The Shape Stealer (14 page)

“Is anything wrong, Mr. Hughes?” the receptionist’s smooth, West African voice interrupted his revery. “You look puzzled. Did your lunch date not show up?”

Better to play along, keep it going, than flee in a panic. He had one more idea. “Yes, we had a no show. So I took advantage of the extra time to change—into something—more suited to my fairly sober mood. Ms.—Senghore,” he read off the name plate on her desk, “I’m going to need some help now, moving something around my office. Could you come with me please?”

“Sure,” she smiled. “But why so formal, Mr. Hughes? Am I no longer Margaret?”

With great effort, he smiled back. “I’m preoccupied with thinking about a trade, Margaret,” he offered.

She came around the desk and, to his relief, walked down the corridor ahead of him. He heard another woman’s voice chirping away behind one of the closed doors they passed. A loafer, too lazy to even go out to lunch like the other pathetic employees.

Marduk let Margaret get to Hughes’s office a few strides ahead of him. It was the last door on the central aisle, though there was nothing on the door to set it aside from the others. It opened onto a large office likely more impressive than the others, one with three desks, a wall-size picture window, and a large video security screen mounted on another wall that showed the interior of all the other offices and the lobby simultaneously, in a number of smaller shots. On yet another wall were more farm animal posters, a slogan painted above—
GREEN HILLS PARTNERS: A VOICE FOR THOSE WHO CANNOT SPEAK
—and a hand-lettered quotation, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, on a placard:
The time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men
.

“Oops, I just recalled that I’ve got to do something online before we move those … boxes,” Marduk said. There was in fact nothing visible in the office that could have required help to move, but there was a closed closet door that might have concealed boxes. Marduk hoped his comment didn’t sound like gibberish. Margaret, to his relief, began to back out of the doorway, though looking at him quizzically. “When would you like me back, Mr. Hughes?”

He glanced at his watch for show. “A half hour would be fine … Margaret.” He grinned uncomfortably. She left.

Marduk breathed heavily with anticipation as Margaret closed the door. He locked it from the inside, then gave the video screens a close inspection. All the offices were empty at the moment except for one, where the woman he had probably heard in the corridor sat before a computer, pecking at the keyboard. She had no privacy from the ceiling camera. The system seemed to be meant to put pressure on the employees.

Each subdivided screen had an audio switch, activating a separate listening device. Marduk debated with himself, then turned on the switch for the lobby. If inane chatter interfered with his concentration, he could turn it off, but at least he would have some warning if Hughes suddenly turned up. From what Margaret had said, he might not be back for a while. She was working at her desk, and all that could be heard from there was a Brahms symphony she was listening to on the radio.

Marduk settled in with an air of anticipation at Hughes’s own desk, which he assumed was the magnificent mahogany one in front of the picture window. From the correspondence, paperwork, and personal effects scattered about the blotter, he seemed correct in his assumption. The first item he looked at was a lettter on Will Hughes’s letterhead, signed but not yet sealed in its envelope. Why he wasn’t using e-mail for this, Marduk didn’t know. But traders were famous for their eccentricities, and perhaps it was harder to spy on postal mail than electronic. The letter read:

Mr. Barnes,

Enjoyed our conversation. I will see you in exactly three days, at 6:30 p.m., in San Francisco, and we can conclude our trade of all trades. In person, off market. Down by the bay, as you suggest, maybe west of Marina Green, right before the Gulf of the Farallones Sanctuary, seems perfect. On a bench by the beach—why not? After all, when we’re both trillionaires, the entire world will be our office, won’t it?

Yours as ever,

Will

Marduk puzzled over this note. What could they possibly be trading that could make them both trillionaires and that could be traded outdoors, even given all these electronic devices people seemed to be using? Didn’t one side always win and one side always lose in a financial trade? That’s what Dee had emphasized during the crash course he’d given Marduk on trading and the computers connected to it, and what all the online textbooks he had crammed had said. This note had the scent of trickery to it.

Fraud!

That was his judgment on Hughes. He’d love to be the one to impose moral clarity on him, and Mr. Barnes, a few days away in San Francisco.

Then he turned his attention to the computer screen. It opened up with the same password he’d used at the black pools (the one Dee had stolen for him), and it quickly filled with currency option positions, all flickering and seeming to change every instant. He was starting to jot some down when he heard Margaret’s voice from the screen, as audibly as if she sat in the room with him.

“You are quite the magician, Mr. Hughes. How did you get from your office to the elevator? I didn’t know there were secret passages around here. And how did you manage to change your clothes yet another time?”

“What?” Hughes asked. “You’re confused, Margaret. I’m just returning from lunch now. I haven’t changed any clothes.”

For Marduk, this was a moment when the urgency was so great that the body became the brain. Bluster and hatred aside, direct confrontation at this point was a disastrous idea. The only way out would be the window, not so daunting a prospect to one with his strength and agility.

He could see Will Hughes on the monitor striding down the corridor toward him, walking purposefully, Margaret a pace or two behind him.

Marduk had immunity to fatality or even injury except in a very few ways, none of which were threatening him right now. He was also a superb swimmer—as Hughes had once learned to his perpetual sadness at Pointe du Raz in Brittany—and had diving skills to match. He did a back flip through the picture window just as the office door was opening, his musculature enabling him to shatter the glass with ease. There was a millisecond of eye contact with a glaring Will Hughes—which Marduk would have preferred to have avoided—then he flipped himself over, head down, for a better view of his destination in the few seconds he had before impact.

While he knew the water wasn’t going to help much, he guided himself toward a reflecting pool with a fountain, in a plaza adjacent to the building … and landed in it. Marduk raised his head sharply and poised his torso upward in the instant before hitting. His sinews were tested with excruciating pain, muscle and bone absorbed a terrific impact, a shock wave went through his body as though he’d dived into the center of an earthquake, but after an instant, vampire physiology ruled.

He rolled onto his back and watched a shower of shard and crystal, the window in a kaleidoscope of pieces, flutter sunlit toward the ground. Then he came spryly afoot, if still aching from head to toe, and walked briskly toward a Metro stop. The group of passersby who had observed his fall stood stunned, rubbing their eyes in doubt, wondering if they’d just seen a film stunt, a falling manikin, or a robot. Had anyone tried to approach him Marduk would have broken into a run, but no one did. He went down the Metro stairs, the crystal shower settling onto the concrete plaza behind him.

18

Viper

Will Hughes stood before the empty space where his window had been, beside himself with fury. He watched with exasperation Marduk’s successful landing and flight, the shard spectacle coalescing on the ground, and tasted bitterness in his mouth, as if he had drunk something rancid. He itched to take up pursuit, but already his secretary was standing behind him, cell phone in hand, calling the police. He did not need to attract even more attention to himself than this unfortunate incident might.

The fiend! Marduk was trying to steal his identity from him. The temerity: the awfulness of it!

He’d have revenge, he soothed himself. But he’d have to plot it out with great care, given that he had the hybrid’s disadvantage (as well as advantage). Daylight freedom was wonderful, but he was weaker physically both day and night.

Turning to Margaret to remind her to call building maintenance—the window, of course, needed to be replaced—he then returned to his desk … and noted a subtle shift in the position of his about-to-be-mailed letter to the San Francisco billionaire Horatio Barnes. Good. Perhaps Marduk had read it. If so, there was an idea for setting a trap. No doubt the trillion dollars mentioned could have whetted the appetite of the viper. If anything could.

He took a few steps toward the window, to let the afternoon sunlight strike him full blast. The tingle he felt was only the normal radiance of sunlight on human skin. He wouldn’t be able to get into a wrestling match or other physical combat with Marduk anytime soon. But there was more than one way to cut off a viper’s head. Animal rights fund manager or not!

He closed his eyes, tilted his head up to the sunlight as if to gather strength from its rays, stretched out his hands … and felt something alight in his palm. He opened his eyes. For a moment he thought the sunlight had coalesced in some form. A creature with wings the color of sunstruck grass and hair the fiery red of the sun’s corona sat cross-legged in the palm of his hand. Then he recognized her, of course. Lol.

19

Earthquake in Eternity

“Black swan,” someone was murmuring in the distance. Over and over. It brought into my groggy thoughts visions of a swan, gliding peaceably on a pond brimming with afternoon sunlight. The swan floated from the center of the pond toward a tangle of overhanging trees at the opposite shore from where I was standing. Kepler sat under the shade of a tree along with a man in ancient Greek garb whom I guessed in the dream was one of his heroes, maybe Pythagoras. They appeared to be observing the angle the swan’s glide made in relation to a line drawn between their location and mine, glancing at me repeatedly, discussing the angle like a pair of high school math club members. Kepler jotted a few notes, and the Greek man moved beads along an abacus in his lap. But it was the swan that riveted my attention.

I strongly suspected that this was the same swan, a mortal, who was going to be assassinated in some inchoate future (from the time of the dream), killed for the crime of trying to be the lover of my ancestor Marguerite’s sister. Marguerite, first love of Will Hughes. But right now, in dream time, the swan hadn’t even met my ancestor yet …

I slowly woke up. I’d dozed off in an overstuffed chair in the sitting room off the lobby of the Hotel des Grandes Ecoles, which was filled with ornate antiques and their facsimiles. Despite the decor, there was a TV tuned to a cable financial channel on a stand that resembled a classic Greek column; someone had apparently turned it on while I napped. A panel of experts seemed to be discussing whether or not another “black swan event” like the one in the fall of 2008—in other words, an improbable disaster—was on the way, and perhaps the phrase had insinuated itself into my sleep. I tried to keep the dream alive even in my waking thoughts, as the gliding swan was of much more interest than the percentages being discussed on TV. But though I could recall the images and stare at them in my mind’s eye, the dream had lost its vitality.

Then I sat bolt upright, eyes wide open, at the sound of a familiar voice I couldn’t place at first.

“Garet James!”

She appeared in the doorway, wearing a less formal version of the attire she’d had on when I’d first gone to her apartment. A sea-green tunic embroidered with a white, multitentacled octopus design billowing over slim white capris, no doubt concealing her six other arms; I only saw two of them.

“Octavia La Pieuvre!” I exclaimed, getting up from my chair. “You survived! You’re alive!” We embraced.

The last I’d seen Octavia she lay weak and gasping, drying toward death in the Val sans Retour. Seeing her so healthy-looking now was like a miracle. I couldn’t wait to hear how she’d survived. But first I needed to introduce her to my friends, who were staring at her and me.

“Here is Johannes Kepler, the astronomer,” I said, guiding Octavia by the elbow into the parlor. She was a sea fey. No point in hiding otherworldly facts from her. “I have recently met him in the catacombs.” With all the gallantry I would have expected, Kepler stood and bowed, then approached and kneeled, and kissed Octavia’s outstretched hand. She beamed at him.

“And of course you remember Will.” I thought it impolite to Will to elaborate on the nature of this Will as opposed to the one she’d previously met. If she noticed any difference, she didn’t show it. Will duplicated Kepler’s aristocratic courtesy; he had been raised as a late-sixteenth-century noble, I reminded myself.

“Madame La Pieuvre is a woman of the sea,” I proclaimed, though “woman” was not quite accurate. “Yet she courageously accompanied me on a land adventure once, at considerable risk.”

Kepler nodded. “You exude courage as well as charm, madame. I too have been fascinated by the sea, although—or perhaps because—I grew up in landlocked terrain. Won’t you join our little group?”

Octavia reached a slender, glistening third arm out from between the folds of her blouse and patted Kepler on his arm. If he noticed the extra nature of the arm, he didn’t show it. Then she sat down in an overstuffed pink armchair with a lavender crescent moon design. Garish, but comfortable-looking.

“What brings you to the hotel?” I asked her.

“I’m here to visit Adele,” she said. Adele Weiss, besides being the concierge of the Hotel des Grandes Ecoles, was her lover of long standing.

The subject under discussion by the TV panel lurched from black swans to new funds being proposed by various financial managers. One of the panel members characterized the funds as creative financial vehicles that arise in the wake of calamity. “Restoring order to ashes,” she said. Whose payroll is she on? I wondered, as I rose from my chair to lower the volume.