Dark Time: Mortal Path (34 page)

A wail built up inside her, and she opened her mouth and screamed silently in her room.

Alone. I am alone in this battle with the Ageless one.

Dressed and steady, her fear suppressed, she went out to wake her friends. She roused them and they gathered at the kitchen table.

“Bad dream?” Yanmeng frowned. He’d once told her that he could see fear in a person. It was a form of viewing auras, but she didn’t bother to explain it to him.

“You could say that. I have something to ask of you.”

“We’re here. Ask away,” Amaro said.

“I want you to go to one of my safe houses.”

“What? Leave you alone? Not a chance,” Amaro said.

Yanmeng put a hand on his arm to quiet him. “When do we go?”

“Right now. You can leave all of your things here. You won’t need them where you’re going.”

Her old friend stood up and dragged Amaro to his feet. “We’re ready.”

Maliha looked at Amaro. He was young and defiant. He’d taken the same selfless vow that Yanmeng had, and carried the same mark of it: the cyanide-filled suicide tooth in his mouth that Maliha had finally, reluctantly, agreed was a good thing, something that could save them much pain. He knew Maliha was going back to ShaleTech, and the protective instinct she’d felt from him didn’t want to let her go alone.

They’d talked it over just a few hours ago, before retiring, when she shared all the information Yolanda had supplied.

“Amaro, this is my job from now on. I have to know that you’re safe and ready to be godfather to Rosie’s baby.”

Conflicting emotions played over his face. Finally he nodded. She told them to sit back down because there were some preparations to be done first.

“I have two safe houses in the Chicago area. I’d prefer to use a house far from this city, but there’s no time. The one I want you to use is an ordinary-looking garage behind a house in Archer Heights.” She gave them the address.

“The entrance is booby-trapped. You need a special key to deactivate the traps.” She started unbuttoning her blouse. “You don’t have to watch if you don’t want to. Getting the key doesn’t look very good.”

Neither of them looked away.

She put a square of cloth on the table, and then used a knife to slice a cut about an inch long above her left breast. As blood welled and slid down her chest, she poked inside the cut with the tip of the knife until a thin disk smaller than the diameter of a pencil eraser slipped out. She put the tiny bloody wafer on the cloth, wiped it off, and dropped it into Yanmeng’s outstretched hand.

“Back in a minute.” She went into the bathroom, cleaned the blood off her chest, squeezed the edges closed, and put on a couple of butterfly bandages. Yanmeng had bought them for her and told her to get used to using them. Most of the time she didn’t, but this time it felt important to do what he wanted.

Looking in the mirror, she touched the spot between her breasts where Rabishu’s mark was, where he’d taken her blood to sign the contract that marked her as Ageless. It was still faintly visible, a shadow on her skin, at least to her eyes.

Back at the table, Amaro was examining the crystalline wafer in Yanmeng’s palm. “You’re full of surprises. This is a beautiful piece of work. Where did you get it?”

She chose not to answer.

“It’s a glorified bar code,” she said. “You use this key first, on the wooden door.” She fished around in her pocket and pulled out a conventional key. “Use that chip on the metal door inside it. Don’t disturb the spike launcher. You should stay inside. If you have to leave for any reason, you must use the chip to get back in, or you’ll be dead.”

“Is this the only one?” Yanmeng said.

“Yes.”

“So that means as long as we have the chip, you can’t get into any of your safe houses.”

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2009-08-25 02:50

Maliha shrugged. “I’m not planning to need them. When you leave here, travel seperately and don’t go directly there. When you’re inside, call me. There’s a scrambled phone line. I want to know you arrived okay.”

A
maro left twenty minutes after Yanmeng. He changed taxis twice, spent fifteen minutes drinking coffee in a diner, and took another cab. He gave an address a block away from the safe house. The taxi took him to South Archer Avenue and made a right turn on South Komensky, a tree-lined street fronted by narrow houses with deep lots. All the houses had garages at the back of their lots, so the row of garages in a neat line mirrored the appearance of the street.

An elderly couple lived in the main house, rent free, and used half the garage to park their car so it appeared to be a functioning garage. Their rectangular parking spot was carved out of the square footage of the garage and walled off with several inches of steel on Maliha’s side and wood on their side.

Yanmeng was already there. Amaro opened the wooden door to the garage using the common-looking key he carried, revealing a blast-proof steel door inside the ordinary-looking wooden one.

Yanmeng placed the chip next to a flashing light adjacent to the steel door and the door slid upwards.

Amaro retrieved the chip. They stepped into the dark interior, and the door came down behind them.

Amaro clicked on the penlight Maliha had given him and used it to locate the light switch. Light flooded the interior and equipment hummed to life. Across from the door was a wicked-looking device that sported twelve sharp metal darts aligned vertically, what Maliha had referred to as the spike launcher. If someone managed to get in the door without the electronic key, the darts would fire and the person would be perforated from groin to head with a line of wicked arrows.

There were hidden cameras that gave a view of the perimeter, no windows, the reinforced walls and roof, and a comprehensive fire-extinguishing system. A hatch in the floor opened on a flight of stairs to a subterranean room that held a weapons cache; papers for several different identities, male and female; credit cards in those names in case they wanted to leave a deliberate trail; and a stock of cash, gold, and jewels. In the main living area downstairs was a communications setup with worldwide access, and water and food for a month—more if they scrimped. There were clean clothes for men and women that could lend a variety of appearances, and several cots stacked in a corner. The foyer, as Maliha had called the upstairs area, could contain a blast so that they’d be protected in the underground room.

Amaro went over to the communications console, which had two computer monitors built into it. On the counter in front of it was a bound book, an inch thick.

“What’s that?” Yanmeng said.

“I don’t suppose it’s the
TV Guide
.” Amaro picked it up and thumbed through it. “It’s an instruction manual to operate everything in here.” He plucked a sealed envelope from the back of the book and read the front of it. “This says…it says, ‘To be opened only if I’m dead.’”

The two men stared at each other. Then Amaro opened a drawer and put the envelope in it, out of sight.

“Let’s take a look at that manual,” Yanmeng said. “We need to figure out how to make that encrypted phone call.”

M
aliha didn’t relax until she received the phone call from her safe house on a secure phone.

She didn’t know all about Project CESR yet, but what she knew was alarming: It involved power stations and national security, and a minimum of five people had already died as a direct result of their knowledge. An Ageless servant was protecting Greg Shale, which meant that one of the seven demons had a strong interest in seeing Project CESR succeed.

She needed to stop the project and take out Subedei. To get Subedei to show up, all she had to do 115 z 138

2009-08-25 02:50

was threaten Greg, and that meant getting into the ShaleTech compound.

She doubted that she’d be invited in for lunch and a few rounds on the mat again.

Everything revolved around getting back into a place she had every reason to think would be heavily fortified this time around.

Maliha made and discarded plans. She ate a meal, made a decision, and called Hound on the landline in her condo.

“This isn’t your usual phone number,” he said when he picked up.

“This isn’t a usual situation. Meet me at the big oak at one P.M. I have a mission for you.”

“Aha, the game’s afoot.”

“In a big way. Hound, don’t be followed.”

“Yes, ma’am, I’ll take that under advisement.”

She turned out the lights and slept for a couple of hours, until it was time to leave.

The big oak was a tree that didn’t live up to its name; it was neither big nor an oak. It was a code word for a location near a flowering crabapple tree in the Brookfield Zoo. Maliha arrived and sat in the open on a bench near the Roosevelt Fountain, observing the bare tree from a distance. No one else was paying any attention to the tree. Determined mothers pushed strollers under a brilliant blue cloudless sky, their visible breath streaming behind them like thin ghostly balloons. The strollers’ pink-cheeked occupants were asleep at this time of day and tucked into enough coats and blankets to make sleeping comfortable in arctic climes.

Hound arrived not long after Maliha got there, and he sat on the other side of the fountain. He was reading a book, but behind the sunglasses, she was sure his eyes were doing the same thing as hers. He wasn’t wearing his hat. He had on a sweatshirt with a zippered down vest over it against the cold, and a hood pulled up to keep his ears warm.

After several casual iterations of changing locations, they ended up crossing paths next to the flowering crab tree and then sitting on opposite ends of a bench.

“Haven’t done this in a while,” Hound said. “Almost forgot how.”

“Sure, like you’d forget your middle name.”

“Don’t have one.”

She blinked. “Just testing to see if that’s you behind those shades.”

“Un-huh. You’re too tensed up. Relax a little. We’re just enjoying a sunny day in the zoo.”

He was right. Her body language was giving away more than she intended. She let herself relax until she was draped easily on the bench, as if she’d been poured there from the tree branches above them.

“Damn, you look good like that. Gonna jump your bones.”

She laughed, in spite of the circumstances. Hound was good for her.

She kept the smile on her face and talked through it. “I’m working on something big. I need a copter for a few hours tonight, a NOTAR, and a pilot to go with it.”

A NOTAR—no tail rotor—helicopter design minimized noise by replacing the tail rotor with fins, like miniature airplane wings. It wasn’t a true stealth machine, but at least it was better than the usual loud
whomp, whomp
.

“Sounds like you’ll be dropping in on somebody quietly, without an invitation.”

“Good description. You have somebody reliable, a guy who can keep his mouth shut?”

“Or what, you’re going to have to kill him?”

She didn’t say anything.

“You are doing something big. Yeah, I got somebody for that kind of thing. I need some money to rent the copter.”

She passed him a bag from the zoo’s gift shop that contained a stuffed tiger and some cash. “Twenty thousand, for the copter rental and the pilot. If you need more, I’ll get it. I’ll pay you your fee later.”

Hound raised his eyebrows—the one he had left at least—at the suggestion of later payment. He tucked the bag under his arm. “This should do it.”

“We might be taking fire on the way out. I need somebody who’s cool with that.”

Hound didn’t say anything, just nodded. They set up a place and time for her to meet the copter that night.

“One last thing. I don’t want you in that bird.”

He got up and limped away. The ears of the stuffed tiger that was on top of the money stuck out of 116 z 138

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the bag and bounced along with his awkward gait.

“Where are you?” Jake said. “I tried to reach you at home.”

Impulsively, she’d called Jake after her meeting with Hound.

“You could have followed me if you wanted to know where I was. Aren’t the Feds good at that?”

“Yeah, I could have. But I didn’t want to crowd you, after…”

“I’m going to be out of touch for a while. I just wanted you to know that I wasn’t hiding from you or something.”

“Why would you be avoiding me?” His voice warmed. He knew what she was talking about, but he wasn’t making it easy. She played it straight.

“Because I don’t know what to think yet.” She’d called because she worried that with what she was heading into, she’d never see Jake again, and she wanted to hear the sound of his voice. Then she worried that she should never see him again anyway, and finally that she cared enough to worry.

She was unwilling to open up and talk to him. How could she? Her story wasn’t typical. There was a tremor in her voice that reflected her ambiguity, and he picked up on it.

“Is something wrong?”

“No.”

“Something you’re regretting, about us?”

“No.”

“Why don’t we get together and talk about it?”

“I have something to do first. I told you I’d be out of touch. It could be a few days.”

“You’re making me worried. You’re not going to do something stupid, are you? Like confront Greg about the drugs?”

“I’m not going after Greg about the drugs.”

True, as far as it goes.

“Good, because I want to see you again. I think I…”

“See you later.” She cut him off. She threw her cell phone into a trash can down the block from the pub. Her call might have generated enough curiosity that he’d try to track her with it.

A
near-freezing rain fell as Maliha walked through the Ned Brown Forest Preserve, near I–90 and Illinois Highway 53. She was heading for the model airplane flying field, which had ample room for a helicopter’s pinpoint landing.

Nearly twelve hours had passed since Maliha’s impromptu phone call to Jake. Hound had told her that the pilot was a woman in her forties who went by the nickname “Glass.” Maliha didn’t question it; if Hound trusted the woman for her piloting skills under fire and her ability to remain quiet, then she did, too.