NO COUNTRY FOR OLD AGENTS

  THE AGENT OPERATIVE™ BOOK 3

  MARTHA CARR

  MICHAEL ANDERLE

  This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.

  Copyright © LMBPN Publishing

  Cover by Fantasy Book Design

  Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing

  A Michael Anderle Production

  LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact support@lmbpn.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  LMBPN Publishing

  PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy

  Las Vegas, NV 89109

  Version 1.00, February 2023

  ebook ISBN: 979-8-88541-851-5

  Print ISBN: 979-8-88878-182-1

  The Oriceran Universe (and what happens within / characters / situations / worlds) are Copyright (c) 2017-23 by Martha Carr and LMBPN Publishing.

  THE NO COUNTRY FOR OLD AGENTS TEAM

  Thanks to our JIT Readers:

  Dorothy Lloyd

  Wendy L Bonell

  Diane L. Smith

  Christopher Gilliard

  Dave Hicks

  Jeff Goode

  Jan Hunnicutt

  If we’ve missed anyone, please let us know!

  Editor

  SkyFyre Editing Team

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Free Books

  Author Notes - Martha Carr

  Author Notes - Michael Anderle

  Other series in the Oriceran Universe:

  Connect with The Authors

  Books By Michael Anderle

  CHAPTER ONE

  So many champagne bottles were opened at the wrap party for The Players that it was like being inside a bag of microwave popcorn. The Players was finished, and Katie was a First Arret intern again, so Norah assigned the young woman to keep an eye on Sid and Bitta and confiscate any Pink Fairy they tried to take.

  "Tell Sid I'll drop him from the agency if he gives you any trouble," Norah said.

  "What about Bitta?" Katie asked, face pale as she imagined scolding the infamous director. The dwarf in question was wearing a sheer beaded poncho that brushed the floor below her six-inch Louboutins. Under the cloak, Bitta wore a nude jumpsuit—hopefully. The director was deep in conversation with Oleander, the fairy assistant director. Now that her job no longer required a megaphone and a campaign of terror, she was smiling and touching her lips to a plastic Barbie shoe full of the ludicrously expensive whisky Marina had sent.

  "Norah!" Duncan called. "Want a glass of champagne?"

  Norah nodded. Duncan whipped out his wand and shot a burst of sand-colored magic across the room. It curled around the stem of a champagne glass, lifted it into the air, and serpentined it through the crowd, the fizzy liquid sloshing against the rim. Twice, the magic flickered when some dark-brown energetic imperfection interrupted the stream, but the glass righted itself and arrived in Norah's hand three-quarters full.

  "Cheers to that little stunt." Norah took a sip of champagne that was only a bit flat.

  Duncan, who wore a tank top that resembled several pieces of string haphazardly tied together, grinned.

  "Did the digital marketing team talk to you about streaming tonight?" Norah asked. "Go live while everyone's relatively sober. By all means, celebrate, but I need you among the living tomorrow for your screen tests."

  A bit of red wine sloshed out of Duncan’s tenuously held cup. "I've been living in a hype house, boss. I know how to stream drunk." He sounded professionally offended. Over his right shoulder, a pixie from the costuming department dove head-first into a bowl of piña colada punch.

  "I'm less worried about you than some of the others. Chop-chop, Dunker."

  Duncan pulled his phone from his pocket. "I'm going to try magic on the stream today," he said. "I told my followers I was avoiding it to prep for being a non-magical human in The Players, but..."

  "You'll do great.” Norah pointedly sipped her champagne. "If you don't, I'll help you figure it out. You're more than a wand, Duncan."

  He nodded, took a breath, and raised his phone, face transformed by a bright, apparently authentic smile.

  "What uuuup! Dunker Bunker here! I'm streaming live from the wrap party of my first big film. Woooo-wooooo! I want to introduce you to the incredible artists I've been working with..."

  Norah ducked away before he could rope her into his livestream.

  Party food was arranged on a table in the corner, and caterers circled with trays, but both were neglected in favor of the flood of booze. The food wasn't nearly as good as Angelo's. Norah plucked a shrimp puff from the buffet table, took a tentative bite, and chucked the rest into the trash as Stellan rolled up beside her. He had gotten the monster guts out of his beautiful beard and had styled it in a new way. The auburn hair was as beautifully smooth as a board. It looked like he was wearing Jennifer Aniston's scalp on his chin.

  Norah admired it. "How do you get it so straight? Some kind of newfangled dwarven iron?"

  Stellan shook his head. "Irons damage the hair and create frizz. This is a Brazilian blowout. Something about coating the individual hairs with keratin."

  Norah considered calling Katie over and having her schedule an appointment, but, seeing that the young woman was engaged in conversation with Bitta, she decided to leave the intern to her relentless networking.

  "I'm texting you the name of my girl," Stellan said.

  Norah glanced across the warehouse at the set, which they’d half-destroyed with special effects. "Now that we’re done, what are you going to do with the monster prop?"

  Stellan grinned. "The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures bought it. They're doing a creature installation. My guy is going to be next to the original Swamp Thing." He said this as if it had some deep religious significance. For him, it probably did.

  "That's great, Stellan," Norah said. "Will you tell Bitta I said goodbye?"

  "You're not leaving to work, are you?" Stellan asked, incredulous.

  Norah shook her head. "Nope. Just meeting a friend."

  As she descended into the tunnels below Los Angeles thirty minutes later, Norah slipped her arms into a new jacket. It was made of Oriceran plant-based leather that looked and felt like cow leather—if the cow had been raised on a cloud and fed a nonstop diet of fabric softener. The material was unbelievably soft and beautiful and was dyed a blue so dark it was almost black. The salesperson had insisted it matched Norah’s eyes.

  Nostril met her at the bottom of the elevator, arms crossed and feet planted in a wide defensive stance. The girl scratched at a new stick-and-poke tattoo on her arm, swollen red skin surrounding, ironically, a rune for protection from disease. Her septum piercing had been updated with a realistic pewter bat, next to which swung a tiny ceramic doll.

  "I'm only here because Shay asked me to come," Nostril shouted over the sounds from a miniature Bluetooth speaker attached to one of her belt loops by a carabiner. The music was ninety percent screaming, maybe ninety-five.

  Nostril was wearing cutoff black jean shorts. Instead of wasting the leftover denim, the teen had cut it into strips and sewed it into a cage-shaped overskirt. Ratty but cool.

  "Have you considered a career in fashion?" Norah asked, looking at the sewing project.

  Nostril eyed her suspiciously. "Fashion is a tool of the Man to keep us afraid of ourselves."

  Norah stroked the blue plant leather of her sleeve defensively. It's so soft. "Out of curiosity, what isn't a tool of the Man?"

  "Death metal and body modification." Nostril tapped her Bluetooth speaker.

  "Cool song." The music had changed to something that sounded like cats dying stylishly. It was…distinctive.

  "Not if you enjoy it, it's not." Nostril peevishly flipped off the speaker. A final wail echoed down the long concrete corridor behind her. "Look, lady, what do you want?"

  "I'm looking for a guy named UrbanWurm," Norah said. "He's a hacker, and I've heard he lives underneath Los Angeles."

  "Who’d you hear that from?" Nostril twined a loop of her overskirt between chapped fingers.

  The psychotic light elf who lives in my coffee table. "An informant."

  "Never heard of any worms." Nostril shook her head so ferociously that the charms on her septum piercing rattled. She stuffed her hands into the pockets of her cutoffs and gazed with great interest at the scuffed toes of her Doc Martens.

  Taking a deep breath, Norah reached inside herself to the knot of magic she’d received from an enchanted antique radio. Following the complex loops of the enchantment, she found the twist of magic that activated it and tugged a thread of blue gum eucalyptus magic.

  Nostril’s emotions hurtled toward her. Teenagers teemed with emotions and desires, contradictory and sometimes nonsensical. Norah took a moment to receive the burst of new information.

  Nostril was protective of her community in the tunnels. She was also afraid. Her eyes, which were surrounded by thick lines of meticulously applied black eyeliner, bored into the sunburst tattoo on Norah's wrist. A current of desire, deep and swift, flowed from the teenager into the tattoo.

  "If you help me find UrbanWurm, my brother will give you a free tattoo. Not a stick-and-poke. The real deal," Norah blurted. He'll be furious, but he'll do it.

  Nostril's eyes widened, and her lips parted. "How big? I don't want some lame butterfly on my ankle."

  "Whatever you want up to a full sleeve. Andrew makes magic ink, too, so his tattoos can move. The pirate and mermaid on his arms are engaged in an on-again, off-again thing."

  "Sick!" Nostril’s eyes widened as this image flashed across her still-developing frontal cortex. "He's not going to ask for my ID, is he? I can't get parental permission or nothing." When Nostril said that, a tidal wave of loss almost knocked Norah off her feet. She shut off her magic. Whatever other skills the young punk possessed, she was very good at hiding her feelings.

  "No ID. Just ink."

  Nostril made a big show of pretending to think about the proposition, then nodded, spun, and pushed through a nearby door. They ascended an escalator that carried them to a wide gray tunnel. Their footsteps echoed on the concrete as Nostril took them into the heart of the labyrinth.

  The accessible tunnels were used for film shoots, but the two left these behind. As the overhead lighting faded, Nostril pulled to a stop. “You got a flashlight? Some batteries?” Nostril, apparently, was conducting an informal preflight checklist. Norah pulled a slim, bright-blue aluminum flashlight and a new pack of batteries out of her pocket.

  Nostril flicked on the light she carried and strode into the tunnel.

  First came a series of concrete tubes, then a wide, rocky cavern as big as a baseball diamond. Halfway across this, Nostril stopped. "Look, I don't actually know where UrbanWurm lives."

  Norah paused, her breathing loud in the massive space.

  "Even if we don't find him, I still want the tattoo. Because I’m helping you," Nostril added defensively.

  Norah wrapped her arms around herself. It was summer, but not underground. "It's important that I find him. He... Some terrible people are trying to hurt my parents, and I think UrbanWurm knows who they are. So, if you’re leading me on a wild goose chase…"

  Nostril scuffed a silver toe in the dirt. Apparently, Norah’s mention of parents hit a nerve.

  "The Wurm is more a legend than a person," Nostril said. "No one has ever seen his face. He wears a spooky mask. Someone told me what it was once. A tar-tardigard?"

  "Tardigrade?" Norah asked. She'd seen magnified photographs of the microscopic animals. They were segmented like worms and nearly indestructible. You could put one in a vacuum, then rehydrate it, and it would pop back to life. Norah didn't think it was a coincidence that the hacker had chosen it as an icon.

  "Yeah, a tardigrade. Anyway, people say he's a tech wizard."

  "Do they mean that metaphorically?" Norah asked.

  Nostril shook her head, and the safety pins clattered again. "I’ve seen him a few times. Sometimes people hold a big market here for the people living in the tunnels. There's food and blankets and stuff, but also a lot of technology. We call it the Junkyard. Anyway, one time, I followed the Wurm in his mask. They say he lives in an underground palace, and he's spliced into the electricity and stuff from the grid. I wanted to see how he did it ‘cause maybe I could do it too, y'know?"

  "Build yourself an underground palace?" Norah asked.

  "Sure. So I followed him. It wasn't hard, because he was carrying all this stuff. Monitors and computer junk. Except later, he wasn't carrying anything." Nostril frowned as if she had encountered a mental block. “Then he disappeared. Stupid magic.

  “I made a mark on the wall. I'll take you there, but I want a guarantee on the tat."

  Norah, more than happy to waste her brother's time, agreed.

  Nostril nodded sharply and marched toward a waist-high pipe near the exit from the cavern. The corrugated metal was four feet in diameter and had thick black liquid trickling down the center.

  Norah frowned. It's a good thing I'm handy with cleansing magic.

  The crawl through the tunnel was blessedly brief, then they descended into something like a mineshaft rather than an underground cavern. After a series of twists and turns, Nostril stopped at the wall and crouched to point out a symbol near the base—a puffy round head with a serrated circle for a mouth. It was a good first draft of a tardigrade.

  "This is it. The last place I saw him."

  "You're not going to leave, are you?" Norah asked.

  "Not unless things heat up."

  Norah took a breath and activated her magical sight, then glanced at the rough rock walls and floor. At first, she saw nothing, but then a faint gray glow in the distance caught her eye. She almost missed it because it was the same color as the tunnel walls. Handy, that. Striding toward the glow, Norah found a thin trail of gray magic that split in two directions at a fork in the tunnel.

  "Left or right?" she whispered.

  She heard the man approach, feet scuffing at the end of the left-hand fork. The bobbing circle illuminated by Norah’s flashlight landed on a sliver of gray fabric as it disappeared around a bend in the wall.

  Norah ran after it. Nostril was following since the girl’s metal piercings clattered behind her.

  She was keeping up but not gaining. The gray-cloaked figure kept a steady pace in front of her. It was clearly more familiar with these tunnels, which wound through a labyrinth. She lost a few seconds finding the glowing gray trail of magic at an intersection but managed to catch up on a long straightaway that finally curved into a dead end. Norah, breathing hard, sprinted at the figure, who backed up against rock.

  "Stop!" She pinned the man in the beam of her flashlight. He only stopped because he had hit the wall.

  Norah's wand was out. When the man went for the cylinder of wood at his waist, she shouted, "Freeze!" He did.

  She saw him clearly. Average height, clothes in heather gray, worn but clean. He wore an old-fashioned dark elf cloak around his shoulders, warm if not stylish. He was wearing his signature mask, which was creepy in the dark. The black hole of the mouth opened to reveal a pointed, toothy maw.

  "Are you UrbanWurm?" The mask nodded yes. "Get his wand," she told Nostril. The young woman crept over, retrieved the wand, and retreated behind Norah.

  "Are you the one behind Dark Hound?" Norah asked, her voice harsh.

  "I'm UrbanWurm." The man’s voice was deep and slightly hollow as if he were reading from a script.

  "A lot of people died because of that site." Norah nearly choked on the words.

  "A lot of people died," the man repeated. Something was wrong with his voice. Norah, wanting to fire on all cylinders, activated her radio magic. Was the man afraid? Was he toying with her?

  A jolt of fear hit her in the back. It came from Nostril. The teen had a tough exterior, but she was still a kid. The ferocity of that emotion contrasted with the dead air in front of her. The man in the mask appeared to have no emotions.

 

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