t,
that
happens. Why’s he gotta keep tabs? Besides, this is Back of the Yards. Nobody’s breaking into shit around here: there’s nothing in this neighborhood left to steal.”

“Hey, Kevin,” Jessie called over, “we gotta roll. Get anything good off those computers?”

He swiveled in his chair. “Heck of a setup. God-tier surveillance suite with a pipeline under sixty-four-bit encryption.”

“Meaning?”

“Not only do these guys have ears all over the place—and from the look of it, some
weird
places, us included—they wanted to make damn sure nobody else could tap into their streams. They’re very protective of their stolen information.”

“Great,” Jessie said. “Pack it all up; we’re taking their gear with us. This listening post is now permanently off-line.”

We sat down in the surveillance van, engine idling with the headlights off, watching the garage. The college kid told us his shift would normally run another hour, so that’s how long we told him to wait. Normal routine, nothing to alarm his boss or give the slightest hint anything was out of order.

One of the garage bay doors rumbled open. Here came the kid, looking nervous, hunched behind the wheel of a Buick with more rust than body paint. He pulled out and turned right. We gave him a five-second head start, then I threw the van into drive and followed.

“Looked like he was sweating bullets,” Jessie said, sitting beside me. “You think he’s going to blow it?”

“If he does, we’ll be there,” I said.

Would we be fast enough to protect him? That was the real question. Whoever the garage crew was working for, he had sorcery, black-market tech, and cash to throw around. Dangerous combination. I didn’t like sending a civilian into harm’s way, but considering the alternative was a
geis
that could choke him to death just for speaking half a name, it felt like our best chance at getting close to his boss.

We ended up back in the Loop. Downtown after dark, bathed in the amber glow of a road construction sign. Orange-vested teamsters worked the graveyard shift, jackhammering a stretch of road and carting away chunks of black asphalt in a wheelbarrow. The Buick parked up ahead on the next block, in the shadow of elevated train tracks.

We parked on the opposite side of the street. I killed the engine and we clambered in back, watching the street from the van’s camera feeds while April worked the console. She centered the view on the kid as he got out of his car, carrying an armload of notebooks. He headed for a store with dusty windows and a flickering neon sign reading
S
MALL
A
PPLIANCE
O
UTLET AND
R
EPAIR
.

“Kevin,” Jessie said, “dig up everything you can find on that address. Who owns it, who works there, everything. I want it five minutes ago.”

“You got it, boss,” he said, resting the laptop on his knees as he got to work.

The kid pushed open the front door. As it glided shut behind him, April angled the cameras for a better view. Through the windows we saw shelves of tangled machine parts, dead blenders and toasters, a wasteland of gutted kitchenware. And a man, walking over to greet the kid with a sour look on his face. He looked to be in his sixties, unkempt and unshaven, the kind of person who perpetually wakes up on the wrong side of the bed.

“Got it,” Kevin said. “Anton Scudder, sole proprietor.”

“Anton.” Jessie nodded. “That’s the name the kid was trying to drop. That’s our guy.”

I focused my senses on the screen, stretching out with my senses, trying to get a fix on him. Anyone who could cast a
geis
was no slouch at magic, and I wanted to know just how powerful he really was before we tried to take him down.

My mind brushed against an ice-cold razor blade. I recoiled, flinching hard enough that Cody put a steadying hand on my shoulder.

“What is it?” Jessie asked.

“Doing my witch thing,” I said. “I wanted to know what kind of man we were dealing with.”

“And?”

“He’s not a man,” I said. “Anton Scudder is a demon.”