Gale Force (6 page)

I took a deep breath, covered the speaker of the phone, and whispered to Lewis, ‘‘We’re screwed. The
New York Times
has the scent on the Wardens. I don’t think he’s going away. He sounds serious.’’

‘‘He’s looking for independent confirmation,’’ Lewis said. ‘‘Print reporters have to prove a story before publication. He’s fishing.’’

‘‘He’s got really big bait. Whale-sized.’’

Lewis shook his head. ‘‘Then we’d better handle it. If we don’t, he’ll catch us at a weak moment and get somebody to admit to something. Tell him we’ll meet with him.’’

‘‘We will?’’

‘‘Both of us,’’ he said, and grinned. ‘‘Tell him to pick a dark, smoky bar. They love that kind of spy shit. Besides, we need anonymity.’’

‘‘And scotch,’’ I muttered. ‘‘Lots of scotch.’’

Due to the excuse of the emergency, our appointment with Mr. Garrett was in a week, in New York City. He’d offered to come to Florida, but the last thing I wanted was for him to run into some busy, annoyed Warden who blurted out the truth just to get him off their backs. We were working here.

A week. I had a week, in conjunction with the other Wardens, to come up with a good fiction to feed the hungry reporter—one that would induce him to back off. Alternatively, we could go for the big hammer— get someone in the UN or the U.S. government to tell him to back off, but that would pretty much prove his whole case for him. I felt an itch between my shoulder blades, as though somebody had drawn target crosshairs right below my neck.

As it happened, there wasn’t a lot for the Wardens to do about the earthquake; on the surface, it quickly became one of those weird leading-this-hour stories on the major news networks for half a day, then slipped into obscurity. It was all over but for the insurance claims, which were going to be considerable. No fatalities, only light casualties.

We’d been damned lucky.

I never finished my breakfast. By the time I felt composed enough to eat, the waffles were cold, tasteless hunks of dough, and I needed to lose a couple of pounds, anyway. Considering how nervous I already felt about facing Phil Garrett in a week, that wasn’t going to be a challenge.

In the interest of having a comfortable place to work, I went home. Well . . .
comfortable
was a stretch right now, since half the complex had burned to the ground, and the half left standing had sustained smoke and water damage.

Curiously, my apartment was perfectly fine. Not a water stain, not a smoke smudge. It even smelled newly cleaned.

David had done me a favor. Again.

I had a secure phone setup in my office area, and VPN access to the Warden’s database systems back in New York; I logged in and began reviewing files. Earth Wardens who specialized in detecting and handling radioactivity were few and far between, and a lot of them were dead, missing, or had quit over the last few years. It had been tough on everybody. First we’d had internal strife within the organization, and then the Djinn had found a way to destroy the rule book that bound them to servitude, and launched their own high-body-count conflict.

We were lucky to have as many Wardens as we did, but we weren’t exactly spoiled for choice these days.

My best bet was a naval officer named Peterson, but he was on a carrier in the Persian Gulf. Second best choice was an ex-army guy named Silverton. No address listed, just a cell phone. He was shown as NFA—no fixed address. In other words, Ex-Sergeant Silverton was either homeless or liked living out of a suitcase and hotels. Since he could afford a cell phone, I supposed it was the latter.

The phone call with Silverton revealed nothing much, other than he was available and could be on the ground in Fort Lauderdale in eighteen hours. I authorized his travel—paperwork was going to survive the nuclear winter, along with cockroaches—and set about typing up my incident reports on the earthquake. When that got old—which I admit, it did quickly—I began surfing the Net for bridal information. I had a wedding to plan, after all. These things don’t run themselves, unless you’re so famous you can not only get your wedding services for free, but have people pay for the exclusive coverage.

Hmmm, now
that
was an idea. . . .

I was looking at wedding cakes when the phone rang—the secured line. Paul Giancarlo’s raspy, Jersey-spiced voice said, ‘‘We’ve got a fuckin’ note taking responsibility for the earthquake down there.’’

‘‘You’ve
what
?’’

‘‘Let me read it to you.’’

Paul paused and cleared his throat. ‘‘It’s signed, ‘the Sentinels.’ ’’

‘‘The Sentinels? You’re kidding me. Aren’t they some football team?’’ It was almost laughable. Almost. ‘‘Seriously, man, I’ve heard rumors, but—wasn’t it just talk?’’

‘‘Not according to this. Not according to what I’ve been hearing. Look, we’ve got ourselves a real, live splinter group,’’ he said. ‘‘One not afraid of using terror tactics.’’

‘‘And they sent a note? How . . . 1980s of them.’’

‘‘E-mail, actually. And yes, we tried tracing it. No luck. We put the NSA on it, but nobody seems real positive about the prospects. This thing in the ground you and Rocha saw, you think it’s some kind of device?’’

‘‘Maybe,’’ I said. ‘‘But . . . it didn’t seem man-made. Didn’t register like that on the aetheric at all. I don’t know. This is deeply weird, Paul.’’

‘‘Yeah, but what worries me a hell of a lot more is that what I’ve been hearing about the Sentinels makes sense.’’

‘‘I—what?’’

‘‘We all know the Djinn are unpredictable,’’ he said. ‘‘We’ve seen it, all right? So is it all that surprising that the ones who got hurt the most—the Wardens who survived that whole bloody mess of a civil war— want to see the Djinn stay out of the way?’’

I didn’t know quite what to say. ‘‘You sound like you agree with them.’’

‘‘Not entirely,’’ he said, which wasn’t, I noticed, exactly a denial. ‘‘But I don’t like the idea of putting our people at risk for no good reason, either. Maybe the Sentinels have the right idea, wrong tactics.’’

‘‘You’re telling me you don’t trust
David
?’’

‘‘Kid—,’’ Paul sighed. ‘‘I can’t have this conversation with you. You’re not exactly rational on the subject. But I was in the New York offices that day. I saw what happens when the Djinn go off the leash. I fought for my
life
; I saw friends ripped apart in front of me. You got any idea what kind of impression that makes?’’

I couldn’t think of any way to respond to that. He’d caught me off guard. I knew that Paul still had bitterness about the Djinn revolt, and he was right; bad things had happened, mostly to Wardens. But he was discounting—or ignoring—all the thousands of years of suffering the Djinn had endured on their side.

Most Wardens wanted to ignore that.

‘‘Right, moving on,’’ Paul said into the silence. ‘‘I’m getting the team together here for analysis. We’re going to count heads, see who’s not answering the pings for roll call. I want a line on anybody who’s missing, just in case. I don’t suspect my own, but it’s useful knowing if somebody’s in trouble.’’

That, I thought, would be a full-time job. Following the Djinn problems of the past year, a lot of Wardens had simply . . . vanished. Most of them were dead, killed in the fighting, but some had slipped away, knowing that we didn’t have time to track down every name on the list. It’d take years to round up any rogue agents out there.

‘‘I’m pulling in Silverton,’’ I said. ‘‘He’s our best option for handling this thing, if it’s radioactive. If I need anybody else, I’ll let you know.’’

‘‘Yeah, you do that. And kid?’’

‘‘Yeah, Paul?’’

‘‘You sure about this wedding thing? Really sure?’’

I knew that Paul, once upon a time, had harbored ambitions in the direction of me in his bed, and I’d been kind of willing to contemplate it. But all that had changed, and he was gentleman enough to acknowledge it. Under the exterior of a badass Mafia scion beat the heart of a very sweet man—if you could overlook all the cursing.

‘‘I’m sure,’’ I said softly. ‘‘I love him, Paul.’’

He didn’t sound impressed. ‘‘You know what he is.’’

There it was again, that thread of darkness, that almost-prejudice. ‘‘Yes, I know what he is. He’s someone who’s saved my life more times than I can count. He’s someone who’s put his own life on the line not just for me but for the Wardens and all of humanity. I know
exactly
what he is. And who he is.’’

Awkward silence, and then, ‘‘Fuck, babe, I’ve gotta run. We’re good, right?’’

‘‘We’re good,’’ I said. ‘‘Kisses.’’

I said it to a humming disconnected signal. Paul was already gone, off to the next crisis. I finished up at my desk, closed the laptop, and sat back to think.

The Sentinels. That had an amateurish ring to it, but who was I to judge? Lewis had started the Ma’at, a separate Warden-like organization, when he’d been just out of college, and that had turned out to be a useful thing—the Ma’at took in people without enough talent to be Wardens, but more than the average human, and paired them up with Djinn volunteers. They worked on the theory of additive power— forming chains of people and Djinn in order to amplify and direct power that otherwise wouldn’t be strong enough to make a difference.

The Sentinels didn’t sound like they had a new idea, just a difference of political opinion. They were anti-Djinn. Well, that shouldn’t have come as a shock; enough Wardens had been hurt or killed in the troubles with the Djinn to make some kind of backlash inevitable. I just hadn’t thought it would be so fast, or so decisive. I’d never thought that it would come down to reasonable, responsible people doing something like causing unnecessary loss of life.

One thing was certain: Whether it was a good idea or not for David to be involved in this investigation about the black knife, it was going to have to happen. I needed him to know about the anti-Djinn movement, and I needed a Djinn to try to analyze the history of the black knife and tell me where it came from, who made it, who planted it, and how to remove it.

It was logical, all right.

I just had a sinking feeling that it was exactly the wrong thing to do.

Chapter Two

According to the checklist I’d downloaded from the Internet, I was already running about six months behind on planning any decent kind of wedding that didn’t involve shotguns and pissed-off dads. As I waited in the Fort Lauderdale airport for Warden Silverton’s plane, I read over the printed bridal list and anxiously jotted notes in the margins. Some things I just marked out. I wasn’t fooling with wedding advisors, wedding consultants, or wedding planners; none of them would be equipped to deal with the complexities of the wedding of a Warden and a Djinn, anyway. And if they were, they’d be way, way too expensive.

Clergy. Now that was something I did have to think about. Unless we went for a civil ceremony . . . Hmmm. Maybe one of the pagan faiths would be willing to do it. And then there were the caterers. Photographers. Musicians for the reception. Florists.

The whole thing was obscenely complicated. I suspected the wedding ritual was designed to make absolutely sure you really
wanted
to get married. God knew that if you were on the fence about it, the organizing would put you over the edge into permanent bachelorette-hood.

I was settled in an uncomfortable hard plastic seat in the baggage claim area, watching the arriving passengers.I had a sign propped next to me with the stylized sun symbol of the Wardens on it in gold and glitter—unmistakable, to anyone who knew what it meant, although I’d put SILVERTON below it in block letters, just in case.

I spotted a likely candidate—a tall African American man with erect military bearing who snagged an olive-drab duffel bag from the baggage belt. Sure enough, as his eyes scanned the waiting crowd, he fixed right on me and headed in my direction.

I stood up, claimed the sign, and waited for him to stride over. He got taller and taller the closer he came, very imposing. His handshake was firm and businesslike, and I realized he was older than I’d thought— probably in his early fifties, with a light dusting of gray in his close-cropped black hair, lines around his eyes. ‘‘Mr. Silverton,’’ I said. ‘‘Joanne Baldwin.’’

‘‘Heard of you, ma’am,’’ he said. No hint of whether the advance notice had been good or bad. ‘‘Call me Jerome, please. No point in formality if we’re going to be working together.’’

‘‘Right. Jerome, my car’s outside. How was your flight?’’

‘‘Food-free,’’ he said. ‘‘Could I impose on you to discuss this assignment over dinner?’’

‘‘Sure,’’ I said. ‘‘Anything in particular?’’

‘‘Fish,’’ he said. ‘‘Hate to miss the fish when I come to the coast.’’

He liked my car. In fact, Jerome liked my car more than most people, walking all the way around it, asking questions about the engine, the performance, the mileage. I was betting that he’d ask to drive it, but he didn’t; he stowed his gear in the trunk and took the passenger side. I made sure to drive extra fast, just to give him a demonstration, which he seemed to appreciate.

‘‘So,’’ I said, as we whipped down North Ocean Boulevard, enjoying the sea breeze and late afternoon sun, ‘‘I noticed you were NFA in the system. Travel a lot?’’

‘‘Prefer it that way,’’ he said. ‘‘Not really interested in being tied down.’’

‘‘And that sound you hear is the hearts of women breaking from coast to coast.’’

I got a low chuckle out of him. ‘‘Not likely, ma’am.’’

‘‘Joanne.’’

‘‘Joanne.’’ He flashed me a million-dollar smile. ‘‘Pretty women make me nervous.’’

I doubted that. ‘‘No Mrs. Silverton, then?’’