Dragons & Dwarves

  Agent Ts’ao and Dr. Blackstone got up and went through the door, which Brown held open for them. I craned my neck to look beyond the three of them, but all I managed to see was an unnatural character to the light. A flickering quality that felt ominous.

  Brown let go of the door as they went toward the front of the house. I saw no incentive to meekly wait for their return, so I stood up and grabbed the edge of the door before it had swung completely closed.

  I heard Agent Ts’ao’s voice, for the first time raised in anger. “Damn it, Blackstone! You said he was clean—”

  “We checked—”

  “Obviously not well enough.”

  I edged down the hallway between the “rec room” and the living room, to get a view of what was going on without interrupting the argument. I needn’t have worried. The sight out the picture window was taking all of everyone’s attention.

  The thumps, which were more sustained and rhythmic now, were from a rush of air. A wall of it, rushing by the front of the house, glowing a peculiar orange in the sunlight.

  “We weren’t tailed here,” Dr. Blackstone objected.

  “Then that,” Ts’ao waved toward the window, “is one hell of a coincidence, Doctor. You grandstanding Company spooks have done nothing but screw up since you got here. You probably got one of our assets killed—”

  “Sir—” Brown’s voice sounded strained.

  Ts’ao shook his head. “Now you’ve blown the cover off of the only magically secure safe house we have.”

  “Sir—” Brown was pleading.

  “Do you know how many man-hours it took to make Feng Shui look this crappy?”

  “Sirs, what do we do?” Brown shouted at them.

  Ts’ao looked out the window, gave a half smile, and shook his head. “About that? Nothing.”

  Dr. Blackstone looked appalled. “What do you mean, nothing? We’re under attack.”

  “I’ve confidence in the building’s security. If there was a breach, they would be exploiting it.”

  I looked out at the moving wall of force. I saw debris swept up in it, trash, paper, mulch—all darkening it like an approaching storm. Occasionally it would swell and seem to sweep toward the glass, but it would pull away before it touched.

  “No,” Ts’ao said. “The wind isn’t the threat.” He glanced at Brown and Mustard. “Break out the guns. And vests.”

  The way he said it let me know he wasn’t talking about pistols.

  Doctor Blackstone looked befuddled.

  “Doctor, out there is a distraction. Very high profile covering fire meant to pin us down for the real attack.” He looked out the window. “Which is going to be soon. No one can keep this up for long. You better keep an eye on our guest.”

  For some reason—probably complete obstinance—I backed away from the living room and slipped behind the first door that wasn’t the interview room. Turned out to be a bedroom that, fortunately, was unoccupied.

  Damned if I knew what I was doing, but I had a pretty good idea who the fireworks were for. Somewhere along the line I picked up information, or someone thought I had picked up information, that was worth pulling out all the stops to keep a secret. Elvish discretion or not, these guys were panicking. Whoever was in charge had completely lost any sense of proportion. I could not see anything I knew as being important enough to make a frontal assault on a bunch of Feds.

  All I knew is that I’d seen Egil Nixon’s corpse and I was not making plans for a similar end.

  I ran over to the window. It was shaded by heavy drapes that I drew aside. I was looking toward the back of the house, but I saw the same swirling wall of air. No escape that way. I stared into the maelstrom, watching the wind growing darker with accumulated dirt and debris. I knew enough not to open the window. The charms at every opening in this place gave this house an unbroken circle of protection. That was what kept the winds outside. Once that circle was broken—

  “Maxwell—” came a voice from behind me.

  I looked behind me and saw Dr. Blackstone standing in the bedroom doorway. “What the hell are you doing?” he snapped at me.

  “Figuring my odds on getting the hell out of here.”

  “You’re not going anywhere, son,” Dr. Blackstone said.

  “I don’t remember being charged or Mirandized.” I stared out the window. If I agreed with Ts’ao’s tactical assumptions—which I had no reason not to—when our opposition was ready to assault the house, the winds would drop to let the attackers in.

  “It’s not safe by the window,” Blackstone said. “You need to come back to the interview room.”

  “So what do you do for the CIA?” I asked him, staying by the window.

  Blackstone stayed silent.

  “You don’t strike me as a field agent. You’re more an analyst type, right? Must be quite a legal Gordian knot to have you guys working on Ragnan when it’s supposedly part of the U.S.”

  Blackstone grunted.

  “That’s why you’re with the FBI, isn’t it? Because you don’t really have jurisdiction here—you need them to make it all neat and legal.”

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  What I was doing was babbling at Blackstone while I tried to engineer my escape. The problem was how many people we’d have to deal with in the attack. Would they have enough to hit every opening? Would they have snipers?

  I was betting that the attack would be limited. The bastards had a lot of magical resources at their disposal, but I doubted that they had a lot of spare warm bodies. They didn’t have enough to flank me after the meeting with Cutler, they probably didn’t now. I suspected that was the reason for the windstorm. They had to pin us all down, because they had limited numbers to devote to the attack itself.

  That probably meant snipers.

  I had studied the window and saw all the protective charms were attached to the storm window. That meant I could slide the inner window open without breaking the protection.

  “Jesus, Maxwell—”

  Blackstone wasn’t doing anything. He was an academic type, and he suffered the flaw that, if no one automatically succumbed to his authority, he didn’t quite know what to do.

  I had a plan now. It wouldn’t work until the winds dropped, but it gave me a chance.

  Blackstone finally got over the fact that I wasn’t listening to him. He grabbed my arm and said, “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Self-preservation,” I said.

  Blackstone backed up and pulled a gun on me.

  “You really want to shoot me?”

  “Don’t force me to make that decision.”

  I looked him up and down. “You’d do better to train that gun on the window.”

  “You’re coming back with—”

  The wind stopped suddenly. The sound ceased as if someone pulled a switch. Almost at the same time there was the sound of gunfire. Blackstone ducked and suddenly didn’t know where to point the gun. I ducked to one side of the window frame and looked outside. I didn’t see anyone prepping to enter this way. Good and bad. Good, because they didn’t have the manpower to cover every entrance. Bad, because that almost certainly meant that they had a sniper covering the area.

  I threw open the inner window, and heard more gunshots.

  “Christ,” Blackstone said.

  I looked back at him as the sounds of breaking glass and wood came from the front of the building. “We’ve got to get out of here,” I told him as I tried to get the storm window off its track, while exposing myself as little as possible.

  “What’re you doing?”

  The door into the bedroom was raked by a series of oblique bullet holes near the top. Splinters showered over Blackstone, and he dove over by me. He held his gun upright and divided his attention between the door and the window.

  “The charms on the window,” I said. “They’ll probably protect us until we reach cover.”

  “You don’t think—” Machine-gun fire interrupted him.


  “I can’t stop you from coming,” I said as the aluminum storm window came free of its track. “You’ve got the gun.”

  My theory was partly confirmed as the inside window was suddenly peppered with gunfire. Again, it was oblique, the sniper shooting from off to the left somewhere. I stuck the storm sideways through the opening, and the shots stopped hitting the window. I could still hear them, thudding into the wall above the window frame.

  That was all the confirmation I needed.

  “Maxwell—“

  I dove through the open window trying to simultaneously keep the charmed storm window between me and the sniper, and to present as small a target as possible. I didn’t land well. My left knee decided to remind me of what happened last night and buckled. I spilled to the ground, my bandaged hands losing their grip on the window as I plowed face first into the wound of raw earth left by the magical winds.

  The storm window fell across my back. Lucky for me, the aura of protection provided by the charms worked for a diameter of about seven feet. Bullets that should have been kill shots were plowing divots in the ground about two feet in front of my face.

  I heard Blackstone mutter an obscenity as I heard something hit the ground on the far side of me from the sniper. I felt the storm window lift up, and the sound of gunfire was much closer.

  “Get up,” Blackstone said between shots.

  I did, and saw him standing next to me, holding the storm window with his left hand, as if it was a riot shield. His gun was pointed in the general direction of the unseen sniper. He fired another shot and yelled, “Get moving!”

  Twenty-five feet to the airport fence, Blackstone moving slowly to keep from overtaking my limping lope. Every few steps, he would take a shot and mutter something like, “Fucking bullshit.”

  In front of the fence was an overgrown drainage ditch filled with a foot of black stagnant water. We took shelter in it, crouching behind our magic window.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Blackstone said. “Now what, genius?”

  “Through the fence,” I said.

  Above us a jumbo jet took off, rattling fillings and drowning out the gunshots. I backed up, down the trench, away from the sniper. I risked a look back at the not-so-safe house, but I really couldn’t see much of anything through the weeds. About ten yards down I found what I was looking for. A muddy stream fed runoff under the fence, into the ditch I was wading through. Despite the pain in my hands, I dug into the muck to clear a space under the chain-link.

  “Blackstone,” I yelled above the engines of the passing jet. I started under the fence without waiting for him. I crawled into the woods on the other side of the fence, and started running directly away from the house.

  Blackstone was on the other side of the fence, with the window and its protection, but I was running on pure panic now. The fact was every instinct was screaming at me to put as much distance between me and the gun as possible.

  The cover didn’t last long. In a few seconds the sky opened above me and I was running through knee-high grass at the end of “White’s Elephant,” the ten thousand foot runway built as one of the last grand projects of the eponymous mayor before he left office. It was long enough to accommodate nonstop flights to the Pacific rim, at a time when there wasn’t more than a single flight out of Hopkins that left the North American continent. The runway’s extra length was unused and unnecessary until the Portal graduated from natural disaster to tourist attraction.

  I ran toward the runway. The asphalt cut the air with heat ripples, and the sound of taxiing aircraft was a pressure trying to squeeze my head inside out. When I cleared the grass, my feet slid on gravel that flanked the edge of the asphalt. I fell down next to the concrete base of a runway light.

  It felt like I’d slammed into a wall. I wasn’t in great shape to begin with, and the past few days had taken their toll. When I got my breath knocked out of me, it was hard to get it back again. I rolled over, stunned, for a moment unable to do anything if the sniper decided to target me.

  It seemed an hour where nothing moved. The thrum of jet engines so loud it wasn’t really a sound any longer, just a throbbing pressure. Above me, the sky was cloudless and just starting to purple with evening.

  Then, suddenly, Dr. Blackstone’s face appeared over me as the silver belly of a 747 slid by above. He still had the gun. He pulled me up and started dragging me toward the terminal. The sniper didn’t reappear.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I DON’T know what Blackstone flashed at airport security, but it made them very deferential, right up to providing him with a private interview room and coveralls to replace the wreck our clothes had become.

  “This is a fucking nightmare,” he told me when we were alone. “What the hell happened back there?”

  Every joint in my lower body ached, and I, for one, wasn’t feeling very conciliatory. “Someone screwed up,” I told him.

  He nodded vigorously, though the skin on his face had turned a shade just this side of purple. “Yeah, you’re a smart one, aren’t you?”

  “It doesn’t take a genius to realize that your cover was blown back there.”

  Blackstone didn’t look pleased at my assessment, but he didn’t disagree. He looked at me and shook his head. “The whole situation here’s blown. We need to get you out of the city.”

  “Hey,” I said, “wait a minute. You don’t have the authority to do that.”

  “You have no idea exactly what authority I have,” Dr. Blackstone said. “I’m giving you a choice. Gracefully accompany me on a flight to Washington, or go there in handcuffs.”

  I got up. “You can’t just kidnap American citizens.”

  “You’d be amazed at what one executive order can do.”

  Blackstone escorted me out into the terminal. I was good, and therefore didn’t rate the handcuffs. However, the fact that I didn’t try to ditch him and lose myself in the crowd had more to do with the idea that there were some very powerful people out there ready to do me physical harm than with any sense of cooperation.

  While we walked down the terminal, Blackstone pulled out his cell phone, which had survived the mess. After a few moments of trying to get it to connect, he grimaced and closed it.

  “Didn’t get a Cleveland model?” I asked.

  He muttered some obscenity and moved us toward a pay-phone. “You have no idea how sick I am of this town.”

  I looked at the phone, then at him, and said, “Do I rate a phone call?”

  Blackstone sighed. “Calling your lawyer?”

  “My daughter.”

  For once I saw the starch in his expression soften a little. I guess there was a human being in their after all. “Okay, I’ll give you five minutes.” He pulled out a credit card. “You’re going to use a secure account. And I’m standing right next to you. You don’t say where you are. You don’t mention anyone’s name. You don’t say where we are going—”

  I picked up the receiver and took the card. “And I don’t mention the safe house, etc., etc.” I used the card to dial California. It looked like a regular long-distance calling card, but there were a lot more clicks and whirs and electronic noise than seemed usual.

  Hell, it was a government account, there was probably a recording being made in the NSA’s basement for every call made with this account.

  With Blackstone hanging over my shoulder I heard the phone on the other end pick up. “Hello?”

  “Sarah?”

  My daughter sounded surprised. “Daddy?”

  “Yeah, honey.”

  “What’s happening? You’re all over the news. Are you hurt? What happened? Are you all right?”

  Oh, shit. For some reason I was hoping the whole mess with Cutler was just going to be a local story. Silly me.

  “I’m all right—”

  In the background I heard a very pissed voice say, “Is that your father?”

  Better and better.

  There was a muffled commotion and the phone rattled as it dropped
on the floor. I was suffering a pang of severe guilt that this was the first moment after the mess started that I’d thought of calling my expatriate family.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Kline?”

  “Margaret, it’s all right. There’s just a little jurisdictional mix-up.”

  “Mix-up? The anchor on CNN said you’re wanted in questioning for a murder.”

  “It’s a misunderstanding. I didn’t do it—”

  “Christ, I know that. Why the hell are there cops looking for you, then?”

  “It’s jurisdiction. I’m cooperating with—” Blackstone placed his hands on the phone, ready to hang the thing up. “—the cops,” I finished. Blackstone moved his hand away. “They’re just not local. Cutler was dealing with dirty cops in the city here, and I didn’t want those people involved.”

  “Why’s CNN saying you’re a fugitive?”

  “The local cops don’t know I’m working with another law enforcement agency.” I looked at Blackstone, and when he didn’t appear concerned, I went on. “They might not know until charges are filed.”

  I heard Margaret sigh. “Are you all right?”

  I glanced at my hands but decided not to mention it. “I’m fine. I’m safe.”

  “You said it was getting better.”

  “This doesn’t have anything to do with magic,” I lied. “Dirty cops, this could’ve happened if I was working in San Francisco.”

  “Then why don’t you?”

  “Margaret—”

  “If you can do the same work here, why don’t you move closer to your daughter?”

  “Can you put Sarah back on the line?”

  There was a rustling, then a voice that said, “Dad?”

  “Yeah, honey.”

  “You’re not in bad trouble, are you?”

  “Not really,” I lied again. “Your mom will explain it to you. I’m fine. CNN just doesn’t have the whole story yet.”

  Blackstone touched the watch on his wrist. Christ, I had not planned blowing my time arguing with my ex. “I’m sorry, honey, I’ve got to go.”

  “But, Dad—”

  “I love you. I’ll call back soon.”