Rebellion Reborn, page 23
“What? MMA, Muay Thai, boxing?” he asked.
“Oh, this?” I held up my casted hand. “Nah. This was from my knitting circle. Disagreement about what type of stitch to use. I said purl, she said knit, and the next thing you know, fists are flying.”
He smiled at me and shook his head. The guy had been paying attention upstairs, after all.
“Oh, this is for you.” He extended the brown-paper-wrapped package, suddenly acting sheepish as if unsure what to do with it. “Sarah left me specific directions to give it directly to you when you arrived.”
“Thanks,” I said, taking the small parcel from him. It wasn’t big, maybe six inches square by four inches tall.
“Careful, it’s really heavy,” he said as he handed it over.
He was right. The thing weighed at least twenty pounds. What the hell?
“Thanks,” I said with a grunt, shifting it a bit to get a better grip.
I walked with it back over to my bunk and sat down, thinking I’d better wait to unwrap it. Mendez walked over to a cot, pulled a heavy plastic storage case from under it, and snapped it open. After removing some sort of corded doodad, he headed back upstairs.
Once I was alone again, I unwrapped the package, revealing an ornately decorated black iron box. That explains the weight.
It had no lock, just a simple hasp, and the inside was lined with thick green velvet set with two shiny filigreed silver tubes about the size of a finger. Each tube was connected to a bright silver chain by its copper-colored cap. Recognition dawned quickly, and I grabbed one just to verify my hunch. The copper end where the chain attached simply pulled free from the silver sleeve. Inside the sleeve was a crystal vial with dark-red liquid inside, and it glowed the palest shade of pink from some sort of magical energy. Sarah’s blood.
The workmanship of the delicate filigreed sleeves was impressive. They weighed almost nothing apart from the crystal and chain, and I guessed they were aluminum. It was clear that other-than-human hands had expertly worked each of the crystal containers, their copper lids, and the chains. Both containers were identical in every detail.
They were ideal tools for finding and tracking Sarah if I needed to. They were flawless creations that would allow energy to flow through them as efficiently as physically possible. In other words, they were tracking crystals that even I could use. I smiled. Sarah really didn’t do anything halfway. I put one vial around my neck and under my cuirass then placed the other back in its wrought-iron box. Even that was smart. The raw iron would keep any but the most ardent Paran from getting hold of Sarah’s very life essence.
I tucked the box into my duffle, rechecked my swords, then wrapped them securely in a microfiber towel. I closed the duffle, changed into my boots, and headed back upstairs to join the others.
Once back on the seventh floor, Graves began her group debrief. A lot of it was standard procedure for an undercover situation: maintaining audio and visual watch, keeping a safe distance, calling in and handing off tails, logging contacts, emergency meets, emergency signals, code words, and such. Graves gave us a very short list of people we could communicate with if necessary. It consisted of two people, one of whom had been at the meeting in DC. The other was a secure runner to communicate with DHS in person. The last thing Graves went over was Sarah’s undercover ID.
“She chose the name Criseida Calchasidou,” she said.
The name made me snort aloud. Everyone else giggled a bit, too, but for different reasons than mine. It was an odd name, after all. “Look, she chose it, so get over it,” Graves said, trying to restore order to the group. “She said she’d go by ‘Cris’ for short.”
I knew immediately that she’d chosen the name on purpose, knowing I would probably be the only one on Earth who would get it. I hoped that was true. The name was a variation on the name Cressida, the daughter of Calchasa, a turncoat Trojan priest who’d helped the Greeks during the Trojan War. In Shakespeare’s play, Troilus and Cressida, Cressida was exchanged for a Trojan prisoner of war, where the story says she met me. The love affair was only a tiny part of the story itself, but I got her reference.
The next few days crawled by especially slowly since my entire contribution was limited to occasionally examining images of people Sarah interacted with to see if I recognized any of them. Unfortunately, still images, no matter how high the resolution, would never capture auras, glamours, or any magical energy. Infrared images could capture certain energy signatures, but the sudden bright flares were usually chalked up to errors or malfunctions and dismissed. As far as I could tell, every image was of a normal person I’d never seen before. There were only about eight million of those in the city. Throw in a few hundred thousand more beings who could pass for human, and I saw my days becoming long and tedious. I hated sitting on my hands.
After six days of mind-numbing inactivity and crappy take-out food, Mendez finally informed us that ads seeking hosts and hostesses for a private club had finally come out in the online versions of several underground and alternative newspapers. That morning, Sarah pulled open the curtain to her room and placed a small plant on the windowsill.
All at once, Agent Mitchell ran past me and upstairs in a blur of panic. That was Sarah’s signal that she needed to make contact, and Mitchell, dressed as a homeless person, was the one who would retrieve the information.
According to procedure, in twenty minutes, she would drop something in the garbage can down the street, where Mitchell would dig it out. Dressed in rags and ratty clothing, Mitchell bolted down the steps and around to the back entrance, leaving a rank cloud in his wake. He emerged onto the street through an alley, shambling along, checking out anything discarded on the sidewalk or street. He reached the designated garbage can and began digging. Within moments, Sarah left her SRO dressed in a short skirt and knee-high boots. The red streak in her shortened hair, which she had dyed blond, matched her bright lipstick. I disliked everything about the persona she had adopted.
On cue, she dropped a used coffee cup into the trashcan and continued off down the street. Mitchell grabbed the cup, stuffed it into his coat pocket, and kept moving. An hour later, the undercover agent made his way back to our roost, reeking of rotted food, stale coffee, and who knew what else. I made the mistake of rushing him to get the cup and felt like I’d been punched in the nose.
“Phew,” I said, instantly recoiling and throwing an arm over my mouth and nose, suppressing a gag. “You take your job too seriously, man.” I snatched the cup from him with my free hand then backed away as he continued upstairs.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah...” He waved me off. “I drew the short straw. What can I say?” He stomped up the rickety stairway, mercifully taking the rancid odor with him.
I popped the top off the cup, revealing the folded note within. Agent Graves walked up behind me, hands on hips, and glared. “Well?” she said, raising her eyebrows and waving an impatient hand.
“It says she replied to the ad in one of the alternative weeklies and has an interview at three p.m. tomorrow at a hotel near the 9/11 memorial. Here’s the address,” I said, handing her the note.
“Outstanding. Now we can really begin,” she said, refocusing on the rest of the team. “Phillips, you and I will tail her at the hotel. I want you at this address by noon. I’ll arrive shortly after. Mendez, get me feeds for traffic and street cameras, hotel security cameras, and a full layout of the hotel and the surrounding area as soon as possible. If you need a warrant, let me know. I want eyes on her at all times. Got me?”
Mendez and Phillips nodded.
“What can I do?” I asked, hopeful that I might be able to take a more active role.
“You watch the screens with Mendez,” she said flatly. “If you see anyone you recognize, let us know. Mendez will be monitoring a lot of feeds. An extra pair of eyes will help.”
Over three thousand years of kicking the shit out of creatures the world doesn’t believe exist, and I’m relegated to watching TV because it’s how they think I’d be most useful. Seriously?
Chapter 31
Through the hotel’s security camera feed, I watched Sarah, dressed in another short skirt and a leather jacket over a blouse unbuttoned one button too many, walk across the hotel lobby and into the bar. She spoke briefly with the bartender, and he pointed at a woman sitting at a table alone. The other woman had her back to the camera with her head bowed as if studying a cell phone or tablet. She was wearing a long camel-hair coat and had very dark hair. As Sarah approached, the woman glanced up and reached out her hand. From the profile, I recognized her immediately as the Moroi who ran Cocytus. The two women shook hands, and the vampiress motioned for Sarah to take a seat across from her. Our view stank—the vampire blocked Sarah, and all we could see of the Moroi was the back of her head. Luckily, Agent Graves was sitting at the bar, while Agent Phillips was at a table by herself, eating and prodding the keys on a laptop. Both had a much better view of the meet than we did.
“The woman she’s meeting with runs Cocytus,” I said into a microphone. “My information suggests she’s not thrilled with whoever she actually works for, but I know nothing about her beyond that.”
Agent Phillips shifted in her seat, moved her laptop slightly, then hit a few buttons. A clear image of the woman’s face just over Sarah’s shoulder popped up on one of our screens. Seconds later, Mendez was running facial recognition on the picture.
“Damn, that woman is gorgeous,” Mendez whispered over his shoulder at me. “You think she participates in the club’s, uh, activities?”
“Possibly,” I replied, trying to focus on Sarah.
He shook his head. “Wonder how much it costs to join.”
They met for about thirty minutes before Sarah got up to leave. As they shook hands, the vampire handed her a card or small piece of paper, then Sarah left. The vampire stayed seated, and within a few minutes, another woman walked in and sat down across from her. Agent Phillips remained at her table by the window, but Graves got up, paid her tab, and left. The facial recognition software continued to run without so much as a beep.
“Whoever she is, she apparently doesn’t have a driver’s license, state or federal ID, or a passport, because she’s not in any of our databases,” Mendez said.
I followed the cameras until Sarah got into a cab headed back uptown. Then I took what seemed like my first breath in the last half hour, and I shook my head.
“Can you try a facial search on social media or anything?” I asked, trying to be helpful, but not really caring. I knew she was a Moroi, and I had no interest in who she was beyond that.
“Well, sort of, yeah, but it won’t be as accurate, and it will take one hell of a lot longer,” he replied. “It’d be so much easier if I had a name.”
“I bet. So I guess you’ll just have to sift through a lot of images of pretty brunettes,” I said, smiling and prodding him in the shoulder. “Tough job.” I got up, stretched, and walked toward the stairs with the intention of heading to my cot.
“Hey, wait,” Mendez said excitedly. “Sarah just searched for directions to an address on her phone.” He tapped rapidly on his keyboard for a moment. “Near as I can tell, it’s some kind of small private medical clinic in the Village.”
It made sense. They would want to make sure she was healthy before proceeding. Mendez did a quick background check and found the clinic itself was a dead end. It was legitimate, owned and run by a larger well-known healthcare company.
Sarah’s visit was fully paid for, but getting access to her medical records to find out by whom was problematic. Laws prohibited even the DHS from legally getting the information, and forcing the issue could risk exposing Sarah’s connection to law enforcement.
Mendez’s facial-recognition search of the brunette Moroi produced a few matches that proved problematic for him. One image that came up as a seventy-five-percent match was a young woman in an old photo of a group of teenage native Hawaiian girls performing at a luau in honor of a visit by the Prince of Wales in the 1920s. The other was a higher-percentage match to an older but just as beautiful young woman at the Golden Gate International Exhibition on Treasure Island off San Francisco in 1940. Without question, both were the Moroi woman, and she hadn’t aged since the later photo. Given the photos’ ages, Mendez predictably tossed them out and considered the effort a failure. The only thing the pictures told me was that the vampire was close to a hundred years old.
Three days later, we were still no closer to identifying the vampire, but Sarah had delivered us a message through the garbage-can telegraph. I read the message over and over, hoping the information would somehow become less unsettling for me. The note said she had passed the physical and needed to meet with someone as part of a standard background check. They would come to collect her the next day during business hours. That was unusual, to say the very least. Each time I read it, my stomach flopped, and I could feel the perspiration break out on my forehead. I had to remind myself that she was a professional and had a solid team behind her, who expected that to happen.
At nine the next morning, I was glued to the monitors. An hour and fifteen minutes later, a sleek black Mercedes sedan pulled up right outside her hotel, and a man in a gray suit got out of the passenger side, carrying a briefcase. He straightened his tie and glanced around at the neighborhood. His brow wrinkled slightly as his gaze fell to the entrance to the SRO. Without thinking, I shot to the window to look at him. I had to know if he was human or not.
I watched as the man walked into the SRO. Nothing about him suggested he was anything other than human. My heart started beating again, and I suddenly realized Graves, Mendez, and Phillips were all frantically calling to me hoarsely to get me away from the windows.
“Damn, sorry. I wasn’t thinking. My bad.”
“All we need is for them to feel just the slightest bit off, and all of this work—all of Sarah’s work—will be for nothing,” Graves said, her voice raised and her tone stern. Phillips ran behind us and up the stairs, wearing a huge pair of headphones and holding a parabolic microphone. She was heading to the roof.
“License plate is registered to a law office here in Manhattan,” Mendez said, drawing Graves’s attention away from me. “That guy is one of the firm’s investigators. I have all his info here. He’s legit, and that law firm is one serious bunch of sharks. Sheesh.”
That actually calmed me down even more. I knew of stories about a creature called a Luduan the Chinese used to detect lies in the royal courts, and all I needed was for Na’amah to somehow pull one of those things out of her ancient ass. Humans, even well-connected and powerful ones, didn’t worry me.
Within a few minutes, a knock on Sarah’s door was broadcast over speakers near Mendez’s workstation, and everyone in the room became deathly silent. We listened intently to the conversation that followed, but it was, in fact, very professional and perfunctory. Sarah gave the details of her DHS-supplied identity. The investigator didn’t ask anything rude or odd or even make a suggestive comment. Other than being run by inhuman beings, the club was probably a legitimate, albeit seedy, business. Part of me hoped the investigator would make some crude advance and that Sarah would coldcock him for his effort, but as soon as he was done asking his questions, he got back in the waiting Mercedes and drove off. Assuming all the details of Criseida Calchasidou’s life held up to scrutiny, I could see no reason they wouldn’t select her. Unfortunately.
Within twelve hours, Criseida Calchasidou was offered a hostess role at the next gathering of Cocytus. Sarah informed us, through our designated drop, that she would receive a call forty-eight hours in advance, then a limousine would pick her up outside her hotel at noon on the day of the event, and a liaison would be waiting in the car to brief her on specific club policies. She was told to expect to be out until at least five the next morning, but longer was possible and at her discretion. No specific date was provided. My skin crawled, and I shivered involuntarily.
Duma better be wide awake at this thing, or I’ll kill him. But only if I don’t freak out first.
Chapter 32
I found it impossible to hide my apprehension over the next few days. The entire team could tell I was on edge. Luckily, they all chalked it up to inexperience and rookie jitters. Mendez even tried to calm me down by explaining the surveillance procedures again and telling me a few stories about past surveillance ops that I’m sure he thought were humorous. Funny stories. If he knew what I knew, he’d be throwing up and all but catatonic in a corner somewhere.
We all expected the event to take place over a weekend, so it came as a surprise when a human messenger slid a note under her door at noon on the following Monday. That meant the event was that Wednesday. With events finally imminent, I had to fight to control my breathing and actively calm myself. I hated everything about what was happening, and I was dangerously close to needing to destroy something—partly from nerves and partly out of sheer boredom. However, the tension also increased notably among everyone else on the team, and they all became restless and antsy. Long-term surveillance work sucks.
That night, I took my gear bag and headed down one floor. In the dim, eerie light of a red-tinted lantern, I went over all my gear. Not because it needed it, but because the chore was familiar and calming. After cleaning my Glock and Sig and reloading the magazines for both twice, I decided I needed to remind Duma of his promise to me. I knew he hadn’t and would never forget, but the idea made me feel like I was doing something productive nonetheless.
I couldn’t text or email Duma without breaking security protocols for the operation, and sneaking out to make a phone call wasn’t worth the consequences, either. Instead, I pulled the small chamois-wrapped leather sack out of my gear bag that contained a roll of thick parchment made from papyrus, a roc-feather quill, a bottle of traditional India ink, a small silver knife, and a flint and tinder. I wrote my message on a piece of the papyrus then wrote out Duma’s full and true name. I used the knife to cut my thumb then said the short enchantment I was told was necessary before pressing my bloody thumb to the page.
