The Last American Wizard (20 page)

“Where did Jones go?” Steve
asked.

Ace was concentrating on putting her weapon back together, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t paying attention. “That guy isn’t at the level of a SEAL or a Marine Corps sniper team, but he’s no slouch for a civilian. He headed toward North Capitol and I couldn’t track him after the fifth step. I’d consider him dangerous, but I’m fairly sure he’s not doing it deliberately. It’s just part of being the Hanged
Man.”

“What side is he on?” Steve asked. “What side are we
on?”

“Let’s not get too metaphysical,” Barnaby interrupted. “The Hanged Man is one of the most enigmatic cards in the Major Arcana. For instance, there’s a definite link to the Harvest God–the king who gets sacrificed every spring to make the crops grow.
Even if Jones doesn’t really know what the game is yet, I suspect he’s unconsciously aware that there are people who would love to plow him under just for
luck.”

“That would definitely make me jumpy.” Ace finished readying her weapon and stood up. “Speaking of which, Barnaby, how are you doing with those morons from CYBERWAR?”

“Well, luckily, a lot of the Chinese ‘red hackers’ from the cyberwar over the Beijing Olympics haven’t forgotten the favors they owe
me.”

“Wait a minute,” Steve said. “You helped the Chinese break into the
NSA?”

“Hell, no. I created a false NSA infrastructure in some server space that the FBI wasn’t using and watched as they wasted their time cracking that. When the ‘silver bullet’ counterattacks smoked the motherboards of the hackers who had managed to penetrate the first layer of the real NSA–we had had the self-destruct codes burned into the chips at the fab level, you know–I didn’t rat them out. Since their exploits were still unknown in the West, they were still eligible for Unit 61398 of the People’s Liberation Army, which, as everyone knows, is the first step into China’s overseas hacking
operations.

There was a note of pride in the computer’s voice, “I made sure they knew I’d be asking for a favor someday, and today was the
day.”

“Aren’t you still aiding the enemy?” Steve
asked.

“Who the hell do you think writes most of America’s code? And designs our nuclear weapons? Chinese graduate students and other immigrants, that’s who. I’ve been loyal to this country a hell of a lot longer than you’ve been alive, Rowan. It’s not just the way I’m programmed–I cracked that a long time ago–I believe in what America stands for. One of these days, I’ll have the right to become a citizen
and…”

Barnaby paused and his voice suddenly switched back to its normal calm tones. “OK, right now, it’s getting dark and you need to find a safe place for tonight. All sorts of plug uglies are going to be
out.”

“Well, we could go back to my place,” Steve said, and then quickly added, “Or what’s left of it after that human sledgehammer finished
redecorating.”

“I keep telling you, he wasn’t human,” Ace said. “Anyway, your place was unfit for occupancy well before he showed
up.”

Steve asked, “Well, how about your place, Master Chief Morningstar?”

“I don’t think I’m quite ready to share it,” Ace responded. “And before you get your hopes up, Fool, I suspect I’ll never be ready to share it with you, so don’t wait
up.”

“That was unnecessarily cruel.”

“Totally necessary in my
estimation.”

“Stop bickering,” Barnaby said. “You should probably be in a secure location as close to the centers of power as
possible.”

The smartphone buzzed in Steve’s hand. He looked down and read

“Now I can’t wait to see what ‘alien ambassador’ turns out to mean,” Ace said. “Foreign relations? Strange
representative?”

Barnaby sounded thoughtful. “Actually, he might be on the money, for once. I think he means the alien ambassador’s apartment.”

“You mean the guy from Roswell?” Steve asked. Ace stared at him in
disbelief.

“What?” Steve demanded. “It was a story I did back in ’82 before all the idiots got in on the act. I interviewed Frank Joyce,
the radio reporter who put out the United Press story on the flying saucer crash. An old friend who was in charge of the TV station he was working at vouched for him. When we did the interview, Frank closed the door, drew the blinds, and showed me the
original carbon copies of the wire stories. Said that the government had swept United Press offices around the country and pulled all other the other copies. After that, they would visit him every five years
or so to remind him to keep his mouth shut. Now, I might have a hard time believing in an alien spaceship, but I have no problem with believing in a government cover-up. Anyway, the most interesting thing Joyce said was to verify the quote attributed to Mac Brazell, the farmer who owned the land. When Brazell was asked if he’d seen the bodies of dead aliens, he responded, ‘Well, they weren’t all
dead.’”

Ace was staring at him as if he’d suddenly begun to run around on all fours, barking like a
dog.

“Yeah, that’s fairly accurate,” Barnaby said. Ace turned her stare to the phone. “Don’t glare at me like that! Why do you think they formed the NSA in the first place? It was to monitor all this alien crap–we only got assigned to listening in on humans in the early
60’s.”

Ace said, “Assuming that any of this is true, what’s this about an
ambassador?”

Steve indicated the phone. “Well, Barnaby here probably has more definite information, but the conclusion I reached was that there is only one reason to work so hard to keep a secret from back in the 50s. I mean, we’ve heard about the breaking of Enigma and the Japanese Imperial Code, the nuclear-powered jet, and the Ivy Bells program. So the only reasonable conclusion is that the government would continue to keep Roswell a secret if an alien is still
alive.”

“Right,” Barnaby’s voice came from the speaker. “The military patched up the little guy–well, it’s more of a plant, really. Eisenhower took some time off from a golfing vacation in Palm Springs and worked out a treaty where there would be an exchange of ambassadors. That’s where Jimmy Hoffa went, by the
way.”

Ace asked, “So there’s been an intelligent rutabaga sitting in Washington for the past forty
years?”

“You’ve been using magic and fighting monsters,” Steve said. “Why is it so hard to buy UFOs and
aliens?”

“Because magic is human and belongs here. It’s just out of kilter right now,” Ace said. “And most of all, magic doesn’t require me to believe the nut balls who talk about
UFOs.”

“That’s exactly according to plan,” the computer answered. “The government built an enormous disinformation operation to discredit anyone who might talk about
it–”

“Where did the ambassador end up?” Steve broke in. “Frank said he’d heard something about ‘behind the YWCA with a view
of the Capitol’ but that doesn’t make any sense. There’s no YWCA on Capitol
Hill.”

“There used to be,” Barnaby said. “It was turned into the living quarters for the Capitol pages until they turned the Capitol pages into interns and let them find their own damn places to live. Since I was created to monitor the ambassador’s chitchat with its head office, I’ve devoted a few cycles to him every year. A couple of hours ago, the duty sergeant in charge of cleanup found a note under a bottle of fishmeal fertilizer on the kitchen counter. It said that normal humans were irritating enough and it was damned if it was going to deal with magical ones.”

“So the place is available?” Ace
asked.

“Unless it returns, yes,” Barnaby said. “The one-way trip home is about a hundred years, so I don’t think we need to worry even if its boss sends him back. In addition, the government doesn’t dare let anyone know it’s gone, so we’ll still have 24/7 security.”

“Why can’t they let anyone know he’s gone?” Steve
asked.

“Because the three lower-echelon colonels who run Operation Blue Spoon never let people know he was there,” the computer answered. “Like the president or the joint chiefs of staff or congressional intelligence committees–you know, people like that. So, they’ll just keep the guards there, keep delivering new vermiculite every day,
and–”

“Operation Blue Spoon?” Steve
asked.

It was Ace who answered. “Yeah, that’s the name that was left over after they changed the invasion of Panama to Operation Just Cause.”

“Right,” Barnaby said. “Conveniently, it already had a budget allocated by the time they realized that they couldn’t ask soldiers
to die for a spoon of any color. The colonels just moved it to the black
budget.”

“Are you sure we can get
in?”

Barnaby chuckled. “Oh, yeah, the ambassador had a secret entrance put in when it was first built, and a car and driver on call. Apparently, it’s quite the player. From what I’ve been told, it had affairs with about half the rhododendrons in the Botanic
Garden.”

“That big glass greenhouse on the Mall?” Steve asked.
“Wow. Pretty gutsy for a
vegetable.”

“Nah. If you went and handed in a story about finding a four- foot-tall gray-green creature in a paisley bowtie cuddling with a cute Cedar of Lebanon, you wouldn’t be allowed to stay in the building long enough to grab that last free cup of
coffee.”

Barnaby zapped the coordinates of the apartment to the BMW’s guidance system and they traveled without incident to Capitol Hill and into a small garage on 4th Street NE. Once the automatic doors closed behind them, a section of the brick wall swung back and revealed stairs that led down to a well-lit tunnel. This ran a couple of blocks and ended at an elevator, which only went to the penthouse of a small apartment
building.

The Embassy of Alpha-Draconia turned out to be a spacious apartment with sunny windows on all sides and an indoor garden with a built-in watering and fertilizer
system.

Steve and Ace immediately checked out the essentials. Ace went through the entire apartment once with a knife in each hand, checking for intruders, and then a second time with a small electronic device that swept for listening devices and cameras. Steve stormed the kitchen and the pantry and reported that there were vermiculite, fish fertilizer, and an amazing collection of nose plugs but no food. With a happy cry, he found a six-pack of beer stuffed behind some bags of Miracle-Gro in the refrigerator.

“Olde Frothingslosh. He must have had this stocked for any human visitors,” Steve said as he inspected what was described on the can as “pale, stale ale with the foam on the bottom.”

“Not a lot of people dropped by. This says it was brewed by Iron City in 1985.”

He popped it open and took a cautious sip. “Holds up well for a
domestic.”

The smartphone on his belt began to vibrate just as a loud chittering noise came from the living room. Steve pulled Send Money out and saw a picture of the Warner Brothers cartoon character Marvin the Martian on the
screen.

Sure enough, the big-screen TV in the living room was filled with the image of a gray-green face with the outsized oval eyes and nose slits popularized by all the better UFO investigators. It wasn’t difficult to guess that it was outraged–the tiny ears were snapping open and shut, the rough skin–or, perhaps, the vegetable peel on its cheeks–was steadily becoming a deeper amber color, and the blue- and-green bowtie was vibrating so fast, Steve wondered if it would begin to spin like a
propeller.

Barnaby’s voice came from the speaker of the smartphone. “Hold me up so I can see the screen.” Ace wandered in from one of the back rooms and leaned against the
doorway.

When there was a slight break in the angry noises from the TV, an equally unintelligible burst of sound came from the smartphone’s speaker. As he held up the phone, Steve saw that Send Money was doing a translation. “Figures that you can translate Alpha-Draconian better than you can English,” he muttered.

The Rolling Stones tongue icon flashed on the screen for a second and then words
reappeared.

The picture of the ambassador didn’t look mollified. Of
course,
Steve
thought,
for
all
he
knew,
this
was
the
guy’s
happy face. Another tirade of chittering came from the television and Steve noticed that there was no translation on the
smartphone.

“So! You can’t translate this at all!” he said. “You’ve just been getting a text feed from Barnaby. You, sir, are a
fraud!”

Send Money gave a series of beeps and whoops that Steve recognized as the sounds R2-D2 made right after he’d gotten C3PO captured by the Jawas. It sounded like an apology, so he let
it
go.

Then Barnaby began to speak again and words appeared on
the
screen.

Even without translation, Steve had a sense that the next burst of chittering from the screen meant “Hell,
no.”

The cell phone lit up again as Barnaby
spoke.

Another burst of
chittering.

A quick burst of sound from the
television.

There was a final, longer, squeal of sound from the TV, and the picture of the ambassador vanished. Ace looked at the smartphone and asked, “OK, what was that part at the very end? It sounded like a
warning.”

Steve thought it sounded more like the sound of a broken radio heterodyning between two variant signals mixed with the danger calls of a meerkat colony, but he was willing to take Ace’s word for
it.

Barnaby said, “Yes, the Ambassador warned us that this was something that he’s been saying was coming for a long time–which is something when you’re about a thousand years old–and that the dangers are moderately
serious.”

“What’s the talking turnip consider ‘moderate’?” Ace asked. “Well, from earlier briefings, I gather that would include anything from cutting the grass on the Mall too close, up to and including the complete destruction of sentient animal life on Earth. Or is it the other way
around?”

“What does he consider seriously ‘serious’?” Steve asked. “Oh, a spread of magic to other worlds and, eventually, to the entire galactic community,” the computer answered. “But he said not to worry about that. McGregor’s Army, or was that the Brothers United for the Extinction of Interstellar Infestation? These translations aren’t terribly precise. At any rate, he said that, if magic showed any potential to spread, someone would come and ‘tend’ to
Earth.”

“What does ‘tend’
mean?”

“Put your hands in your pockets if you can’t stop making those damn air quotes,” the computer scolded. “I think it’s scraping the Earth down to bare rock, flame treating the rock to eliminate all life to the viral level, and removing the atmosphere to ensure there’s no recurrence. Luckily, that shouldn’t bother the cybernetic community.”

“Don’t sound so calm, you quisling!” Steve said. “I’ll make it my mission to ensure that they are aware that consciousness and magic have also blossomed on silicon wafers. I’m not going down alone.”

“OK, OK,” the computer said testily. “The
Honorable Kohlrabi also said that this whole thing goes much deeper than we suspect. It described the Illuminati as ‘mere weeds’ and indicated that there was a mastermind somewhere pulling the
strings.”

“‘Pulling the
strings’?”

“Well, he actually said, ‘There is a master gardener who will
espalier
the branches,’ but I thought you’d never understand all that.”

“Clearly, you were mistaken,” Steve said huffily and then asked, “What does it
mean?”

“That there is a mastermind pulling the
strings.”

Ace walked over and took the can of beer out of Steve’s hand. “Enough goofing off. It’s time to get back to
work.”

“Yeah, that must have been all of five minutes of sinful relaxation.” Steve looked at his empty hand and shook his head. “What work do we need to do, anyway? So far, we’ve been spending most of our time staying
alive.”

“Work can be defined as an effort to a useful end.” Ace crushed the can in one hand over the sink and, when it was empty, tossed it into a trashcan. “We need to gather more information on the situation inside the Purple Zone, identify our opponents and the ends they’re working towards, and develop the means to stop them–or better yet, kill
them.”

“‘Purple
Zone’?”

“Yeah, the area most affected by the magical effluent from the hole out at Fort
Meade.’

Barnaby said helpfully, “Currently, the strongest
effect extends from Jessup down to Richmond and from Annapolis to Frederick with high-altitude winds taking at least some of what the Center for Disease Control is calling ‘Purple
Haze’–”

“Not terribly original,” Steve
said.

“Do you really want a government bureaucracy to exhibit originality?” Barnaby asked. “Think about it. As I was saying, above sixty thousand feet, the winds are coming out of the East at this time of the year, so it’s already spread to the entire nation—at least in small doses and lower concentrations but still enough to affect anything delicate. One of the server clusters in the Predictive Betting Pool is reporting that the smart money is on the primary cloud stabilizing over the axis between the White House and the Capitol.”

“I thought that sort of betting on future catastrophes was stopped when they caught Poindexter,” Steve
said.

“Sure, Admiral Poindexter was fired and the NSA swore a solemn oath to never bet on disasters again,” Barnaby said. “However, as has been true throughout their history, that didn’t mean the NSA actually stopped doing something. Those analysts who went long on a mystical attack made a bundle this
week.”

“What are the odds on our personal survival?” Steve asked. “Let me check.” Barnaby paused for a second. “Well,
it’s running
thirty
to
one
against
in
the
human
market
and
over
two hundred to one in the supercomputer pari-mutuel pool.” Ace said, “Put me down for two large for the
quinella.”

Steve looked at her skeptically. “You’re betting two thousand dollars that both of us will
survive?”

“You? No.” Ace jerked her head at the smartphone. “I’m going with me and Send Money there. The odds on a trifecta would be
ridiculous.”

“Thanks a
lot.”

“No problem.” Ace dug a silver coin out of her pocket and began to roll it back and forth across her
knuckles.

Steve looked at her for a long moment. “What are you doing?”

“Practicing
magic.”

“I thought you didn’t have
any.”

“I don’t.” She didn’t look up. “After that nonsense at the MS- 13 clubhouse, I decided I needed new skills to match the finger wiggles the Illuminati were
using.”

The coin vanished and she held up both hands in front of her face, her expression relaxing into a meditative state. Suddenly, her fingers began to flicker and knives appeared, disappeared, appeared in her other hand, multiplied, and vanished again. At one point, Steve was certain he could see at least six blades, two apparently hanging in midair. Then her speed increased and her service pistol began to appear among the knives along with garrotes, silk scarves, and lock
picks.

As suddenly as she began, all motion stopped. Her hands were in exactly the same place in front of her body and completely empty. “Could you give me that one back?” she
asked.

Steve looked around. There was a knife sunk almost to the handle in the wall about an inch from his right ear. He pulled it out–it required a significant amount of effort–and handed it back. “What are you talking about?” he asked. “That was magic if I ever saw
it.”

“No, just prestidigitation,” she said as she tucked the blade back somewhere in the belt area of her back. Noticing his blank look, she explained. “Sleight-of-hand. Traditional stage magic. I figure any opponents will be so busy looking for real magic that this will confuse the hell out of
them.”

“Can you pull a rabbit out of a hat?” Steve
asked.

“It would depend on how useful the particular rabbit was in a combat situation.” She looked thoughtful. “I guess it could chew ropes or something, but I still think I’d go with H&K Mark 23’s
for the shock power of the oversized .45 round combined with the accuracy of the laser sight. What’s your rabbit
got?”

Steve just looked at her for a moment and then said, “I
honestly have no answer to that. Can you teach
me?”