White Hot

  Rogan walked over to the wall, slid the panel open, and came back with a glass and a bottle of Jack Daniels. He set the glass and the bottle in front of Cornelius.

  “I don’t drink,” Cornelius said. “I’ll be sober for this.”

  “What will happen after you find your wife’s killer?” Rogan sat down to my left.

  “I’ll fire Ms. Baylor,” Cornelius said.

  “Because of Ms. Baylor’s stubborn inability to compromise when it comes to legal matters?” Rogan asked.

  “She made it clear she doesn’t want to be involved in what would follow.”

  I waved at both of them in case they forgot that I was sitting right there.

  “How committed are you to this course of action?” Rogan asked.

  “I’ve taken measures already,” Cornelius said.

  Rogan sat back, his eyes calculating. “I’m going to share some confidential information with you. It has wide-reaching implications. If you would rather not be involved, tell me now. The lives of my people depend on your discretion and if you betray my confidence, I’ll have to eliminate you.”

  “Understandable,” Cornelius said. “Likewise, if I discover that you in any way caused Nari’s death, I’ll take the appropriate actions.”

  This wasn’t the world of normal people. Yet somehow I kept getting stuck in it.

  “For the record, I don’t consent to being killed,” I said.

  They both looked at me.

  “Just getting it out there in case there are any questions later.”

  A careful knock sounded and Bug bounced into the room. One of my mother’s friends had a cairn terrier called Magnus. Cairn terriers were bred to catch vermin among the cairns of the Scottish Highlands, and Magnus was physically unable to sit still. He dashed about the back yard, he ran on walks, he chased toys, and if you blew bubbles, he turned into a bolt of black furry lightning until he murdered every single one. Moving was his job and he devoted himself to it.

  Bug was Magnus in human form. He was always moving, typing, talking, tracking . . . Even though he often sat for most of the day, he wasn’t sedentary. He was never without a purpose or a task, and I had a feeling that if only he could stop doing all of his things and eat a sandwich once in a while, he would put on the twenty-five pounds his skinny frame was missing.

  Bug was a swarmer. The U.S. Air Force had bound him to something they’d pulled out of the arcane realm. They called it a swarm because they had no better name for it. The swarm had no physical form. It lived within Bug somehow, which let him split his attention, process information faster, and made him into a superior surveillance expert. Most swarmers died within two years of being bound, but Bug had somehow survived and, until recently, lived in hiding, detesting all authority, especially the military variety. I’d occasionally bought his services with Equzol, a military-grade drug designed to even him out. Then Rogan had lured him from his hiding place with promises of Equzol, advanced computer equipment, and whatever else was part of the devil deal they struck.

  Being lured into Rogan’s clutches agreed with Bug. His skin had lost its sallow tint, and while his eyes still brimmed with nervous energy, he wasn’t twitching or freaking out.

  Bug dropped onto the couch and placed a laptop in front of him on the table. “Hey, Nevada.”

  “Hey.”

  A plump dog that was mostly French bulldog and part something unidentifiable sauntered into the room and rubbed its face on my pants leg.

  “Hi, Napoleon.” I reached down and patted his head. Bug’s dog rambled over to Rogan and unceremoniously flopped on his feet. Rogan reached down without really looking, on autopilot, picked Napoleon up and put him on the couch next to him. The French bulldog sighed contently, wedged his butt deeper into the couch, and closed his eyes.

  Rogan leaned back. “In the fall, Ms. Baylor and I were involved in apprehending Adam Pierce.”

  “I know,” Cornelius said. “That’s how we met.”

  Bug pulled a tablet out of his sweatshirt and began messing with it. A screen slid from the wall on the side.

  “Adam Pierce didn’t act alone,” Rogan said. “Someone loaded him like a gun, aimed, and pulled the trigger.”

  “Who?” Cornelius asked.

  “We don’t know,” Bug said.

  “We became aware of the conspiracy surrounding Pierce when we learned he was moving about the city undetected,” I said. “He didn’t just have a single mage cloaking him. There was an entire team shielding him. We know that an animator Prime was involved.”

  In my head I flashed back to running across a parking lot as Rogan fought a whirlwind of metal and pipes that tried to crush him. We never did find out who the animator was.

  “Pierce used a teenager to do some of his dirty work,” Rogan explained. “His name is Gavin Waller. Gavin’s mother is my cousin. I found out that she was part of whatever cabal was pulling Adam’s strings.”

  That was news to me. So Rogan’s own cousin had betrayed him. Would he care? Would it even matter to him? He hadn’t seemed to have taken any interest in Kelly Waller or her son, until Adam Pierce made Gavin a part of his murder-and-arson spree.

  “Whoever was behind Adam is well funded and powerful,” Rogan continued. “Fortunately for me, they overlooked a weak spot in their armor.”

  Bug tapped the keys on the laptop. The screen ignited, showing a woman in a skin-tight black dress kneeling on a tall chair, her arms bent at the elbow, her forearms resting on the chair’s back so she could stick her butt out. A high-heeled shoe hung from the index finger of her left hand. She was looking straight at the camera with light grey eyes, her makeup fresh and flawless. Her strawberry-blond hair framed her face in a perfectly straight shimmering curtain. Her expression was vapid. She was biting her lower lip.

  Ugh.

  “Harper Larvo,” I murmured.

  “Who is she?” Cornelius asked.

  “A socialite,” I said. “She was involved with the people behind Adam Pierce.”

  “I put her under surveillance,” Rogan said.

  “We bugged her apartment, her phone, her cell, and her car,” Bug said. “We bugged all the shit.”

  “A month ago Harper began an affair with Jaroslav Fenley,” Rogan said.

  Cornelius leaned forward. Jaroslav had worked with Nari. He was one of the three other lawyers murdered with her.

  “Then, last Friday we got this.” Rogan nodded at Bug, who reached over the top of the laptop and pressed a key.

  “It’s happening,” Harper’s voice said. “They’re going to hand it over. They don’t want it leading back to them, so they’re looking for security for the meeting now.”

  “We need the time and place,” an older female voice said.

  A muscle jerked in Rogan’s face.

  “I’m tired. Can I just be done? He’s boring and he smells. The BO is through the roof.”

  “Do you need me to remind you who’s holding your leash?”

  “Fine. I’ll call you when I get it.”

  “The other woman on the tape is Kelly Waller,” Rogan said. His blue eyes were glacier-cold. He cared about Kelly Waller’s betrayal. He cared very much. If I were Kelly Waller, I’d make arrangements to run away to another continent.

  Bug grimaced. “She used a burner phone. If she wasn’t clutching Sassy at the time, we wouldn’t have caught it.”

  “Sassy?” I asked.

  “Her foo-foo poodle,” Bug said.

  “You bugged her dog?”

  Bug drew back, outraged. “I bugged her collar! What, you think I’m a complete fart muffin? She shouldn’t have that dog anyway. She treats her like shit. She doesn’t deserve Sassy.” Bug tapped the keys. “We combed the net and the usual places a dimwit—”

  Mad Rogan glanced at him.

  “—a man who doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing might look for private security. We found Fenley’s job and we took the contract.”

  “We?” I asked.

  ?
??I own a private security company,” Rogan said.

  Of course.

  “Fenley indicated that they were meeting with another party to exchange some data,” Rogan said.

  “At Hotel Sha Sha,” Cornelius guessed.

  Rogan nodded. “The timing and location weren’t ideal, but I took the risk. If my cousin wants this data, I want it more.”

  He took the risk and his people had died. He blamed himself. It didn’t reflect in his face, but I saw it in his eyes for a brief moment, before they went back to their icy blue. The last time we talked, I was almost completely convinced that he was a sociopath. He seemed invulnerable, as if nothing could bother him. This did.

  Bug pushed a key on the keyboard. I braced myself.

  A woman in her mid-thirties wearing grey pants, a black shirt, and an odd-looking bulletproof vest appeared on the large screen. A thin strip of metal and plastic adhered to the left side of her forehead, disappearing under her dark hair, pulled back from her face. She touched it and the view shifted slightly. She was looking into a mirror.

  “Stop screwing with it,” Bug’s voice said.

  “It’s distracting.” Her voice carried traces of Louisiana. “I don’t like distracting.”

  “It the best tech on the market,” Bug said. “And you broke the last two, Luanne.”

  “They were also distracting.”

  “Do you see the care in my eye?”

  Luanne looked athletic and strong, and the way she held herself projected a dispassionate calm. Not serenity, just a quiet, competent alertness devoid of any emotional connection. I’d met her type before. She was a professional private soldier. You would look into her eyes and see nothing, and then she’d shoot you in the face, and as the bullets were flying, you’d still see nothing. It didn’t reach her, maybe because of her experience or perhaps it just never did. In everyday life, she’d look completely normal. You’d see her at the supermarket and never imagine that she could kill people for a living.

  Behind her men and women in identical garb were checking their weapons.

  “What kind of a vest is that?” I asked. It looked segmented under the grey fabric, as if made of small hexagonal sections. Flexible too. The hexagons shifted slightly as Luanne moved.

  “That’s a Scorpion V,” Bug said. “Latest, greatest, classified, and civilians aren’t supposed to have them, so don’t see it or we’ll have to gouge your eyes out.”

  “No heroics, Luanne,” Rogan said off camera. “I just want to know what they’re trading. Get in, stay alive, get out.”

  “With all due respect, Major, this isn’t my first dance,” Luanne said.

  “Major worries,” a younger man with a freckled face said as he rested a firearm on his lap. Heckler & Koch MP7.

  I glanced at Rogan. His face was blank.

  “Major always worries,” an older man said.

  “It’s our job to prove that he’s worried for nothing, Watkins.” Luanne turned and the view swung to a group of private soldiers. “Time to earn the big money.”

  The screen split into four, each feed attached to a different soldier.

  “Fast forward,” Rogan said quietly.

  The recording sped up. They divided into four huge black Tahoes, picked up the lawyers—putting them only into two Tahoes—and took separate routes to the hotel. The video slowed to normal speed. We watched them get out and escort two men and two women, all in Scorpion bulletproof vests, into the hotel, where another private soldier met them at the door. Rogan’s team must’ve scouted the location beforehand and done a walk-through.

  As the lawyers were hustled into the hotel, the recording caught the taller woman’s face.

  Cornelius took a sharp breath.

  She was about twenty-eight or so, Asian, possibly of Korean descent, with a round face and large smart eyes that looked just like her daughter’s. Worry twisted her face. She seemed so alive there on the recording.

  I was watching a dead person walking.

  The lawyers and the private security people moved into the building. Four went ahead. The group directly responsible for the lawyers’ lives followed, clearing the hotel’s corridors in the “hallway” formation: one guard in front, the other slightly behind to his left, then the lawyers, then the third guard on the right and the final guard almost exactly behind the first. From above it would look like a rectangle set on a corner. Four remaining guards brought up the rear. They moved fast, took the stairs instead of the elevator, and arrived at a suite on the second floor. Another private solider, a woman this time, stood at the doors of the suite.

  “Any security on the outside?” I asked.

  “There are two people,” Rogan said. “One on the building northwest, covering the entrance, and one on the museum’s roof to the north, covering the two windows.”

  Thorough. He’d covered the exit and the windows, so if anyone or anything that presented a threat tried to enter the hotel, his people would know instantly and neutralize it. I never took any private security jobs, but back when my father was alive, he and my mother had insisted I take a course on it at a training facility in Virginia. From what I could remember, Rogan’s people had crossed every t and dotted every i.

  The lawyers and their bodyguards filed into a spacious suite. A dark coffee table—some sort of wood, nearly black and sealed to a mirror shine—stood in the middle of the room, flanked by a dark grey sectional sofa and two chairs, one upholstered in royal purple and the other in zebra print. The lawyers sat down. Rogan’s people spread through the room, one by the dark red draperies, one by the door to the bathroom, and the rest by the walls, forming a killing field in front of the door. Four people stayed with the lawyers.

  The four feeds on the split screen showed every angle of the room. On two of them Luanne’s face was clearly visible and she was frowning. She was looking at the window. What did she see . . . ?

  Condensation. A thin layer of fog tinted the glass.

  “Bug,” Luanne said quietly. “What’s the humidity in here?”

  “Ninety-two percent.”

  “What’s the humidity by Cole on the roof?”

  “Seventy-eight.”

  “Abort.” Luanne bit off the word. “Move them out now.”

  The room iced over. In a blink a layer of ice sheathed the walls, the weapons, and the furniture.

  “I’m reading a temperature drop!” Bug’s voice called.

  Then everything happened all at once.

  A short African American soldier standing by the lawyers clenched her fists and jerked them down, as if ripping something. A low sound rolled through the room and the air around her turned pale blue. An aegis, a human bulletproof shield.

  Three other soldiers by the aegis jerked the lawyers to their feet and shoved them into the blue sphere.

  At the door another soldier grabbed the handle, yanked his hand free as if burned, and kicked the door. It held. The layer of ice on it kept growing, at least an inch thick.

  “Make a hole!” Luanne barked.

  The two men by the door snapped into mage poses, arms slightly raised, palms up as if holding an invisible basketball in each hand. Crimson lightning flared around their fingertips. Enerkinetics, commanding the raw magic energy. The wall was about to explode.

  Suddenly Luanne’s face turned blank. She snapped her MP7 up and shot both enerkinetics in the head.

  Across the room a middle-aged African American man spun toward her and fired. The bullets smashed into Luanne, jerking her back with each hit. The view of her camera trembled as each projectile ripped into her body. A small explosion flared before her camera, the bloody mist flying. A bullet hit Luanne in the skull.

  She turned, oblivious to the stream of bullets. She should’ve been dead. She had to be dead, but her body rotated, swung the MP7 around, and unloaded the full blast into the aegis’s blue sphere. The bullets slid through, making ripples in the barrier and clattering harmlessly to the floor. The middle-aged man who’d shot her turne
d as well, the same slack expression on his face, and pumped a stream of bullets into the shield.

  What the hell was going on?

  I looked into Rogan’s eyes. I had expected anger and pain, but what I saw in their depths made me want to cringe. They were full of darkness, as if a layer of ice had formed over bottomless black water. There were terrible things in that water.

  “Give me an exit!” the aegis screamed.

  The soldiers near her fired back. Luanne careened and crashed down, her head bouncing off the floor, her camera still recording.

  The two soldiers, one by the door and the other by the window, spun in unison and sprayed the room, cutting down the lawyers’ guards like they were straw, then turned their weapons onto the shield. The aegis screamed as multiple impacts ripped into her sphere. Blood poured from her nose. Her hands shook with effort.

  The faces of the lawyers behind the shield were so frightened—contorted with panic and helpless.

  The first bullet broke through and hit the young blond lawyer in the throat. Blood landed on Nari Harrison’s cheek and I saw the precise moment when she realized she wouldn’t be going home.

  The blue sphere vanished as the shield failed. The aegis dropped to her knees, blood pouring from her mouth. Bullets ripped into the unarmed attorneys. For a few moments they jerked, suspended by the stream of armor-piercing rounds tearing into their flesh, and then collapsed. Nari landed four feet away from the camera. Her wide-open dead eyes stared at us through the screen.

  Cornelius made a strangled sound.

  A boot blocked Luanne’s camera view. Two shots popped like dry firecrackers. The boot moved as the soldier stepped over to Nari. A gun barrel loomed over her head. Two bullets punched her temple, misting blood onto her face. The soldier walked from lawyer to lawyer, pumping bullets into their heads, then stopped by the blonde female lawyer’s body. Blood soaked her blond hair. He crouched, pulled something from her hand, and stepped away. Glass shattered. He returned to sink two bullets into her skull.

  The camera in the left top corner swung up and we saw the soldier’s young freckled face. His eyes were brimming with pain and fear. Slowly, he raised his middle finger and held it. A little message to Rogan. Fuck you.