The Diamond Dragon (Kip Keene Book 4) (14 page)

“What are you, twelve?”

“She just lost her father, Keene,” Strike said. “Jesus Christ.”

“I’ve lost almost everyone that ever mattered to me. My parents died in the revolution, sold out by someone to make a quick buck. The first woman I ever loved tried to destroy a world I hated. My best friend went insane. They’re all dead.” With a deft movement, Keene spun in the tunnel and snatched the bow from Alessia’s hands before she could respond. He threw it behind him and then blocked the tunnel again. “It hurts like a son of a bitch sometimes.”

“Just let me go.”

“And I wandered around for a long time, struggled to find my way,” Keene said. “But here’s the thing, Alessia.”

She took a knife from her belt and cut him along the forearm. His hand dropped, and she rolled past. He reached to grab her, but she was already on the other side, reaching for her bow. Before he could close the gap, another arrow was notched and she was backing away, more cautious after having underestimated him the first time.

She reached into her pocket and threw a piece of paper on the ground.

“You can wait a half an hour,” Alessia said with a strong voice that did little to belie the fear and pain beneath. “If I’m not back…”

Then she tore down the tunnel, disappearing in the direction Prashant had travelled ten minutes before. Keene leaned against the crumbling dirt, clutching his wounded arm. A knowing smirk was painted on his face, but it wasn’t smug.

He knew when someone was lost from experience.

And that woman was about to drown at sea.

Strike came up beside him and said nothing for a few minutes.

“You think we should wait?” Keene said finally.

“I guess,” Strike said. “What were you going to tell her?”

“Nothing,” Keene said. He looked down at his blood-stained arm. The cut wasn’t deep, but it stung.

“We got half an hour, the way I look at it.” Strike sank into the dust and sat cross-legged.

“I was going to tell her that I had time to sort it all out,” Keene said. “But right now, she doesn’t. And I would’ve been better off if I could’ve let people help me.”

“Good advice is always the hardest to follow.”

“Ain’t that the truth.”

He sat down in the dirt next to Strike and they waited.

Thirty minutes passed, but Alessia didn’t return. Footsteps pounded on the ground above.

Keene bit his lip and smiled.

“What?” Strike said.

“She was never coming back,” Keene said. “The thirty minutes was so the berry water could take effect and the guards would return.”

“She was making sure we’d have to go to the temple,” Strike said. “Instead of following her.”

Keene rose and began walking down the tunnel, towards the hidden entrance in the field. 

He looked at the crumpled note, which was a map to the Diamond Dragon.

Time to follow the plan.

Even if it was a bad one, it was the only one they had.

Carmen Svetlana returned from across the city carrying a bulky ham radio from one of the UCD’s ancient storage units. She struggled to hang on to the rusted metal casing as she travelled up what seemed like a thousand stairs.

“Linus,” she yelled through the closed screen door. “Help me out here.”

The door opened a crack, and Linus stood there with a stupid look on his face. “What do I do?”

“Get out of the way.” Carmen staggered by and collapsed in the center of the dirty floor. The room shook for a moment, and it looked like the precariously stacked boxes would tumble. But everything stabilized and Carmen got to her feet.

She began dragging the radio towards the study. The screws on the bottom dug into the floor, emitting a horrid scratching noise.

“You’ve been gone a couple hours,” Linus said. “Thought you got into trouble.”

“And you didn’t come running?”

“I was going to, but then you came back.”

“Bullshit, tech wizard.” Carmen hoisted the radio onto the desk. “You think you can hook this up?”

Linus looked at the jumble of antennas and wires and shrugged. “Sure, no problem.”

Carmen loomed over his shoulder while he fiddled with the ancient equipment. True to his word, Linus had the apparatus operational within ten minutes. He tuned the dial to the frequency 462.462 and a burst of static crackled over the tinny speakers.

“Not bad,” Carmen said. She pulled out her phone. “It should be around four in the afternoon there.”

“There’s only eight hours left before…?” He swallowed audibly.

“Before the world ends in fire and brimstone.” Carmen clasped her hand on his shoulder and gave it a little shake. “Better hope you hooked everything up right, tech wizard.”

Linus gave her a worried frown and flicked a series of scuffed chrome switches on the front of the radio. The static gradually diminished into a gentle hum occasionally punctuated by snippets of words. Linus played with the volume knob and the words became audible.

“I think it might be a distress call,” Linus said.

“Thinking isn’t quite good enough,” Carmen said. “Can you clear it up?”

“With this equipment?” Linus batted one of the taped-together, rusted antennas with his index finger. “You’re not giving me much to work with.”

“There’s something in it for you,” Carmen said with a seductive bat of her eyelashes. “If you do a good job.”

“Like what?” Linus said, his shaky voice trying to play along.

“Like not dying in eight hours.”

“Jesus Christ, Carm, I can’t concentrate as it is.”

“Oh, you thought you were getting laid?”

Linus fully extended one of the antennas and the feed picked up for a moment, the looped message coming in clear. Then it was swallowed up by what sounded like an angry swarm of bees. He rushed over and flipped the main switch, plunging the room into silence.

Linus rubbed his ear and stretched his jaw. “See what I mean about the equipment?”

“You had it for a second. Go back.”

“They’re all gonna die if we can’t help them.” Linus played with his dangling black hair, sweeping his bangs out of his eyes. “And you give me this—this shit to work with, a bunch of photo copies and a goddamn fairy tale.”

He kicked the floor, where a number of papers were still side-by-side. A swirl of white spun about in the dust. Linus continued his tirade, walking over to the avalanche of files.

“Don’t do it, Wade, I swear—”

The stack came thundering down with a rollicking crash. Linus continued ripping at the cardboard even as the mass of boxes threatened to cover him. The top box toppled off the mountain and hit him in the head. He went down in a heap, covered by a corrugated paper wasteland.

Linus’ voice seeped out through the cracks. “Damn that hurt.”

Carmen, initially inclined to help, was stopped by a paper fluttering through the air. She snatched the sheet before it could be buried in the rubble along with Linus. She ignored his low-pitched groans.

She smoothed out the redacted memo on her thigh.

“A little help?”

“Shut up.” She skimmed the redacted paper, searching for meaning. The only thing legible, besides a few random articles and commas, was the headline which had originally caught her eye. REGARDING THE TILLUS WATERWORKS.

She ripped the pile off boxes off Linus and shoved the sheet in front of his face.

“Just give me a second.”

“Your tantrum might have given us a lead,” Carmen said.

“I can’t read it,” Linus said, rubbing his jaw. From his expression it seemed like he’d been mortally wounded, even if his skin bore no sign of actual injury. “I thought you read all this stuff already.”

“Do I look like a machine?” Carmen kicked one of the boxes against the wall, papers exploding into the air. Linus tensed on the ground. “I’m a field agent.”

“Junior field agent,” Linus said, getting to his feet while shaking off some dust bunnies.

“Just try to find this damn file. Unredacted. You have backdoors into all the government agencies, right?”

“Too much to do, Carm,” Linus said with a sigh. He reassumed his post in front of the radio and reached out to play with the buttons again. Carmen came in and blocked his motions.

“Uh-uh. This first, tech wizard.”

“Stop calling me that. Makes me sound like I’m Gandalf or something.”

“I thought you’d love that.”

“Yeah, because chicks dig wizards,” Linus said. “Give me that.” He snatched the sheet and began looking it over. Then he slid his chair through the rubble and started tapping away at the workstation in the corner.

Carmen came up behind him. Her phone buzzed in her pocket and the radio hummed, but first she wanted answers on whatever was going on in Tillus. Some instinct, deep within her gut, told her the reason that it had been redacted.

Her phone buzzed again.

Carmen took out the device and answered. “
What
?”

“Agent Svetlana,” her supervisor, Supervisory Agent John Stevens, said, “we have a situation in Tillus.”

Her voice became more conciliatory, almost apologetic. “I’m just researching it now, sir. I think I—”

“They’ve taken control of the town.” There was a long pause. “Without authorization.”

Linus finished typing and said, “You’re gonna want to see this.”

“Who took control of the town, sir,” Carmen said, trying to read the unredacted memo on the screen while also processing her phone conversation. Her attempt at multi-tasking just made everything more confusing.

“It seems our remaining agents stationed at the waterworks have gone rogue. Now, I’ve given Agent Redbeard a long leash with this silly nonsense about prophecies and magical girls, but this whole operation has become a significant liability.”

“Rogue?” Carmen put down the phone for a minute to finish reading the on-screen memo. Her gut feeling had been right. The confirmation still made her sick. All this work, deep undercover, and for what? She got to the paragraph about
concerns regarding our agents’ priorities
and put it together. “I see, sir.”

“Yes,” Stevens said with a note of resignation. “It seems that the UCD forces in Tillus are quite loyal to Agent Redbeard, and he left them with instructions to punish the town for its transgressions. Ridiculous. This sort of Wild West justice will not stand. It’s wanton and irresponsible. The potential for exposure is enormous.”

“What are you going to do, sir?” Carmen asked, her heart thumping.

“Fix the situation.” Stevens sounded nonplussed, as if his server had forgotten the lox on his bagel. “It is a pity, though. Good men. But, as you know, we are a secret organization. And such blatant disregards of the rules, well, they just invite scrutiny. I am not one for Congressional Committees. Cannot stomach them, in fact. And this entire operation has, thus far, produced no tangible evidence of a prophecy or imminent threat to the world.”

“Sir?”

“I am letting you know as a courtesy, since you reported to Agent Redbeard.”

“A courtesy? I don’t understand, sir.”

“Isn’t it clear, Agent Svetlana?” There was a beep, indicating that Stevens had to take another call. “A clean sweep. An industrial accident, perhaps. I’ll think of the cover story later.”

“But sir, some of those people are innocent—”

The call ended, and Carmen allowed the phone to drop to the floor. It shattered into a half dozen pieces.

“We’re going to destroy the town,” Carmen said, to no one at all. She stared dumbly at the faint orange glow of the streetlamps. “The UCD is going to burn Tillus down.”

“Might not be bad, considering what we know about the place.”

“I didn’t sign up for that,” Carmen said. She leaned against the radio, and suddenly the distress message came across loud and clear.

“Don’t move,” Linus said, hopping to his feet. “You’ve got the golden touch.”

They both listened carefully to the looping fifteen second clip. A man’s voice, pleading for assistance.

“This is Prashant Baral of the Shambhala resistance. We are under the rule of an immortal Roman Centurion named Cladius Maximus. We require the assistance of others to defend our world against certain destruction. There is a hidden way through to our paradise at the bottom of the Himalayas, an ancient path that has not been discovered by our captors. Please hurry.”

The message ended with a string of coordinates. Linus scribbled them down as Carmen held her breath.

“You get it,” she said with a tight voice.

“Yeah,” Linus said. He entered a series of keystrokes on the workstation’s number pad. “It’s in Nepal, surprise, surprise. Looks…totally uninhabited. Untouched.”

Carmen rose from the desk. The transmission plunged into white noise. She rushed into the adjacent room and hastily opened the gun locker. She removed as many clips of ammunition as she could carry, along with two pistols and two rifles.

She returned and Linus said, “Whoa.”

She tossed him a gun, and he caught it awkwardly. “You know how to use that?”

“Uh, I’m pretty good online. Top one hundred—”

“It’s nothing like that,” Carmen said. “Just point and shoot and be prepared for the recoil.”

“Sure,” Linus said, like he’d never been more unsure about anything. “But what’s it for?” He glanced out the window with a nervous expression, as if he was worried that goons had suddenly materialized on the doorstep.

“Paradise sounds like a dangerous place,” Carmen said. She slung the two rifles over her shoulders and walked towards the steps. She burst through the screen door with a lowered shoulder. “Wouldn’t want to come unprepared.”

“What about Tillus?”

“First we help save the world. Then, maybe.” But she was pretty damn sure that was a lie—to herself, most of all. When Stevens ordered something, it got
done
. No questions, no screw-ups. That town would be wiped from the map.

Best not to think about it.

“How are we getting there,” Linus said.

“The UCD has a couple tricks up its sleeve,” Carmen said. She reached into her pocket and removed a black keychain containing a single button. She pressed it.

Two minutes later, a town car rolled up and the doors opened.

“I hope this thing flies,” Linus said. “There’s not enough time to get to Nepal, anyway.”

“Just trust me,” Carmen said, tossing the guns into the back seat. “We’re gonna save your friends.”

Deep within her own chest, she wasn’t certain of her own words. But one thing was damn certain. She wasn’t going to let anything burn without a fight.