Dark Time: Mortal Path (21 page)

“Nothing to talk about, huh? In that case, let me tell you about Rip.”

“Don’t you have to get to work?”

“I took the day off. I was worried about you. Didn’t want to have the clock ticking while we talked.”

Maliha checked the time. “Listen, I’ve got a thing I have to do, but I could be back for a late lunch.

How about three P.M.? You can tell me all about Mr. Corrugated Abdomen.”

Randy laughed. “I can make it. I’ll give you a call later and we’ll decide where.”

“What are you doing on your day off?”

“What else? Shopping and the spa, girlfriend. Come with?”

Tempting. I could use a decadent day.

Then Maliha thought about lying in the alleyway in Atlanta, feeling her life—
Nando’s life
—slip away. It took the glow off the spa idea.

“I’d love to, but I’ve…”

“Got that thing to do. See you later.” Randy glided to the door.

M
aliha drove the McLaren northwest on I–90. She crossed into Wisconsin, keeping a light foot on the gas pedal and enjoying the fall scenery even though it was raining off and on. About 10:30 A.M., she pulled in to Madison.

She didn’t want to enter the house that was the object of her drive until closer to lunchtime, but she parked a block away and observed. The McLaren kept attracting the attention, though, so she moved away a mile and walked back.

The modest house under observation belonged to Samantha Dearborn, mother of Karen, the nine-year-old girl who’d died after receiving incorrect medication from a PharmBots machine. The girl who was the reason for lawsuits for five million dollars against PharmBots and an equal amount from the hospital. Amaro’s research had demonstrated the corporation’s culpability.

Samantha Dearborn was a widow with no other children. She and her husband were both schoolteachers, but he had died in a car accident when Karen was a toddler. Karen had had a serious heart defect that had just been repaired. It had been the third time her daughter had been in the hospital that year. Samantha had no insurance and no resources left. She’d put every penny she owned, and some that she didn’t, into her daughter’s care. The medical bills had mounted steadily, but she fought for the best care for Karen.

She still had the medical bills and other loans, but no daughter.

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The hospital would have considered writing off the large bill as a compassionate gesture and good PR, but they were holding off to use it as a bargaining wedge in case of a judgment in the lawsuit against them. The whole situation was a mess, with both parties willing to escalate the fight and a grieving mother at the center of it all.

Maliha decided on a direct approach, walked right up to the front door, and rang the bell.

A woman answered through the wooden door.

“Who is it?”

“Mrs. Dearborn, I’m the grief counselor from the, er, school district. May I come in?”

“I’ve already spoken to…oh, all right, I suppose so.”

The door opened to reveal a sallow-faced woman in her thirties in a worn housedress.

Maliha sat for two hours at Samantha’s kitchen table, drank tea and ate grilled cheese sandwiches with her, looked at her photo album, absorbed her bitterness and saw through it to the loving woman underneath.

In spite of her loss, Samantha had had something Maliha wondered if she would ever have—a child to gather into her arms.

Maliha began formulating plans that PharmBots wasn’t going to be happy about.

T
here were four messages on her phone when she got home, the first from Randy. She begged off on the late-afternoon lunch, saying that she’d met a hot guy at the spa, some chauffeur waiting to pick up his employer. The next two were from Jake. He’d had Interpol look into SkyDevice employees who’d died in August or September.

There weren’t any, and he wanted to know why not.

The third message was from a friend of hers, archaeologist Manco Serrano. They’d met at a symposium in Lima, and she’d conveyed her interest in unusual artifacts that raised questions about their origins. It was an intensely personal quest of hers, something that might mean she could avoid the whole Rabishu-plaything business if she died before atoning for all the lives she’d taken.

Years ago, she had deceived Rabishu into revealing the location of the Tablet of the Overlord, an object all of the demons knew how to locate. She convinced him that Anu might have hidden one of the diamond shards in the same area. It was a plausible idea, since no one would think to look for it there. He agreed to have her search for it and gave her the location. After a suitable period, she told him she’d checked and there was no diamond shard there. She hadn’t even made the effort, but she’d filed away the location of the tablet.

In truth, when she was Ageless, she had searched for the shards halfheartedly or not at all, because she had no interest in helping Rabishu in his attempt to become all-powerful.

Since she’d left the demon’s service, Maliha had intensified her search. Her plans were vague at first—maybe something to blackmail Rabishu with—but settled into a goal as much a part of her as the carving of the scale on her body. She wanted that lens not just to keep Rabishu or one of his brothers from finding it, but for her own use. Maliha intended to get rid of the demons by wielding the Tablet of the Overlord against them. With each one she vanquished, a portion of the misery the human race suffered would be gone.

What would Earth be like without war, suffering, and disease? Did they serve an essential purpose in giving humans something to strive for in their elimination? Or were they the ball and chain around the ankle of the human race, preventing the achievement of its fullest potential? Lord Nergal may have left those demons behind on a whim. If he’d taken his servants with him, life could have been very different for humans.

She had a network of archaeologists looking, in a casual manner, for artifacts that just didn’t fit into the location or time period they were working on. She reinforced their interest in staying in touch with her by making them into characters in her novels. They were as thrilled as kids on a roller coaster when they spotted their names. She got an image of a whole squadron of academics hunched over their dusty pot shards, fragile textiles, and canopic jars with contents of mummified livers and intestines, taking lunch breaks and sticking their noses into one of her sexy pulp novels, scanning the pages for their own or colleagues’ names.

“Marsha, this is Manco, at the Caral site. I’ve found something…something odd. I have this piece 71 z 138

2009-08-25 02:50

I’ve been studying, and I’ve been putting off registering it. I think you’re going to want to see this. I sent you a photo by email. Talk to you soon.”

His message was intriguing because Manco wasn’t one to go out on a limb, keeping a find hidden.

Methodical and by the book were more like it.

She eagerly checked her email, found his message, and looked at the photo. It astounded her. The simple pot was covered with what looked like Sumerian cuneiform, even though the image wasn’t very clear. Manco’s hastily handwritten note across the top of the photo indicated that the pot had been found in the vicinity of figurines carbon dated to be 4,650 years old, comparable in time with the ancient Sumerian civilization—but over eight thousand miles away from Sumer.

The photo wasn’t high resolution, but Maliha could make out some writing that was larger than the rest. Filling in the blanks for what was illegible, she came up with a translation.

Anu, son of Anshar and Kishar, leaves this for the children of the Great Above, should their wisdom
grow.

She closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths to control the surge of excitement she felt. Maliha fired off a response to Manco, urging him to delay revealing the existence of the pot a little longer, until she had the opportunity to make a rollout, a digital image formed by placing the pot on a turntable and snapping photos as it rotated. The images were blended together by software to form a flat, complete picture of the entire circumference of the pot. A high-resolution rollout could be printed as a large color poster so the detail could be examined. An archaeologist no longer had to travel to the physical location of an artifact to study it. He or she could just get the disk.

After she had her rollout, Manco could turn the actual pot over to an antiquities director and get credit for his find. Getting that rollout in her hands couldn’t wait. When she found out that she couldn’t get a commercial flight to Lima until the next morning, she chartered a private jet that would be available in three hours and threw some clothing and weapons into a suitcase. She was a regular customer of the charter agency, so no one would be screening her luggage. They’d already verified that Marsha Winters was an upstanding citizen, meaning one with deep pockets.

After the whirlwind of activity, she had nothing to do until she took a taxi to the airport.

Plenty of time to return Jake’s calls.

Instead she sat down for a writing session, incorporating the inept and annoying but sexy rookie cop Jackie Stacked, named in honor of Jake Stackman, into her book.

R
esponding to the intriguing summons from the Peruvian archaeologist, Maliha was on-board the jet that had taken off from Chicago. She called Amaro to let him know about Jake’s involvement in the drug investigation.

“I already know. He checked parts of your ID that triggered a warning. I’ve been looking into your man Jake.”

“He’s not my man.”

“Caution is the word here. Jake looks okay on the surface, but parts of his service record have been expunged. That typically happens when an agent has crossed the line but is too valuable for some reason to shitcan. Or he’s got the goods on somebody higher up. It could be your man Jake is only halfway one of the good guys.”

“He’s not my man. Stop saying that.”

“Touchy, hmm? Do you get PMS at your age?”

“How rude.”

“I’ve got news on ShaleTech. I’ve been chatting with the administrative assistant to Edward Rupert, ShaleTech’s chief financial officer. Her name is Betty, and she’s a member of a salsa dance club. The chat room’s associated with the club. I told her I was planning to join soon so I could meet her.”

“You dance?”

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“Hell, yes. Don’t you?”

“You’ll have to teach me the modern stuff sometime. My dance technique never got past ‘Rock Around the Clock.’”

“I find that hard to believe. Dance salsa with me, and you can wear one of those sexy dresses with all the fringes.”

“Can’t. I’m on a plane to Lima. Tell me more about Betty.”

“Betty is thirty, a little shy, and joined the dance club to try to be outgoing and meet people. She took gymnastic lessons as a girl, so she thought that maybe dancing would be her route to the man of her dreams. Why are you going to Lima?”

“One of the shards might have turned up. Betty told you all this stuff in a public chat room?”

“Tsk tsk. I would never have a conversation like that in public. I set up a secure, private chat for us.

She was a little reluctant to open up about herself, but when she did, it all came out in a rush because she’s worried about something. She found out that the ShaleTech CFO is keeping two sets of books. She’s afraid Greg knows that she knows, and she could get fired or a lot worse. The lead on the shard looks solid?”

“Very solid. I have a preliminary translation that mentions Anu. I still can’t get past the fact that she told you all this without meeting you.”

“She checked me out on MySpace. I guess that makes me trustworthy.”

Amaro is worthy of trust. I trust him with my life. Betty has no idea who she’s stumbled into, though
it was no accident on Amaro’s part. Probably saved her life.

“Anyway, we met in person for lunch, and things took off from there.”

Amaro 1, Maliha 0. So far, my lunch date hasn’t taken off.

“I hope you’re taking that ‘fired or worse’ part seriously. Especially the ‘worse.’ How could Greg find out?”

“Betty’s boss was working with Greg in Greg’s conference room. Betty came in to deliver some papers her boss had requested for the meeting. She saw a wall safe standing open in Greg’s office. She found the ledgers, and without thinking she locked the safe after she’d seen them, instead of leaving it open as she’d found it. Greg and her boss came back and found her in the room. Neither of the men said anything, but she’s pretty sure Greg remembered he left the safe unlocked, and that’s why he returned so soon—to check on it and lock it up. Plus, she’s a CPA, and he knows that whatever she saw, she’d understand the significance of it.”

“Betty’s nosy. She’s also on borrowed time.”

“I know. I already did something about it. I put her in my own private witness protection program.”

“Good for you. You didn’t break her heart, did you?”

“Much as I’d like to think I break the heart of every woman who can’t have me, no. I wasn’t her type.”

“I need a look at that second set of books.”

“Breaking and entering is your thing,” he said.

Can’t argue with that.

“Do me a favor, will you? Find out whatever you can on a guy named Subedei.”

“How do you spell that? What’s the last name, or is that the last name?”

“How should I know? I’m asking for information on him, aren’t I?”

He started in on the PMS thing again, and she hung up on him, then remembered she had been going to ask about Rosie’s countdown to baby number three.

Best I not raise the subject.

She reflected that her excuse about getting away had been at least partly true. She did need to get away. The contrast between the sexual and emotional attraction she felt with Jake and the suspicions that had arisen made her edgy. It was good to be unreachable. She wanted him to proceed with his investigation of the heroin smuggling and see what he turned up on his own. That was the point of getting him involved in the first place. She was disappointed that he’d become fixated on her as a party to the smuggling.