“All right, I’m trying to follow you.”
“Good.” He nodded. “So first I knew about the tides changing, and before long I could tell things about the weather, too. I could smell rain, and dampness. I knew when it was storming, and when it was about to storm. Write it off to barometric pressure if you like, but I could feel the air above and the water outside, working together, pushing against each other. Let me ask you something, Ms. Pendle.”
“Go for it,” I urged. I seriously had no clue where he was going with this, but I was willing to grasp at whatever straws he offered.
“When you were still alive,” he broached, “did you ever have migraines?”
“Migraines? I don’t know. I had headaches sometimes, sure. It’s been a long time.”
“I’m not speaking of ordinary headaches. Migraines are different, from a neurological standpoint, or so I have been told. I had them, and I sought treatment for them for years before I was turned. And I can only compare my new forms of awareness to the sensation of having a migraine. There was pressure across my forehead, and a light, tingling feeling at the base of my skull, where it meets my neck. I saw lights, too—bright swirls that dipped and rolled across my right eye’s field of vision. These things, these sensations. My knowledge of the weather and the water … it came from the same place.”
“So … having a built-in meteorologist is kind of like a really bad headache?”
He appeared to struggle with his words—wanting at first to argue, then changing his mind. “It is not altogether different. But it’s as if the pull goes both ways. I …” He untucked his hands from each other and used them to gesture again, drawing the words in the air in front of him—trying to force this odd communication. “I could feel the ocean and the clouds pulling at me. And one day, it occurred to me that I might be able to pull … back.”
I frowned without meaning to. “Are you trying to tell me you can control the weather?”
He unleashed a nervous laugh and said, “No, no. Nothing like that. Not anything as huge as the weather … but perhaps something that drives the weather. Pressure changes, electromagnetic fields, the earth’s rotation, the persistent motion of gravity … I don’t know. Something, though. Something large called to me, and I called in return.”
Pausing then, he reached out for the glass of wine he’d nearly forgotten. He tapped it gently with the back of his knuckles to locate it. Another swallow or two, and he was ready to continue talking.
“I experimented at first, and in the process I wondered if I hadn’t completely gone crazy. But I used my mind to pull it, to nudge it. To push it around. And in the beginning, I couldn’t tell if it was working or not. It was a process, you understand—learning my way around this new thing. We were so far underground, after all—”
“Wait,” I interrupted. “You said ‘we.’ How many people were down there by the time you left?”
“Oh, let me see.” He narrowed his eyes from some long-ago habit of thoughtfulness and then, after a few seconds, said, “Not many. Of the half dozen or so cells … only mine and two others remained occupied. One was a young man, another vampire who sounded like he might’ve been from Texas. The other was something else, a were … wolf or something else. She was female, at any rate. I could smell that much. And she never made a sound.”
“But there’d been others, like us, in the cells before?”
“Several. They came and went. But something was changing down there; people were packing up equipment and moving it out, and moving in larger pieces. The personnel shifted. Two men left, and were replaced by a different man and a woman. The routine of the place had been disrupted, and it worried me—for all that I sometimes thought I had nothing left to worry about anymore. After all, it seemed like the worst had happened, hadn’t it? How much worse could it get? But I didn’t want to find out.”
I sat back in the chair, both chilled and intrigued. “Can’t say as I blame you. So you started playing with this new … power? Whatever it was?”
“You could call it a power, I suppose, though I don’t think it was new. Nothing they did to me produced this. I think it was in my head all the time, perhaps as a result of the faulty wiring that made me prone to headaches. Or maybe it’s similar to the mortal phenomenon, where people who lose one sense gain sensitivity in the others. There’s no way of knowing now. Privately,” he confessed, lowering his voice and holding tight to the wineglass, “I think it might be a combination of the two. My strangely functioning brain, struggling to compensate for the loss of my sight … that’s how I like to think of it, anyway.”
I understood. It was another mortal phenomenon, after all—the desire to understand something by retroactively assigning it a myth. I told him, “Sure. But you still haven’t told me exactly how you escaped. You’re avoiding that part.”
“Am I?” He sounded surprised. “I don’t mean to. It’s just that what I’ve told you so far is so difficult to discuss. The rest can be summed up quickly, if you like.”
“Tell it however you want,” I said. I liked to hear him talk, and now that I knew I could drag the whole story out of him, I didn’t mean to rush him.
“Hm. Well, as I said, I tried out this power in small ways at first, trying to find a rhythm for it. Imagine, if you will, pushing a merry-go-round. At first it’s difficult; it’s heavy, and slow. But soon you find the weight of it, and you learn how to keep it moving—and then all it takes is the occasional shove to keep it going at full tilt. That’s what this was like. At first, I was trying to move something huge and impossibly heavy, trying to make it spin.”
“Spin?”
“Yes. I wanted the world to turn, or at least the Gulf of Mexico.”
“So you … made a hurricane?”
“No.” He stopped me quickly with a wave of his free hand. “Nothing like that. More like a tornado, yet nothing like a tornado at all. Believe me, I was as shocked as you are.”
“How do you know how shocked I am? You can’t see me.”
“No, but I can imagine the look on your face,” he said with a smile. “My initial attempts yielded no definitive results, but then I was making the windows rattle, and shaking the doors, and I could hear the fencing outside uprooting itself.” He sat forward on the edge of his seat now, closing the space between us. “They didn’t know it was me. Even if I’d told them it was me, they wouldn’t have believed it. But one night I heard them coming. I heard the doors opening and smelled the tide, and I couldn’t bear the thought of them even one more hour. I called down the vortex—if I must call it anything, then that word will suffice—and the building …” He shook his hands, almost spilling a little of the wine. “It came apart.”
“That’s it? It came apart?”
He shrugged. “Blew apart. Exploded apart. I felt my way out of the rubble, and I went blindly into the woods where I hid for several nights, feeding on whatever I found or could coax into my hands.”
“Then what?” I asked.
“Then …” More hand-waving. “I was found by the captain of a shrimp trawler who had ventured close to the island. I persuaded him to assist me. He took me off the island and over to St. Petersburg, where I threw myself upon the mercy of the Broad House.”
I couldn’t believe he’d taken the chance. “Seriously? And they didn’t kill you on the spot?”
“No. They’re ostracists,” he said, which meant that the House members were the equivalent of anarchists. They didn’t play nice with other Houses, and they tended to take in the freaks, geeks, and weirdos—the undead dregs. Few ostracist Houses (if they can loosely be called such) are very powerful, and they live on the fringes like the Hollywood stereotype of Gypsies.
“Still. Ballsy move, mister.”
“Thank you. Eh … Ms. Pendle, is your phone ringing?”
“What?” I didn’t hear it until he said it. “Oh. Well, it’s buzzing at me.” But I’d missed the call, and had to wait until the little blip told me I had a message. I pr
ied it out of my purse and checked the number. It looked familiar but I didn’t recognize it outright. I sighed and said, “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude, but so few people have this number that I need to check it as a matter of professional duty.”
“There’s nothing rude about it. You’re here on business, and more business has come calling.” I thought it sounded even more rude when he put it that way, but I didn’t argue with him. He downed the last of his wine and rose, going in search of a refill.
I flipped the phone open and realized that my caller hadn’t left a voice-mail message, but rather had sent a follow-up text. It said, “Call BH ASAP re: HP and JR.” The sign-off was a callback number unrelated to the text’s origin.
I unpacked the message to read, “Call Bad Hatter as soon as possible about the Holtzer Point and Jordan Roe information.” But I’d never actually spoken to Duncan in person before, and the prospect weirded me out. We’d exchanged emails, and a couple of text messages here and there, but never when it wasn’t of the utmost importance.
I cursed the other thief’s sense of timing, and when Ian returned to his seat with a fresh glass of wine, I said, “I’m awfully sorry. I mean, I’m even more sorry now than I was before, because I think I have to call this guy. It’s about your case, if that makes any difference.”
“My case? It makes all the difference in the world. Make yourself at home in the bedroom, there, if you’d like a bit of privacy.” I liked the sound of that—even though I knew I was only being dirty-minded and that anyway, he could probably hear every word without even trying. But I accepted his offer and closed myself behind the double doors, into a large space dominated by a frothily overstuffed king-sized bed. I dialed the number that was included at the end of the text message, and it was answered on the first ring by a man who sounded too old to be in this business.
“Cheshire,” he said.
“Yes,” I admitted. “And before you go all strange about it, I’m a woman.”
“I know.”
“You know?”
“I guessed. But that might not hide you.”
“What are you talking about?” I demanded.
“We have problems.”
I said, “We have problems?”
“That PDF I sent you was flagged.”
“Wait. What? You sent me a PDF?”
He said, “I didn’t know until after I sent it. There are …” I could almost hear the gears in his head turning, tumbling, trying to think of the easiest way to explain it to me. I’m tech-savvy for an old lady, but I don’t know all the ins and outs of the Web. He went on, speaking very fast. “Uncle Sam’s keeping a lookout for keywords related to the info you wanted, presumably because it was a classified program—a very classified program. When the keywords are tripped—like when I nab a file that’s loaded with them—a quiet little note goes back to an administrator someplace, and then the tracing begins. I’m a lucky fucker; I know what to look for. Otherwise I would’ve never seen it coming. I figured it out in time to move, and now I’m telling you, because it’s my fault the thing’s been sent your way.”
“Sent my way…,” I repeated, only barely following what he was telling me.
“Yeah, like a hot potato. Someone’s going to follow it, you can bet on that. They’re already all over my IP and breathing down my network’s neck. I’m sure you’ve got your ass covered in all the usual ways, but this is not a usual situation. I don’t know how they found me so fast, but Jesus, they found me fast.”
“Found you—are you all right?”
“I got out in time. I may be old, but I’m not slow,” he said, reinforcing my impression that he sounded like someone’s grandfather. “Are you at home?” he asked. “That place of yours on Seventeenth Street in Seattle?”
“What? No. Why do you know that address?” I demanded.
“Same reason you probably know mine. Insurance.”
Damn him, he was right. I’d dug up a general location on him years ago. “Fine. But no, I’m not home.”
“Good. And if you want to play it one hundred percent safe, don’t go home. I had to leave without destroying everything I wanted destroyed, including some personal info on some of my fellow freelancers—I’m telling you, kid, they were on me like lightning. I can’t promise they won’t come after you, too. Don’t check anything, just check the fuck out. You’ve got safe places. Pick one and camp there for a few weeks, lie low, and keep an eye on what happens.” It wasn’t a question. You didn’t get to our tier in the game without a backup plan.
“Yeah, I do,” I said, and the panic was coming back, right up into my throat. I chewed it back down and said, “Thanks for the warning.”
“You understand though, don’t you? This wasn’t deliberate. I wasn’t trying to junk you.” And now we were at the crux of the matter. His call wasn’t just a guilty heads-up; it was a double check that I wasn’t planning to rat him out as a traitor to the industry, via network gossip.
“I get it,” I said. I tried to make it cool, but I was shaking inside. “Duncan, what do I do?”
“Anyplace where you access those files from the Internet is a potential ground zero. If you think you can get them fast enough from some remote location, have them printed out and mailed to you, that’s your best bet. Carry them far away and as fast as you can. And destroy your phone. Don’t throw it away, destroy it. I had your number listed in some of the stuff those assholes seized.”
“Uh, okay. Okay. And I guess we’d both better run.”
“Damn right. I’ve got some more phone calls to make.”
“More warnings to hand out?”
“You got it,” he responded and the connection went dead.
I shoved the doors open. Ian was still sitting in the overstuffed brocade chair, looking confused. “Is something wrong?”
“Yes. I’ve got to run.”
“Is this anything to do with—”
“You? Yes. Quite a lot to do with you, actually.” I grabbed my purse. “I think someone is still looking for you. Someone’s keeping an eye out for your files, anyway. I have to run, and I might not be back.”
“But we haven’t even talked about—”
“I know. And we will one day, I promise. And the price is rising by the nanosecond, because I’m probably going to have to move away from here when all is said and done.”
“I don’t understand …”
“Me either. Get rid of your phone, get Cal, and get out of here. We need to treat this like an outbreak of a disease. Everything that’s had any contact with me, or with that PDF, has to go.”
He was standing, and then in the blink of an eye he was between me and the door—wearing an expression that was half earnest, half frustrated. “I don’t understand.”
I took him by the shoulders, gently—lest he think I was trying to play rough. I said, “I have some info about your situation, but I can’t get to it yet—and the man who sent it to me has been outed. Whoever else tries to get those files will be likewise chased, harried, and hounded, and the time frame for this event is absolutely unknown. I might have five minutes or I might have weeks, but if you want to know what I’ve got, you need to let me run, and run like hell. I need to get home, print your shit, and get out of Dodge before they descend on my place, and it might already be too late.”
I hoped to God that I was overstating the urgency, but my internal Panic O’Matic assured me that heavily armed commandos were already rifling through my underwear drawer.
I let go of him and he got out of my way. “You shouldn’t stay here,” I added as I reached for the door. “You could go, you could … I know. Go out to Ballard and get a boat. Stay out at the marina and I’ll find you when I can.”
He was on the verge of saying something but I was already out the door, and it was already shutting behind me.
4
I fled the hotel and ran down to the parking garage, because—did I forget to mention this?—I’d driven down to see Ian. It was f
aster, and I knew that a temporary squatting place like a hotel would have some kind of parking available. Hallelujah for valet service.
As I got my car and got out of the covered garage area, my mind was doing a hamster-wheel of the damned trying to figure out exactly what the trouble was and exactly what I was going to do about it. So Duncan had sent me an email with some juicy gossip. I wished he’d been more specific about … well … about any of it.
Note to self: Cultivate more demanding interview persona. I need to learn how to get more details before letting people get away from me.
It wasn’t far back to my place, but Seattle traffic is not to be believed sometimes—and oh, fantastic. One of the electric buses had blown a fuse, or busted a wire, or stopped in the middle of the road for some other equally aggravating reason.
The detours were killing me, but they were giving me time to think.
Flagged information had been sent to me. I hadn’t opened it. How could anyone possibly know where the Hatter had kicked it off to? In my wholly uneducated estimation, it wasn’t possible to pinpoint the info while it was in transit. Until I downloaded and moved the content, there’d be nowhere to trace it to. Right?
The thought didn’t calm me much, and the traffic was only fueling my horror. I’d been doing so much so wrong lately. Keeping that awful factory for storage, staying in my pretty little condo for too long, meeting up with vampires when I damn well ought to know better … I must’ve been getting sloppy in my old age, and if there’s one thing I couldn’t afford to be, it was sloppy.
What I needed to do was think.
So I sat at a red light for its third cycle (what were those people doing up there, knitting a sweater?) and I forced myself to breathe.
Okay. Duncan had said I shouldn’t go home, and he was the expert—so maybe I shouldn’t go home.