The Night's Legacy (28 page)

Set spoke some words Lois recognized as ancient Egyptian.  The staff turned red hot in her hands, so hot not even the armor could protect her hands.  She dropped it to the floor, where it set the carpet on fire.  Set wasted no time in tackling her to the floor, punching her hard enough to dent the armor.

Caledfwlch
lay on the carpet a few feet away where it had fallen.  She closed her eyes, concentrating on the sword to see it clearly in her mind’s eye.  She imagined it flying towards Set, cleaving that dog’s head from his body.

She heard Set scream and the punches stopped.  Opening her eyes, she saw him limping towards the door, a gash in his right leg trailing blood.  She got to her feet, snatching up
Caledfwlch before she hurried to follow him.

The trail of blood ran through the VIP room, into the bar.  She burst through the purple curtain to find the bartender and waitress cowering behind the bar.  “You’d better get out of here.  There’s a fire in your boss’s office,” she said, following the trail out the front door.

In the parking lot she saw the red taillights of a car turning left.  A pool of shattered glass nearby indicated Set had broken a car’s window and then hotwired it. 

She jumped on the Kawasaki; she wasn’t about to let him get away.

* * *

He’d stolen a Dodge Journey, not the fleetest of vehicles.  She managed to catch up to it a couple of blocks later.  He still had the headdress on even behind the wheel, looking like some kind of grotesque cartoon of a dog driving. 

She wished Mom had thought to put some rockets or machine guns or oil spill cannons or some James Bond shit like that on the motorcycles.  Even though it was a Journey, she couldn’t try ramming it and if she hit it from the side she’d just bounce off.  She could try doing like the movies and jumping from the bike to the car.

She saw the dog’s head staff a second before it fired.  She hit the brakes in time for the lightning bolt to whiz past and hit the front of a mattress store. 
Lois twisted the throttle to pull even with the Journey again.  She pulled up as close to the side as she could and tried to snatch the staff away.  He pulled the staff out of her reach.  She ducked before he fired it again.  This time the display window of an antiques store took the hit.

Reaching to her hip, she took
Caledfwlch with her left hand and then passed it to her right.  She swung the blade at the car, slicing off the mirror on the left side.  Set jerked the wheel to the right, trying to pull away from her.  At least that’s what he wanted her to think.  As soon as she did, he would bring the car back to the left to knock her off the bike.

Instead, she decelerated to drop behind Set for a moment.  She steered far to the right so that she was on the passenger’s side.  She transferred
Caledfwlch back to her left hand.  She raked it across the rear tire, hearing it explode.  Set managed to keep control of the car, at least until she hit the front tire.

The Journey spun to the left, tumbling over and over down the road.  It came to a stop about fifty feet later, smok
e coming from the rear of the car.  She pulled to a stop next to the overturned Journey, Caledfwlch at the ready.  She squatted down to peer into the car.  She had to roll away an instant later, before Set fired the staff.

This bastard just won’t quit, she thought.  She crouched down behind the car, waiting for Set to fire again.  He didn’t disappoint her, firing a bolt through the back window.  She flattened herself on the pavement, the bolt going over her back.  She had to roll to her left to avoid the next one.

When she got to her knees, she saw Set slithering out of the car.  He took a few steps away from her, his red eyes glowing.  “You can’t stop me, hero,” he said and then fired.

He didn’t aim for her.  Instead, he aimed for the rear of the car.  The lightning touched off fuel leaking from the car.  She threw herself to the ground as the Journey exploded.  Flaming parts of the car rained down around her, a chunk of the engine banging off the armor.

When she looked up she expected to find Set ready to finish her off, but he was gone.

Chapter 27

The next morning Lois went straight to work.  She didn’t care about keeping busy or earning any money so much as getting the chance to confront Tony.  When she got there at nine o’clock, she found the gate still down.  Melanie sat on a bench nearby and called out to her.

“What’s with the door?”
Lois asked.

“Tony isn’t here yet,”
Melanie said.  She shifted a bunch of books in her hands.  “I stopped by the Home Depot yesterday on my way home.  Look at these color swatches.  Which one do you think would look good in my room?”

She had apparently taken every color swatch in the place. 
Lois shuffled through a few of them.  “What one do you like?” Melanie asked.

“I’m not sure.  What do you think?”

“I really like this cotton candy pink.  Doesn’t that look cute?”

“It’s nice.”  It looked far too girly for
Lois’s taste, but then she had wanted to paint her room black when she was ten.  Mom hadn’t gone along with that.  Lois found some paint in the garage, not realizing that it was house paint, not indoor paint.  The resulting mess had gotten her grounded for two months and set Mom back a few hundred bucks to fix.

Melanie
shuffled some of the other things in her hands.  “I got some decorating magazines too.  Aren’t these curtains so cute?  I could probably make them myself if I got some material.  I mean, curtains aren’t really that hard, are they?”

“I wouldn’t know.” 
Lois cleared her throat and said, “The rooms are already decorated.  Maybe you should look around and see if there’s one you like.”

Melanie
’s face reddened; Lois hoped she wasn’t going to run off crying again.  “Oh my God, I’m sorry!  You probably don’t want me taking a wrecking ball to Dr. Johnson’s house.  I just thought it would be fun for us to do it together.  Like, a project, you know?”

“I know.  I’m just saying you might get some ideas when you see the actual rooms.”

Melanie considered this and then nodded.  “You’re so totally right!  Mom always said I get ahead of myself.  Put the cart ahead of the horse is how she says it.  I don’t know anything about carts and horses, though.”

“It just means you’re jumping to conclusions.”

“Yeah, I guess.  That’s me, always jumping to conclusions.”  Melanie sighed and then shuffled the magazines closed.  “I hope this isn’t getting too far ahead, but could you help me move my stuff?  There’s not a lot of it.  The furniture can all stay there.  It’s a bunch of old junk I got out of the trash, you know?  I only need my clothes and stuff like that.”

“Sure.  When do you need me?”

“By the end of the month.  That’s when that sleazy landlord is kicking me out.  He’d probably do it earlier and steal all my stuff to sell on eBay or something.”

“Maybe we could do it Saturday.  We could move it into Mom’s house first.”

“Great!”  Despite the load in her hands, Melanie managed to hug Lois.  “This is going to be so much fun!  It’ll be just like camp or something.”

“We could roast marshmallows in the fireplace even,”
Lois said.

“That would be awesome!  I love S’Mores.  I went camping with Daddy once, before he died.  We made S’Mores.  Well, he did most of the work because I was like four.  They were so yummy I could have just died.”

Lois nodded along with this, though her attention was more focused on Tony coming down the hall.  He limped along, holding onto the railing for support and keeping his weight on his left leg.  He forced a smile once he was close enough.  “Hey guys,” he said.  “Why didn’t someone else open up?”

“They couldn’t find the spare keys,”
Melanie said.  She must have seen the way Tony walked as she asked, “What happened to your leg?”

“I tripped on some stairs last night.  It’s just a little sprain.  I’ll be fine in a day or so.”

Lois nodded, but she knew he was lying.  There was a bulge in the right leg of his pants, a bandage.  He’d cut his right leg.  She thought back to last night and Set limping off with his right leg leaking blood.

The rest of the pieces began fitting in place.  Rahnasto had been stationed at the Brass Drum; when she met Tony he was coming out of the VIP room.  Later he had ditched her at the club on the docks, where a lot of mobsters hung out.  Rahnasto said the man who became Set had taken care of all the security, including Stan the guard.  She remembered Stan’s final words; he  had been greeting someone, so the robbery had been an inside job.  Last night Tony had snuck out of bed with her a couple hours before Set showed up.  Set had spoken in ancient Egyptian and
Lois knew Tony had been working with Dr. Johnson to study the language.

There could be no doubt about it:  Tony was Set.

* * *

She accepted his phony excuse about needing to check on a sick aunt, or something flimsy like that.  “I hope you didn’t twist your ankle coming out of my place,” she said.  “That could be a lawsuit.”

“No, it was at Aunt Celia’s building.  The light was out on the stairs and I caught one wrong.”

“You want me to kiss your boo-boo and make it better?” she asked, pressing close to him while
Melanie was in the back to unpack some new products.

“No!” Tony said far too quickly.  “It’s fine.”

“Party pooper.”

After that, Tony took over for
Melanie in the back.  Lois half-listened to Melanie, the rest of her attention focused on the clock.  She needed to find some answers and she knew she wouldn’t get them just by asking Tony.  She watched the clock tick towards lunchtime.

At one, she turned to
Melanie and said, “I’ll be back in a few minutes.  I’m going to call the hospital and check on Mom.”

“Sure, we can cover for you.”

Lois didn’t go downstairs to the cafeteria for a pay phone.  Instead she took the elevator up to the fourth floor.  Lorna was still there, opening some mail that continued to come in even with Mom incapacitated.  “Hello, dear.  What can I do for you?”

“Can I borrow Mom’s computer for a few minutes?  I need to check on a few things.”

“Of course you can, dear.  Go in and make yourself at home.”

Lois
hadn’t sat in Mom’s chair since she was seven years old.  Back then she had enjoyed spinning around and around in the chair until she was dizzy.  As a child she had imagined what it would be like to sit in this chair and make all the big decisions.

The big decision she had to make now was what to do about Tony.  It would be simplest to go downstairs and stab him in the heart.  No Tony, no Set.  But what if she was wrong?  Sure all the pieces added up, but that didn’t mean she was right.  There might be some other explanation for what had happened last night; maybe he really had fallen on the stairs.

And she had to consider the possibility that Tony could have an accomplice.  Someone other than Rahnasto could be working for him, or making him do these things.  She needed to find more information.

The place to start was to learn more about Tony.  As listed in the human resources database, Tony’s name was Anthony Francisco Donato.  She winced at this; Francisco was a worse middle name than Gladys.  She got his Social Security Number from the file and then began backtracking.

As someone who had spent seven years on the run, she knew how to manufacture a fake identity.  The easiest way was to use the name of someone who had died and borrow their Social Security Number.  If the number was reported to the Social Security Administration or IRS it might set off a red flag, but most of the jobs she had worked were the type that didn’t use a lot of documentation.  She had downloaded a whole list of dead people named Lois so that she could borrow their identities.

Mom’s security wouldn’t be that poor.  She had mandated full background checks for everyone to try and prevent the type of inside job Tony—or whoever had taken the Staff of Set—had pulled that night.  A duplicate number would be sure to come back as a flag.  Which meant Tony was smart enough to fabricate a Social Security Number, a whole new identity the museum’s security hadn’t picked up on.

Lois had picked up a number of hacking tricks at the various colleges she had attended.  As a nerd herself, other nerds had gravitated towards her.  For a feel of genuine girl boob they would do just about anything she asked, including show her how to crack Federal databases.  That had come in handy while she was on the run.

It took her a few minutes to see there was something wrong with Anthony Francisco Donato’s records.  Prior to five years ago there had been no Tony Donato in the system.  The records had been added in, doctored to make it seem as if they had been there the whole time.

She looked up from the computer, making sure Lorna was still at her desk.  If anyone caught what she was doing, Lois could go to jail for a long time.  She went even deeper into the system, trying to find an inactive record that belonged to Tony.

It took her a good twenty minutes of searching to find it.  The record for Antony Francis Domingo had gone cold months after Tony Donato appeared.  It was as if Tony Domingo had simply disappeared the way she had.

Now that she had his real name and Social Security Number, she had an easy time finding out the rest of his story.  It turned out he hadn’t been lying at Frederic’s that night; his father had served in Vietnam with a man named Barney.  His grandfather really had fought in World War II, helping to liberate his native Italy from Mussolini and Hitler.  But there was something he hadn’t mentioned:  his brother Vincent.

She remembered that moment of pain on Tony’s face as he talked about the military tradition in his family.  Tony hadn’t carried that on, enrolling at Caltech instead.  But his younger brother Vincent had joined the army.  He had died two years later while on patrol in Baghdad.  It was a common enough story:  Vincent had been walking around and a homemade explosive device had gone off, killing him and wounding two others. 

Not long after that, Tony Domingo dropped off the radar.  He had stopped going to classes at Caltech; like her he had missed his degree by just a few classes.  Tony Donato showed up in Ren City about the same time, applying to work at the gift shop.  Mom’s signature was on the hiring paperwork, next to that of the HR director.

Lois
closed the browser and then pushed back her chair.  She remembered what one of the mob goons Sam had questioned had said about Set:  he wanted to bring down the US government.  He wasn’t interested solely in creating terror or making a political statement; he wanted to sow chaos on such a scale that America would collapse.  Tony wanted to destroy the government that had sent his younger brother to die in the desert.

She left Mom’s office,
Lorna stopping her on the way out.  “Are you all right, dear?”

“I’m fine,” she lied.  “Try not to work too hard.”

“You too.”

Lois
went back downstairs, where she found Melanie flipping through some of the magazines she had bought.  She tried to hide these as Lois came in.  “Hi!  How’s your mom?”

“She’s doing fine.  How’s business?”

“Slow.  Tony said you could go see your mom if you want.”

“I think I’ll do that.”

* * *

When she got to Mom’s room, she risked jostling her mother a bit, not hard enough to shake the tubes and wires loose.  Mom woke with a snort and then a smile came to her face.  “Hi, sweetheart.  Was I snoring?”

“No more than usual.”

“Oh.  What’s wrong?  Is it something about your father?  Or the will?”

“No.  It’s Tony.  The boy who works at the gift shop.  You hired him about five years ago?”

“I remember.  He was just a summer employee and he wound up sticking around after we had some turnover.”

She could imagine what kind of turnover there had been; Tony had probably poisoned someone or broken a few kneecaps until someone quit.  “He robbed the museum.  He’s the one who shot you and Sam and Dr. Johnson.  He’s Set.”

Mom gasped at this, her face turning paler than usual.  “Are you sure?  He always seemed like such a nice boy.”

“I’m all but certain.  He created a fake name to get hired.  He’s been living as someone else ever since he started working at the museum.”

“Why?”

Lois told Mom about Tony’s brother dying and Set’s wish to destroy the country.  “He wants revenge for his brother.  Not against the people who killed him, but the people who sent him there in the first place.  He must have known something about the Staff of Set.  His grandparents on his mother’s side came from Egypt; one of them might have said something.  So he gets a job in the gift shop and starts getting friendly with Richard so that he could figure out how to use the staff.  When he was ready, he partnered with the mob.  They were looking for a way to get rid of you and Dad and that’s what he promised them.  They created a distraction by robbing the museum while he got what he really wanted:  the staff and headdress.”

“That’s terrible,” Mom said.

“Set hit those banks, especially the Fed, hoping that he could destabilize things here and then start working on the rest of the country.  When I stopped him, he set a trap for me in the subway.  If Dad hadn’t got in the way, he would have got me.”