The Forgefires of God (The Cause Book 3) (18 page)

Fuck!  I sat down on the little phone booth seat.  Cold sweat poured from my body, and my vision narrowed to a single point.  Two senior Arms plus Rayburn, who would have gained enough stature in the fight to become the next senior Arm, and they
lost
?

“How much of a fight was it?  Did Keaton’s crew manage to damage Patterson and her people before she went down?”  This made no sense whatsoever.

“No.  According to Shadow, they fought their way into Patterson’s compound and surrendered.  He thinks Keaton fell into a trap.”

I took a long breath and my nerves began to sing.  This was it.  Hell and opportunity both at once. We had been betting Keaton would screw up, and here it was, in one of my least likely scenarios.  We all knew the dangers of Patterson’s home base, Hilltop, we knew her capabilities, her resources, her enslaved Focuses and her oversized household.  We knew more about her setup than we knew about nearly any other Focus.  Keaton and I had wargamed out attacks on Hilltop for years.  Keaton knew to take in Crow help, and I was sure Bass’s Crow, Snowcone and Rayburn’s Crow, Kincaid, were at least hovering in the vicinity to protect them from Patterson’s suspected captive Crows.  Haggerty and I had even eliminated the biggest danger, potential FBI help.

Despite all our preparations, we had missed something big. Keaton, implausibly, had fallen.

Now we needed to survive the experience.

“Lori, did you hear the news?”

“Yes,” she said, on the phone from Memphis.  “What are you going to do?”

“No.  What are
we
going to do?”

Lori paused.  “I think you and I need to tag Sky and vice versa.  Invite the witches to meet with us and divide up the world.  Number one on the agenda should be replacing the UFA with a new organization.”

“What about Patterson?”

“Let her rot.  Without the other ruling firsts to do her dirty work, she’s nothing.”

“I see two problems.  First, she still has blackmail information on a bunch of important Focuses, and likely has quite a few of them tagged.  Second, she’s got Keaton, Bass and Rayburn.  Eventually, she’s going to break them and turn them into her enforcers.”

“That does sound like a problem,” Lori said.  She took a deep breath to steady herself.  “Take over the Arm organization, Carol.  Finish the job Keaton started with Patterson.”

I shivered, nervous and paranoid.  “I’ll get the Arms.  Finishing the job against Patterson, though, will be far more difficult.  Keaton should have won.”  Against Keaton, Bass and Rayburn as Patterson’s enforcers, we would need to radically change how the Arms worked as an organization.  We would need to be watching each other’s backs, full time.  We would each need multiple Crow partners.  We might not even end up with real territories.  Most of our juice might end up coming from Focuses.  I would need to challenge Keaton and win.  To get the stature necessary, I would need to tag all the other Arms.  How, dammit, had Keaton
lost?
  “You work on Patterson; taking down the First Focuses should have been a Focus operation from the start.  Come up with a plan and I’ll get the Arms and our organizations ready for the fight.”

“No, Carol.  Think about the big picture.  Think like the Commander, like Patterson’s nightmare.”  Pause.  “Please, love.  We don’t know the whole story yet, and I think the real story is going to turn out to be far worse than anything we’ve ever imagined in our darkest nightmares.”

“I’m afraid you’re right about that.”  Something or someone else had to be involved.  Nothing else made sense.  Amy’s ‘unknown ultrapowerful Major Transform enemy’ theory was looking good today.

But thinking like the Commander?  Riiight.  Keaton and Bass had beat me far enough into my beast to make thinking like the Commander
unnatural
.  The Commander could sweet talk neutral Crows and Focuses into participating in wars, and plan out devious battle strategies for fun.  All I could think about now was hunker-down paranoia-driven plans that would drag my friends into the darkness.

Reclaiming my place as the Commander?  Thinking like the Commander made my brain hurt.

Lori was correct, though.  My responsibilities, not just as Chicago’s Arm, but as the owner of the juice music project, the juice to an Arm project, and as the owner of the Network, meant I needed to think strategically, or someone would take it all away from me.  I
must
do this.

I focused my mind and pushed through the hurt, pushed through the paranoia and pushed through all my nasty Arm instincts.  The darkness of my beast faded from my mind, napping, not gone.  The world opened up around me, the dance of the Major Transforms.  The politics of all the Major Transforms.  The big picture.

Lori was right.  When I thought about this as the Commander, the issues became obvious.  If we ignored Patterson, she would re-establish her hold over the Focuses before they got off their asses and took her down.  She would use the blackmail weapon on the Focuses, enforced by her new Senior Arm goon squad.  The Focuses wouldn’t make their move soon enough.  Worse, Keaton’s fall would push Enkidu and his damned Hunters into their attack.  They were predators enough to sniff out any hint of weakness.  They would be at our throats in an instant, long before the Focuses defeated Patterson.  Nor could we go after the Hunters with Patterson at our backs.  She and her enforcers would destroy us with ease.

I had my duty, and I would do it.  Patterson needed to fall.

“Okay,” I said.  “You willing to take some orders, Lori, and arrange some things for me?”

“Yes, Commander.”  I smiled.

“I think it’s time I visited Tonya.  Order Betsy to take Teas to Chicago.  You and Haggerty fly to Philly, and meet me in Philly at Fairmont Park.  If you get some time, find us somewhere private to use as a base camp, say, in one of those Noble tourney sites in New York or New England.  Start getting anyone and everyone there with even the slightest interest in participating in a war against Patterson, both as fighters and as support people.  Except Polly’s witches.  We’re going to handle them through Tonya.  No delays.  The only way we’re going to win this is if we hit Patterson before she’s ready and before the Hunters attack.  Speed is our only option.”

After I hung up the phone, I composed myself, and walked back to the car to talk to Rose, Giselle and Mary.

“There’s been a sudden change of plans,” I said.  I explained the situation, and sent them on their way.

“Smith,” Hank said, over the phone.  The phone booth by the closed Esso station was getting a lot of use this morning.  I had already lifted a supply of quarters from the cash register of the nearby Dunkin’ Donuts.

“Double your bodyguards, stay in your office, and don’t leave for any reason,” I said.

“What’s up?”

“Patterson took Keaton, Rayburn and Bass.”

Pause.  “Commander, ma’am, this sounds like treachery.  Talk to Van, he’s…”

“I will, when I get the time.  Get him to write up his theories and send them on to me.  Keep your head down.”

I had called him to alert him and get him to hide under my protections just in case someone took a shot at him on the way by.  I had neglected one important detail, though: his insights into the situation.  “Give me a worst case scenario, Hank.”  Although Keaton’s Arms working for Patterson was bad enough, I suspected there were worse possibilities.

“Yes, Commander,” he said.  Using my title was his way of telling me he understood the gravity of the situation.  “Recall my side project on Arm shape alterations?  If Patterson remakes those Arms, you should watch out for radical physical changes in the medium to long term.  Enough to surprise you in a fight, perhaps enough to alter their appearances.”

“Short term?”  My big worry.

“Is the scuttlebutt correct that Patterson uses élan?”

I grunted in the affirmative.  I should just give up on trying to keep anything from Hank.

“Élan means
speed
, Commander.  Consider Keaton with the size and bulk of Armenigar, if you want a short-term worse case.  Or Rayburn as an Arm-Monster, or Bass as a Chimera.  I would suggest you move against Patterson as soon as possible.”

Good confirmation that I was on the right track.  “I am.  Remember, you learned the benefits of speed from
me
.”

Dolores Sokolnik: December 20, 1972

“Okay, what’s our scoreboard like, now?” Del said.  She sat down next to Dorothy, and toweled off from her late night exercise session.  Normally, she would turn in for her two hours of sleep, but not with the way the night was going.  Far too many no-reports.  Dorothy slid the notepad over to Del, who whistled.  The whistle was a beat late, but still, it was a normal human reaction.  Del was proud of it.  “Did you get a chance to talk to Arm Hancock’s communication woman about the Adkins attack?”  There were three telephones in the communications room, plus two televisions and a radio.  Papers, maps, and notebooks covered the table, many of the notes in Del’s handwriting.  After reading through the research on Adkins, she had fingered Adkins as nearly as likely as Patterson and Fingleman to cause problems for them.

“A normal, and a rather independent one,” Dorothy said.  Disgusted.  “Yes, and we now know more than ‘they succeeded’.  Hancock’s crew actually took Adkins alive.”

“Damn,” Del said.  She expected all the inner circle first Focuses save Julius would be too well guarded to capture.  “What’s that squiggle mean?” Del said, pointing to the Claunch attack section in her notebook.

“Had to make something up,” Arm Kent said.  “Bartlett and Focus Mann took Claunch’s compound, but Claunch and her Transforms were gone.  She left a bunch of normals running the place as decoys.  Claunch went gypsy on the tenth of December, and somehow managed to fool the lot of us.”

“Nothing from the Boss?”

“Sorry.  Not a word.”

Del winced.  This didn’t sound good.  Ma’ams Keaton, Rayburn and Bass had started their attack on Patterson two hours ago.  Ma’am Keaton had predicted twenty minutes, tops for the operation, and a maximum of an hour before she called in and was on her way to Charlotte to pick up Corrigan.

“Did you learn more about what went wrong on the Fingleman nab?”  Ma’ams Billington and Naylor had called in to report failure in taking Focus Fingleman, but they were under a time crunch and couldn’t give the details.  Using the Crow information, they should have been able to surprise Fingleman by going in through Fingleman’s supposedly secret escape tunnels.

“Fingleman wasn’t there,” Arm Kent said.  “Her remaining Transforms were in a panic, in the process of packing up and leaving.  Billington and Naylor captured three of them and got them to talk.  Apparently, Fingleman had a bad dream and decided to evacuate, leaving with her top people while Ma’am’s Billington and Naylor were in the tunnels.”

“Hmm.  Fingleman wasn’t known to be able to use the Dreaming.  I guess she wasn’t truthful about her own capabilities, even with her own household,” Del said.  “I’m going to take a nap.  You want me to wake up Theresa for you?”

“Yes.  Del?” Dorothy said.  The older graduate Arm smelled of fear.  Del sat.

“Something bad’s happened,” Dorothy said.  “I don’t know how I know, but I do.  You don’t feel anything, even with your strange set of talents?”

“Not a thing.  Of course, having to rip my own mind apart with my quiet pools trick probably did in any nascent capabilities involving the Dreaming, or anything else in the subconscious.  I can barely hold together a normal human persona, remember?”

Dorothy nodded.  She and Maynard had been working as much as they could to help Del retrieve her lost humanity.  With Del holding their tags, doing so was a matter of survival.  Having a crippled Arm as a boss wasn’t conducive to a long life.  Del hadn’t objected in the slightest, and welcomed the aid.

Doing so was a logical necessity.

A bad thought crossed her mind.  A distinct set of bad possibilities.  “Treachery.”

“If Ma’am Keaton didn’t report because she walked into a trap, this could mean all our targets had advance warning,” Dorothy said.  “None of Ma’am Hancock’s did, at least according to their reports.  I’d say that Hancock or one of her people set us up.”

“There’s another possibility with this set of data,” Del said.  “One of our people set us up, and because they didn’t know what Arm Hancock’s crew was doing, couldn’t set them up.  Either is possible.  As is bad luck or secret Focus abilities.  Based on your bad feelings, I’m leaning toward treachery of one sort or another.”  She grabbed Dorothy on the shoulder.  “You’re right about this.  We need to prepare for an attack on us, here.”  So much for her nap.

“How about the other plan of yours?  Arm Bartlett is due back here in two hours.”

“We go through with it,” Del said.

---

“You’re crazy,” Merry Bartlett said.

Del shook her head.  She, Dorothy and Theresa had Bartlett surrounded.  Mona had Bartlett in her sights, with a canister-fed repeating .700 Monster rifle, from behind a low wall that was part of the back yard obstacle course.  There was no moon, but starlight gave enough light for an Arm to see.  “No, desperate.  Bass told you to keep away from me, didn’t she?”