Rogue Oracle (23 page)

“Oh.” The male attendant stepped back, embarrassed. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I thought—” He glared at the female flight attendant, who made a face at him. “Are you all right, ma’am?”

Tara made a big show of leaning over the sink and spitting, as if to remove the taste of vomit from her mouth. “I guess I have no choice but to be all right,” she said, grimly.

“I’ll take you back to your seat,” the female flight attendant snipped.

Tara let herself be led by the elbow back to her seat and climbed back over the old woman in the pink sweat suit.

Tara settled back in her seat. The cards had been burned into her memory, and she closed her eyes, visualizing them, trying to figure out how they were connected. She slid more easily into her dreams now than she ever had before. She knew it was the influence of this new deck of cards, and it worried her. She set the worry aside, let herself be pulled down into the dream, the falling sensation indistinguishable from the feeling of a plane plunging through turbulence.

In her dream, she stood on the black beach with the lion pacing around her. The lion made broad tracks in the sand not so much different, except in scale, from Oscar’s footprints in a litter box. He glanced at her with his golden eyes. Tara didn’t know yet if he was some type of a spirit guide or, more likely, some partitioned part of Tara’s consciousness, her intuition, translated into a symbol by this odd turn her power had taken.

She could feel the heat in the land through the soles of her shoes. She squinted into the distance, at the figure she could see walking further on down the strand. The figure approached, but she knew who he was the instant she spied the sun glancing off his polished armor.

Harry. The Knight of Pentacles. Wordlessly, he walked toward her, visor lowered so that she could not see the expression in his eyes.

Tara reached up and took his face in her hands. “Harry, I’m sorry that I had to leave you behind.”

His gauntleted hands remained motionless at his sides. Guilt rippled through her, and Tara’s hands paused to finger the scars in his armor. He seemed like such a wordless automaton here, a machine. She had the sensation that he was becoming hollow beneath that armor, that he was losing himself.

She threw her arms around his neck. His armor was scalding hot against her body. She reached up to lift his helmet from his face, but he lifted his hands and held her fast. The segments of his gauntlet gloves began to burn the white flesh of her fingers. She wondered whether this was simply the absorbed heat of the sunshine in the metal or whether it was something more radiating from him. Anger.

The lion paced around her, sniffing the air and growling. From the corner of her eye, Tara watched him walk toward the black forest rising from the beach, away from Tara’s guilt and Harry’s anger.

Tara took a deep breath. She had work to do. She had to follow her intuition, wherever it led. She disentangled her burnt fingers from Harry’s, picked up her skirts, and ran away through the black sand, trying to catch up with the lion.

The lion was easy to follow, luminous gold against the crisp burned grasses and blackened bark. As Tara pursued him, she noticed that green sprouts were beginning to emerge from the rich black dust, the dust that coated the bottom of her skirts. It tasted metallic in her mouth, as if she’d taken a mouthful of iron filings.

The lion led her to a clearing, a familiar one. She recognized the Tower from her cards and her previous dream, black against the blue sky. Even in the daylight, it felt ominous, its hulking, uneven shape blocking out the light. But it was even hotter in the shade of it, looking up at the rusting bits of metal and welds that seemed to hold the ramshackle structure together.

Tara paused, her hand coming to rest on the lion’s brow. She understood the meaning of the Tower card. Chernobyl. But why was it placed in the future in her spread? Was it merely the act of traveling there that had brought it into such sharp focus? Or did her reading indicate that a new disaster was on the horizon, something beyond the scale of the dirty bomb at the airport?

Twigs snapped behind her, and Tara whirled. She let out her breath when she saw the Knight of Pentacles clomping through the scorched brush. Harry had followed her here. Or her guilt had.

She stared up at the Tower, trying to understand what the silent lion of her intuition was trying to tell her. A sparrow roosting in a bent crenellation took flight, but fell out of the sky. The bird landed at the lion’s paws.

Tara knelt down to pick it up. Its wings were bent, feet stuck straight out. It was suddenly, inexplicably dead. Of what?

She turned on her heel. Could it be the heat, the radiation from this place? She stared up at the Tower. The accident happened long ago, the radioactive elements sealed in sand and concrete and on their way to decaying. The monster slept, degrading quietly. What changed? What had awoken to kill the bird and char the forest surrounding them?

Tara gently set the bird down on the cleanest patch of ground she could find. She had the urge to bury the poor thing. Casting about for a suitable shovel, she found a piece of rusty metal at the foot of the Tower. She plunged the edge of the metal into the earth, scraped it away …

… and gasped as she burned her fingers on something hot. She stepped back, dropping the makeshift spade. Something glowed below the black earth, seething with an unearthly blue light below the surface. The lion approached the fizzling blue light, sniffed. He paced around it three times, began to kick dirt over it to cover it.

Tara understood. Something was being unearthed here, coming to life that should remain hidden. She cradled her burned hand in her elbow.

The Knight of Pentacles clapped his hand down on her shoulder. He pointed to the edge of the clearing, where something glowed, bright as a star.

Tara started toward the movement, shaded her eyes. She called out.

The movement stopped. Tara squinted into the light. She saw the figure of the World, bent over and broken by a burden it was stealing away. The burden was the same as the card, the Ten of Wands. But the rods glowed the same unearthly blue she’d discovered underground, burning shadows into the World’s impassive face. Shadows of wrath.

Tara cried out to him: “Why are you doing this? Why won’t you let it be buried?”

The World’s mouth twisted. “To show you what we have suffered. And never to let you forget it.”

T
ARA AWOKE WITH A START THAT NEARLY KNOCKED OVER A
cup of water that had been placed on her tray table while she slept. The old woman beside her snorted and glared. Tara reached for the water, feeling it wash the cold, metallic taste of the dream from her mouth.

She shivered, wrapping her arms around her. A spidery pattern of frost had formed where her face had been pressed up against the window. Tara wiped it away with her elbow.

She understood, now. Veriss had been on to something. His notes and the Ten of Wands made sense. The Chimera was searching for the lost reactor rods of Chernobyl. He’d figured out their location from draining the minds of the ex-spies, and was going back to dig them up.

Tara pressed her fingertips to her lips. If the Chimera managed to do that, the dirty bomb at Dulles would be child’s play. With that kind of materiel, someone could poison an entire water supply, kill thousands. The Chimera’s vengeance was revenge on an unimaginable scale. The effects of the information he’d sold would ripple through the world for years. But this—this would be an unmitigated disaster of unimaginable proportion.

She knotted her hands in her lap. Perhaps they’d all be lucky. Perhaps the Chimera was still in Washington, deterred by the men at the airport security gate and their Geiger counters. But she knew, and the cards had shown her, that he had escaped. The Moon was the card of deception. She was certain the Chimera had managed to elude the authorities, had slipped through their net and was headed east.

Tara leaned back in her seat. The Chimera had escaped all attempts to ensnare him. How could she hope to catch him, when she was unarmed, alone, and unfamiliar with the terrain?

The only weapon she had was what she’d brought with her into the forest of her dreams: her intuition.

Chapter Eighteen

T
ARA’S JOURNEY
led her first to Amsterdam, where she changed planes after a long layover to take her to Kiev. The flight to Kiev was only half full, and Tara had the luxury of having two seats to herself. The empty seat beside her bothered her. More than once, she wished Harry were with her.

She busied herself with poring over the maps and other information the Pythia had included in her envelope. From Kiev, she was intended to take a train to Korosten, which was about 150 kilometers via winding roads west of Chernobyl. A handler was expected to meet her there and take her onward to the Exclusion Zone.

The plane descended in a fit of turbulence, passing through storm clouds. As the plane broke through the layer of gray, Tara could see Kiev more clearly. It was a beautiful city: multistory white buildings with golden spires peeking out above lush, green trees. The river cutting through the city reflected the color of the gray sky, crossed by delicate-seeming bridges. Tara hoped to be able to return here and explore. If she got the chance.

Getting through the security checkpoint was at least as much an issue as it would be in the U.S. Tara clutched her Russian phrase book and handed the guards running the checkpoint an envelope labeled in Cyrillic script that the Pythia had included in the packet. A yellow sticky note had been attached to it that said:
Give this to Customs in Kiev
. The guard read through it, gave her package a perfunctory search. Tara assumed it explained she was there for a harmless purpose. Or perhaps it contained money.

The guard with the envelope pointed to Tara’s Tyvek suit. He muttered a string of words in Russian. Tara flipped through her phrase book, struggling to keep up. One of the words meant “journalist.” Another guard rolled her eyes and waved dismissively.

The female guard searching her purse set a pack of cigarettes aside. Tara held her breath. The pack contained her concealed Tarot cards. If the guard tried to keep them, Tara was well and truly screwed.

The guard put all of Tara’s items back in the purse, except for the cigarettes. Tara reached for the packet, and the woman’s hand slammed down on hers. “Nyet,” the woman said.

Tara swallowed. She had to get her cards back. If …

The woman turned her back to Tara and flipped open the top of the pack. Tara assumed she wanted to share her good fortune with her colleagues. But when the guard turned over the pack to tap out some cigarettes, a single card fell out on the table, the Devil.

It was easily the most fearsome card in the Tarot deck, depicting a horned devil, wreathed in fire, with a man and woman chained at his feet. People who were unfamiliar with the Tarot often panicked when they received this card in a reading, assuming it signified pure evil. In actuality, it rarely signified such pitch blackness. It usually drew the reader’s attention to self-imposed bondage or limitations. But the guard was unaware of those nuances.

She dropped the pack of cards back down on the table, as if it was hot. Tara scooped up the card and the pack, jammed them back in her purse. The guard wouldn’t look at her, instead giving the sign of the Evil Eye at Tara’s retreating back.

Tara was a bit startled at the cards’ behavior. She’d never had a deck before that seemed to exhibit any … volition. And this deck appeared to act in self-defense. She made a mental note to question the Pythia more fully about it, if she got the opportunity.

Tara eventually worked through the security line, was thoroughly patted down. The guards even took the wallet that the Cowboy had given her to hide under her clothing. It felt a bit lighter when it was returned to her. Eventually, Tara was sent on her way. Tara wound through the crowded Boryspil airport, searching for a train terminal. She spent a frustratingly long time studying her phrase book before feeling competent enough to ask a man in a uniform where the train was by pointing to a picture of a train in her guidebook.

He gestured to the far end of the terminal, and Tara nodded. Some of the signs contained a pictogram of a railway, and she was able to follow these to a ticket counter. She pulled another of the Pythia’s letters from her bag and gave it to the clerk at the window. Without comment, the clerk issued her a ticket and pointed to a platform down a flight of stairs.

Tara slung her bag over her shoulder and trotted down to the sparsely populated train platform. She glanced at her watch. She had easily fifteen minutes until her train left. Nice planning on the Pythia’s part. She walked away from the main platform to a kiosk displaying a brightly colored map and began to study it. It was hard to make out all the lines and connections under the dim, flickering light overhead and bits of graffiti scrawled on the glass cover in Magic Marker.

She was too absorbed in trying to figure out how the lettering corresponded to the words in her phrase book to notice a man beside her. He grabbed her wrist, turned her to face him. He said something in Russian. Tara shook her head, not understanding what he wanted.

The man brushed open his jacket, displaying a gun. His intent was clear.

She stomped on the instep of his foot as hard as she could, kneed him in the groin. She twisted her arm around to pull it away against his thumb, the weakest part of his grip. She tore herself away, but had not taken more than two steps before he caught the back of her shirt, hauled her back behind the kiosk, and slugged her in the jaw. He pulled the pistol out of his waistband, aimed it at her head, gesturing for her to hand him the purse holding her passport, cards, and train ticket.

Tara clenched her fists, ready to fight. She couldn’t afford to give up any of the meager tools she needed on her mission. Not to the guard, and not to the mugger.

“Hands off the lady.”

Tara blinked. The command came in English. And in a familiar voice.

The mugger turned, and a dark figure reared up behind him. The figure knocked the mugger’s gun arm wide and smashed his head into the kiosk. Tara lifted her arms to cover her face as the kiosk glass shattered. The mugger slumped into the maw of the kiosk, teeth of glass piercing his neck and shoulders.

“Come on.” She was lifted to her feet by Harry, who was tucking the mugger’s gun into his jacket pocket. He steered her briskly away from the kiosk, toward the train that had rumbled into the station.

Harry gave his ticket to the provodnitsa at the door to the car, a middle-aged woman in a navy-blue uniform. Tara had read about the provodniks and provodnitsas in her guidebook—they worked in pairs, and were in charge of the sleeper cars. Tara fished her ticket out of her purse and surrendered it to the woman, who returned a stub to her. Numbly, Tara took it and followed the provodnitsa and Harry into the car.

The interior of the car was brightly painted, as one might find in a home, not the industrial colors and finishes Tara had encountered on the plane. The provodnitsa opened a squeaky sliding door to a small room barely larger than a hotel bathroom. Two narrow couches were piled high with pillows, a small table set between them. Fringed curtains bracketed the train window. This was a luxury cabin, a
spalny vagon.
The provodnitsa ushered them inside, and closed the door firmly.

Harry thrust Tara’s hair away from her face. He touched the rising bruise on her cheek. “Are you hurt?”

Tara winced. “No. It’s all right. What are you doing here?”

“You mean, after you ditched me in Washington?” Harry’s mouth pressed into a hard slash.

“Yeah. After that part.” Tara pressed her hand to Harry’s chest. “Look, I didn’t want to get you involved. The Pythia sent me.”

“And she sent me after you.”

Tara shook her head and sat down hard on the narrow couch. “She’s got you all wound up in her plans, now, Harry.” She didn’t want that for him.

“Hey.” Harry sat down beside her, turned her swollen chin to face him. “Where you go, I go. That’s not negotiable.”

That had never been the case before. She swallowed. “But Aquila—”

“You don’t need to remind me about duty,” he said, tightly. “This is a duty of a different kind.”

The train ground to a start, the wheeze of the engines reverberating through the floor. The train began to pick up speed, chugging away from the platform. Harry pulled the drapes that smelled like cigarette smoke, and Tara wondered how long it would take before the mugger was found embedded in the kiosk. She forcefully turned her thoughts away, hoping the man wouldn’t bleed out before someone found him.

“I take it that your presence here also means you think the Chimera made it at least as far as Rome?” Tara asked.

“Rome and beyond.” Harry shook his head. “On the Dulles surveillance tapes, I saw a guy that looked like Norman Lockley on the Rome flight. He wasn’t detained by anyone when the flight landed. He just vanished. Radiation sweeps in Rome showed some abnormal amounts of radiation in the interior of the airplane. He was there, but disappeared. Since you were right about that, I’ve gotta assume that you’re also right about where he’s going.”

Harry shrugged out of his jacket. He was dressed as Tara was, in a T-shirt and nondescript pants. Jeans would have marked them as tourists. He checked the gun that he’d picked up from the mugger, frowned, popped out the magazine.

“What’s wrong?” Tara asked.

“This is a piece of shit. A knockoff of a cheap automatic pistol. Cheap Czech ammo. This thing is as likely to jam as it is to shoot.” He slammed the magazine back home, stuffed it into his jacket.

“But it’s better than nothing at all,”

Tara said. “It’s better than nothing,” Harry agreed. “I guess.”

Tara rested her elbows on her knees, tried to ignore the tingling in her face. “I think I know what the Chimera is after.”

“The reactor rods from Chernobyl,” Harry said.

“How did you—?”

“Veriss was on it. I dug through his research files, found that all the missing agents had been searching for them, at one time or another.” Harry shook his head. “Poor bastard should have stuck with what he was good at.”

A knock sounded at the cabin door. Harry stood to open it, admitting the provodnitsa carrying a tea set.

“Chai?” she asked.

“Spa-see-ba,” Tara pronounced slowly, remembering the phrase for “thank you” from her guidebook.

The provodnitsa set the tea service down on the small wooden table between the bunks. She glanced at the bruise blossoming on Tara’s face, then at the bloody scratches on Harry’s knuckles. She pulled a plastic bag of ice from her apron pocket and left it on Tara’s side of the table without saying a word. She gave Harry a dirty glare on her way out.

Tara gratefully pressed the bag of ice to her cheek. “She thinks you’re a violent man.”

Harry glanced at the drawn window curtains and stared at his scuffed hand. “She’s not wrong, lately.”

Tara leaned forward and captured his hand. It felt very cold under hers. “I’m glad you’re here.”

Harry stared back at her, levelly. Tara could see the thoughts churning behind his eyes, and he didn’t move to take her hand.

“Like it or not, you’re stuck with me,” he said quietly.

“W
HERE ARE WE GOING
?”

Cassie lugged a cooler down the dock to the marina. Maggie trotted behind her, while Oscar squirmed in the backpack slung over her shoulder. The tabby succeeded in getting one leg free of the zipper and was slapping her on the shoulder with his paw.

The Kahuna was walking beside her. A fishing pole was slung casually over his shoulder, but Cassie had seen him fill the pockets of his fishing vest with at least two pistols and several fistfuls of ammo. It made her nervous.

Ahead, on the dock, the Cowboy was fiddling with some ropes tethering a medium-sized boat to the weathered dock. Cassie knew very little about boats, but this one seemed very ordinary. It had a cabin, a motor, and the words
Starry Night
painted on the side. Someone (the Kahuna, she imagined) had put up a Jolly Roger flag on the front railing.

“We’re going on a little trip, down the Potomac,” the Kahuna said. She saw he was scanning the dawn horizon behind his plastic shades. At this early hour, there was only a handful of people at the marina: a couple of guys scraping the paint from a boat on the shore, a lady walking a dog, and a couple of drunk college students still stumbling around the closed tiki bar.

The Cowboy whistled, and Maggie jumped into the boat. Her tail wagged, and Cassie could see that she was excited to be around new smells.

Cassie wasn’t so sure. “I thought that the surplus shop was the safest place,” Cassie said reluctantly.

“Your crazy aunt left a package for Tara last night.” Cassie’s heart lurched into her throat. “She knows where I am?” she squeaked.

“Yeah. Tara says she promised not to hurt you, but … Steve and I are pretty cautious. Might be better to be on the move.”

The Cowboy reached out from the side of the boat to offer her a hand in.

Cassie swallowed. Tara’s cards said she could trust these guys. She trusted Tara, and the cards were an extension of her. Hesitantly, Cassie took his hand and swung into the boat. The cooler came in after her, and the Kahuna brought up the rear. The Cowboy finished unmooring the boat, while the Kahuna headed to the cabin. “C’mon. I’ll show you round the good ship
Starry Night
.”