My shoulders and hip bones ached from the scraping press of forcing my body into what was, essentially, a ventilation portal, but my first glance around the interior suggested it might have been worth it.
It’d better be. And it’d better be worth it fast.
I knew this, because my first glance also told me that there were cameras inside this big-ass information dump. If they didn’t know where I’d gone yet, they’d figure it out before long.
And to think, I’d been fantasizing about taking a leisurely poke around the place, maybe having a nice picnic lunch and a nap before heading on my way. If there has been any doubt in your mind about the state of my sanity, I hope this revelation cinches that up for you.
Anyway, I dropped down onto a level that was something like a hayloft, loaded up in rows and stacks of crates and boxes, stamped from various facilities around the world and around the country, too. I saw FORT SAM HOUSTON as a return address on one package, and FORT KNOX on another one. I had no earthly idea where info on The Other Thief might have hailed from. I’d never find anything about him by sifting through postmarks, but it gave me an idea. I wondered if anything might’ve been shipped from Jordan Roe, in Florida—but that seemed unlikely, if it was only a facility and not a town.
I shimmied between the rows of stacked containers and let my eyes dilate as widely as they could. My one slight advantage—and the one thing that might buy me extra snooping seconds—was that there weren’t any windows low enough for the exterior commandos to actually watch me do my investigating. But boy, I could hear them outside, buzzing like a hornet’s nest.
The darkness opened enough that I could see piles and rows of discarded secrets, unlabeled and unorganized as far as I could tell. And there I was, standing in the shadow of a towering stack of sawdust-covered crates, with no earthly idea of what I was looking for. And I could’ve hung around and looked in that barn-sized depository for days.
Not an option.
Frantic and serious, I set to work flinging open drawers, smashing open crates, whipping open filing cabinets, and bashing in boxes.
Outside, someone practically shouted into his tiny microphone, relating a string of military abbreviations and acronyms I didn’t understand, but I got the thrust of “Subject in Alpha Building Four. Copy.”
Ah. So I was in Alpha Building Four. For all the good knowing it did me.
“Roger,” the same shouter replied.
And then they surprised me. They didn’t come bursting in—which I’d expected, and begun to prepare for. I was just thinking that the loft where I’d first entered would be a fairly easy place to defend, or at least exit. All I had to do was get the hell away from them, after all. I didn’t have to fight them all to the death in a cage match.
But they didn’t storm the premise of Alpha Building Four.
They locked it.
The motherfuckers locked me in and surrounded the place with firearms readied and aimed at every visible in-and-out of the joint. Whether or not they’d be able to shoot me upon exit I couldn’t say, but I didn’t like the prospect. Did they know how I’d gotten inside? Were they watching the ventilation windows upstairs?
I would’ve had to climb back up there to find out, and I didn’t, because the clock was ticking and I was a little worried. I don’t like it when people get unpredictable on me. Not at all.
I distracted myself from my worry by ratcheting up my search. While the men outside chatted back and forth in barked commands and responses, I found a set of crates that were approximately the size of a pair of high-school lockers side by side, and both of these crates had return addresses stamped ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA. Close enough, right? There were more islands in Florida than just the ones dangling off Miami, I knew that much, and Ian had said it was on the west coast.
Besides, out of all this crap, it was the first sign of “Florida” I’d found so far.
When I ripped the crates open I found whole filing cabinets nestled within. In a stunning display of laziness, haste, or apathy, the cabinets had been duct-taped shut and shipped that way.
I pulled my flat, fixed-blade knife out of my Useful Things Bag and started cutting the tape for the same reason the bear went over the mountain: to see what I could see. Also, because someone didn’t want me to see it. So let this be a lesson to you—about 80 percent of all research is boring as hell. Legwork sucks, but it’s necessary, and if I didn’t do it, nobody else was going to do it for me.
I spied the word JORDAN and almost choked with surprise. I seized the folder and everything inside it. It wasn’t the prayed-for lead on The Other Thief, but I didn’t have time to pick and choose my clues.
“On my command!” ordered somebody new. Without taking a breath he hollered, “Now!”
But I didn’t hear anything new or exciting, so I kept on flipping through those files. My fingers moved in a blur as I shuffled the contents, dumping everything pointless right onto the floor. PBS declared one folder’s label, and BSHOT said another. I grabbed those, and added them to my stash, looking up just long enough to wonder exactly what order had been given, and why no exciting action had followed.
Then I smelled it.
Gasoline. And moments after the gasoline, I heard that whoof sound of something flammable meeting an open flame. A warm, orange glow came peeking in through what precious little exterior glass was available to let it inside.
“Awesome,” I declared. Then I saw JROE and said with more enthusiasm, “Awesome!” I swiped that file, too, and stuffed my collection deep into my Useful Things Bag. I zipped up the thing and strapped it down across my back, in case it might stop a bullet or something. Because baby, I was ready to dash—and I had no intention of letting them catch anything but my figurative taillights on the way out the door.
Or out the window.
The stink of smoke was wafting inside now. The warmth of the orange light was growing ever brighter as I stood there, collecting my loot and my wits as I prepared to bolt. I felt like I had little choice but to take the same way out. I didn’t see any other promising options, and I’d already popped the glass. Even if they were watching it, if I could move fast enough—if I could fire myself out of that thing like a goddamn bullet—they’d never hit me.
Right?
I monkeyed myself back up to the loft and pushed a couple of crates under the window—which was far enough off the ground that I couldn’t just flop myself out. They’d see me doing that worm-wiggle of escape and open fire on the spot, I was sure of it.
I was even more sure of it when I peeked out from a distant corner window and saw that the commando dudes had encircled Alpha Building Four, and I was pretty much screwed coming and going unless I could get some major hang time out of this exit.
Deep breath.
Double-check the gear.
I climbed atop the crate, keeping my head low until the last possible second.
And I dove.
I flew out hands-first, with as much kick as I could manage. They saw me. They had to have seen me—my feet weren’t quite as slick as the rest of me, and I splintered the frame on the way out. It sounded like a gunshot, or maybe it’s only that gunshots followed my exit. It took them a minute to track me, to find my trail, to even figure out which direction I’d run … but they did, and they began to chase me.
I assume they saw the hole I left in their chain-link fence when I shot through it like a Japanese bullet train.
I didn’t care. I was so freaking elated that I’d done it—I’d gotten away with it! Fuck those men in black and everything they stand for!—that I didn’t care I was trudging at light speed through snow deep enough to drown in. I didn’t care that my thighs ached, and my chest hurt from sucking down the icy night in fits and gasps. I didn’t care that they were coming right for me, and that behind me I could hear the guttural cough of snowmobiles being cranked into duty.
I was almost back at my car.
And they hadn’t found it yet.
A
fter the preternaturally speedy run through the forest, the mundane task of retrieving my keys and forcing them to navigate the half-frozen car door lock seemed impossibly slow. But I did it. And when I started the car and started driving, I’d left the snowmobiles far enough behind me that even if they knew where I was, they wouldn’t have been able to catch me.
All the way back to the hotel, I breathed so hard I coughed fog onto the rearview mirror, and even though I was so cold I could barely move, I didn’t think to turn on the car’s heater until I’d already gotten the thing into the parking garage.
You could make an argument for the fact that I’d been lucky.
I’d argue with you, though. I scarcely think one can call an outing “lucky” when it involves being shot at by commandos, locked in a barn, and set on fire.
Gotta admit, I didn’t see that coming.
I didn’t honestly think they’d sacrifice the whole joint just to nab me. Even if it was the kind of place where information went to fossilize, it blew my mind that someone had issued that order and told someone to pull the trigger on it.
So to speak.
This only served to underscore, reinforce, and otherwise buttress my neurotic insecurity and all-out paranoia with regard to this case. Whatever I was chasing was serious. And someone out there was serious about keeping me away from it.
Sadly for that mystery someone, I had actually scored some pretty useful loot … or loot that had the potential to be useful. And unlike the PDF that started this whole mess, the feebs, the feds, the whoevers … they had no idea what I’d gotten my grubby little hands on. For all they knew, I might’ve found nothing at all—or Bigfoot’s DNA profile, or Batman’s birth certificate.
Good. Let ’em sweat. The assholes had burned the place down behind me, so now they’d never know, either.
And what did I find?
Oh yes. That’s the part where you could make a case for “lucky.”
Buried at the bottom of some files that had otherwise been coded and classified into near uselessness, I found a lead on one of the experimental subjects. I’d have been happier with details on my burgling competition, but it’d have to suffice—and hey, it was one more lead than I’d had earlier that evening.
So I ran with it. And less than twenty-four hours later, I was on a plane to Atlanta.
6
I’ve never cared much for Atlanta.
It’s crowded and hot, and even in the dead of winter it doesn’t get dark as fast as it does up in the northern hinterlands where I usually hang out. This means I have less people-interaction business time, and less running-around time in general. Yes, I keep a safe house there, and yes, I was happy to find myself back in a cushy spot instead of a hotel room, but I wasn’t so charmed to be back in the Southeast.
My condo was a wreck, which is to say, it was as pristine as my place back in Seattle except that everything was coated in dust. I’ve never trusted housekeepers enough to pay one to visit during my absence.
The bathtub had a spider in it.
But it could’ve been worse. It could’ve been hot, and it wasn’t. It was merely muggy and kind of cold, which wasn’t vastly different from Seattle, but was vastly better than the bone-gnawing freeze of Minnesota.
The city of Atlanta sprawls like hell because there are no natural boundaries to stop it, and its neighborhoods are practically their own individual nations. I don’t mean the blocks are broken down by ethnicity per se, though in some of the zip codes you could certainly make a case for it. I mean you’ve got your hipster sections, your New Money strips, your Southern Hollywood club ghettos, and the relics of the Olympic Village, plus a dozen other subdivisions of subdivided class, type, and preference.
There’s even a gayborhood—sort of. It would probably be more accurate to say that Atlanta is the gayborhood of Georgia, but there are parts of town that are more rainbow-friendly than others, and the spot I wanted was right on the edge of a gaudy strip filled with drag bars and bathhouses.
Why did I want this spot? Well, I didn’t find a Holy Grail at Holtzer Point, but in my hard-earned score I nabbed a small lead on another member of Project Bloodshot in a fat stack of material that was otherwise kind of useless to me. The rest of what I’d stolen hadn’t amounted to much, though I now was the proud owner of Ian’s paperwork without all the aggravating black bars. Unfortunately, the lack of bars didn’t tell me much. They might tell him more, I didn’t know, but I resolved to pass it along to him and Cal next time I saw them.
Mostly the net gain was a collection of serial numbers.
Much to my personal queasiness, the other three personnel dossiers (which including Ian’s, made the sum total of my loot) all appeared to detail subjects who’d died while part of the program. But although two of the deceased were listed without next of kin or any other personal contacts … subject number three actually came with a name and a hometown.
She was easily the best documented, with all her physical stats like hair and eye color, height and weight, as well as the results from some series of tests she’d taken. But I didn’t know what those tests were, or what they meant.
All the attention to detail had me thinking that she might’ve been a special case. Maybe they had bigger and better things in mind for her at Jordan Roe, or maybe she was only more cooperative than the others. I had no way of knowing.
Anyway, I had a woman’s name—Isabelle deJesus—and I had a place of birth, Atlanta, Georgia. And from what was left of her processing sheets, I was almost 100 percent certain she’d been a vampire.
She had the correct 636 serial number starter, and I noted a few other telltale marks that bolstered my suspicion. She’d been kept in an underground bunk like Ian (no windows), and the lone fragment of her chart mentioned a required dietary supplement that was provided twice a week. Gosh. I wonder what that could have been.
I ran her name through a phone book and my Internet sources, and turned up a big fat nothing … short of the fact that “deJesus” is not a hugely uncommon Spanish name and I could spend the next fifteen years interviewing every “deJesus” in Fulton, Cobb, and DeKalb counties.
Then—on a hunch—I ran the scarce facts through a missing persons list. After all, Ian hadn’t gone along willingly; maybe Isabelle hadn’t, either.
And then I understood that I’d gotten things wrong.
Isabelle hadn’t been a woman. She’d been a girl.
I found a listing for her as a teenage runaway, gone missing about ten years ago. Someone had been looking for her. Looking long and hard. The case had been pushed to the media every couple of years, and ads had run in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Someone hadn’t wanted to let her go.
That put a damper on my glee. I know it happens—hell, everybody knows it happens—that teenagers sometimes fall into bad times and bad habits, and I even had insider knowledge that some of the skankier vampire families will go out of their way to recruit kids like Isabelle when they want disposable foot soldiers. If you forced me to speculate about their rationale, I’d have to say that it probably has something to do with strays. If you take care of strays, the strays will take care of you, later on. And besides, if you get them young enough, they’re easy to control.
That transition point sometime in the late teens, from homeless kid to homeless person, that’s a real bitch. That’s when they get you—or so I hear.
Ironically, ghouls tend to come from a higher social tier than young vampire soldiers. They’re people who have something professional to offer a vampire House or family. They have accounting skills or computer skills; they have law degrees or other certifications. They’re white-collar and ambitious, hoping to upgrade to a cape.
With a little digging, I turned up an address for Isabelle’s parents. It turned out to be a modest beige house with red shutters and a pair of tall, gangly roses growing up around an arch in front of the porch.
I parked my car across the street from it and stared down at a picture I’d taken from
the Center for Missing and Exploited Children: Isabelle’s sophomore-year high-school photo. She looked thin and pretty, with hair she hadn’t yet figured out how to tame and lip gloss that was a little too bright for her coloring. But she had nice eyes and good bone structure. Her Hispanic ancestry stood out in the width of her cheeks and the set of her mouth.
I’d spent some time working out what I might say to her parents. I hadn’t been able to scare up too many details of the kid’s case, except that she’d either run off or been kidnapped sometime in the middle of summer break before her senior year and she’d never returned home, but her case had been closed with the missing persons bureau.
I suspected government intervention on that point. Of course, by then I was seeing government intervention under every rock and in every corner.
Man. I thought I’d been paranoid before I took Ian’s case; now I was downright deranged.
I wondered when she’d become a vampire and who had done it to her, but I doubted her parents would know. I didn’t even know how I’d go about asking, but I figured that pretending to be a concerned cold-case detective might work. I have a badge I bought off eBay a couple of years ago. I think the cop who originally wore it is dead. Regardless, it’s never gotten me double-checked or refused before.
Before I’d made the drive down to the quiet little inner-city suburb, I’d nabbed some new clothes at a high-end mall and I’d utterly failed to find a new car I wanted to buy on the spot. Something innocuously authoritative—like a dark blue Crown Victoria or something—would have been ideal, but I couldn’t find one for sale that suited my fancy so I’d been forced to rent one.
My rented pseudo-cop-car did a good job of completing my Professional Law-Enforcement-Type-Person package. I was wearing a gray pantsuit and black ankle boots, with a button-up long-sleeved shirt that was white and crisp. I almost felt like a gangster from the forties, but I told myself it all worked fine and I walked up to the house, pretending like I belonged there.