Dragons & Dwarves

“I love you, too. But, Dad—”

  Blackstone hung up for me. He looked at my expression and said. “I gave you more than I was obliged to. You can talk all you want after we’ve debriefed you.”

  I stepped back and handed him the receiver. He pulled out a different card, made a call—and with the power of a government expense account—we had a pair of business class seats on the next outbound Continental flight to Dulles Airport. The plane left in two hours. He made another call after he got his flight. “It’s blown . . . Yes . . . three agents . . . I had local authorities informed about the mess . . . no, I have the subject here . . . I’m taking him in for debriefing . . . I’ve made arrangements, the flight leaves in two hours . . . Yes . . . Yes . . . I understand.”

  He hung up and started hustling us toward the gate.

  “Hey,” I said. “The rush is over, you got your flight, calm down.” He looked at me as if I’d just suggested that he consummate an unspeakable act with his mother. “We’ll have about ninety minutes before they start boarding. I haven’t eaten a thing all day, aren’t you hungry?”

  “Christ.” He looked at me as if my suggestion was singularly inappropriate, but he said, “Yes, we can get something to eat.”

  He pushed us into the first place that we passed, a McDonald’s where some mental giant had contracted someone to construct full life-size simulacrum of some of the more creepy denizens of Ronald McDonald’s world. A life-size blue-furred hump of a monster watched us with eyes that were too human.

  He sat me down at a McTable and was interrupted by an electronic beeping. He pulled out his cell phone again, listened, shook his head and cussed it as he threw it down on the lemon-yellow table. “Useless . . . Hold up your hand, Maxwell.”

  I raised my right hand as if I was about to take an oath. He slapped one end of a pair of handcuffs on me, and before I could register an objection, he had the other end attached to the back of the chair next to me. “I thought we weren’t going to resort to handcuffs.”

  “I don’t trust you, Maxwell. And right now you’re one of the few things I’ve got to salvage from this operation.” He looked back at the counter and asked, “So what do you want?”

  I ordered the generic burger-fries-and-soft-drink, just because what to eat wasn’t high on my list of things I wanted to spend time thinking about. Dr. Blackstone went to stand in line, and I made a cursory examination of the McChair, which was fiberglass and bolted to the floor. It looked possible to break the cuffs free of the chair, but not in any unobtrusive way.

  While I was contemplating the chair, Blackstone’s phone rang.

  I looked at it. A small black rectangle, slightly rounded. The Motorola logo across the top without any of the trademarks for the kind of multichannel digital encryption that made phone traffic possible around the Portal. The only thing anyone would be able to get on that phone would be a cacophony of magical interference.

  It rang again.

  The thing shouldn’t even be receiving enough of a comprehensible signal to know someone was calling it.

  A third time it rang.

  I reached out for it, a familiar feeling twisting in my gut. I raised it to my ear and activated it. I was greeted by the now familiar sound of whispering babble led by a voice that was like an old-fashioned tape player going bad.

  “—I come not to praise Caesar—”

  “Who the hell are you ?” I whispered harshly into the phone. My anonymous Shakespearean had to be a magus of some sort. I couldn’t figure anything else. How else could this guy know to call me on Blackstone’s cell phone? Not to mention that his phone number was probably unlisted, and this phone didn’t have the electronics for normal operation near the Portal anyway. Magic would be the only way my someone could make a call . . .

  The voice continued with the quote.

  “Damn it. Stop playing the enigmatic Oracle. I get your point—” This time the voice didn’t cut off, it faded into the din and the babble took over. “Who are you? What do you want?” The transmission faded into nonsense. After a few more fruitless moments, I shut the thing off and tossed it back on the table.

  Blackstone came back with our food and sat down. He still looked pissed, though now it was a pissed without a specific target. He kept looking toward the entrance and watching the crowds press by the terminal, as if he expected to be jumped.

  I didn’t blame him after the last hour or so.

  “So what do you intend to do with me?” I asked him.

  “You’re going to be debriefed.”

  “CIA?” I asked again.

  “Threat Assessment Office,” Blackstone answered.“It’s an inter-agency organization.”

  “What threats are you assessing?” I asked between bites of my hamburger.

  “What do you think?” Blackstone asked, keeping an eye on the concourse outside. “The Office was established in response to the Portal.”

  “So the federal plan to take over the Portal has spawned an entrenched bureaucracy.”

  Blackstone shook his head. “You can be glib if you want, but this is more important than a battle over local turf. Do you have any idea of the danger the Portal represents?”

  “You’ve made that point—”

  “One mage,” Blackstone said, “one person with the arcane knowledge, and access to blueprints, can manufacture a nuclear device.”

  “Is that what you’re worried about?”

  “I’ve seen studies. I’ve conducted studies. It’s possible for a mage—given enough effort—to create elemental matter. Nothing prevents their access to fissionable material.” He turned to look at me. “No tooling necessary, no weapon plants, just one man with the will and the power. Same can go for chemical and biological weapons.”

  One thing I’ll say for our government’s intelligence agencies. They have no problem coming up with nightmare scenarios. I shook my head and ate a few fries.

  Pointing one at Blackstone’s nose I said, “There’s something you’re leaving out.”

  “Yes?”

  “What exactly do I have to do with it?”

  “You know something important,” Blackstone said. “You have managed to stumble across something that this conspiracy—this magical fifth column—is willing to go to any length to prevent us from finding out.”

  “This is the conspiracy that Aloeus was part of?”

  Blackstone nodded.

  “Well, good luck, because I don’t even know what that is.”

  “It can be anything, Maxwell,” he said. “A name. Someone you’ve seen. Something that would allow us to uncover exactly what’s happening, and who is involved.”

  I shook my head. “All I have is a dead dragon, a bunch of crooked cops, and a guy named Faust.”

  Blackstone leaned forward. “And exactly what do you know about Faust?”

  Ah. This is what interested the doctor. I wouldn’t lay odds against this being one of the things that Blackstone had wanted “clarified” after my first run through in the rec room.

  “Nothing other than the elves were interested in him, and that he was a rumor that Dr. Shafran had heard about.”

  “More than a rumor.”

  “Why don’t you tell me about him.”

  Blackstone shook his head. “No, that was why I was against Agent Ts’ao lending you information. There’s no better way to contaminate the intelligence from a subject than to tell him what you already know.” He looked at me. “Not that I disagree with him entirely. If you remain as cooperative as you have been, I don’t see any reason not to answer your questions. After we debrief you.”

  I nodded. “You would like a story about all this crap, wouldn’t you?”

  “Let’s just say that it would help us if public opinion started to move in our direction.” He reached over and undid the handcuffs.“Come on, Mr. Maxwell, we have a plane to catch.”

  I hadn’t finished my food, but I didn’t see much point in arguing. So I grabbed the leftover burger to finish on the way to t
he gate. At this point I was kicking over story ideas in my head.

  We were halfway to the gate when Blackstone stopped and said, “No, you’ve got to be kidding me.”

  That brought my attention back to the here and now in the concourse. I took a bite of my hamburger and looked around to see what Blackstone was complaining about.

  It would have been hard to miss.

  Coming down the central corridor of the concourse was a line of blue uniforms, their wearers watching us with grim attention. I looked behind us, and saw another five officers approaching from the rear.

  At this point I was suffering from law enforcement overload and couldn’t produce enough adrenaline to panic. Blackstone was looking back and forth with a dumbfounded expression that was almost amusing. “What?”

  I finished my hamburger, dropped the wrapper on the floor, and slowly raised my hands and locked them behind my head. “There’s a warrant out for me, remember?” I took a few sideways steps away from Blackstone. If he did something stupid, I didn’t want to be caught in the aftermath.

  The ranks of blue converged on us from both sides. I was somewhat relieved to see that they were all run-of-the-mill Cleveland cops supplemented by airport security. No SPU officers.

  Blackstone recovered somewhat and addressed the lead cop, “What’s the meaning of this?”

  I was somewhat surprised, though only somewhat, to see that the head cop here was Commander Thomas O’Malley, looking more like the mafia hood than usual. “Doctor Roy Blackstone?”

  “Yes, I can show you my identification. I’m conducting a federal investigation here.”

  O’Malley nodded. “Uh-uh.” He didn’t look impressed.

  Blackstone reached for his ID.

  O’Malley raised his hand and shook his head. “I know, Doctor. One of Langley’s little ‘experts.’ PhD dissertation on the geopolitical implications of the Portal, worked the Cleveland desk at the CIA—Christ, don’t look so surprised. You thought the FBI was the only Agency that kept files on people?”

  “This is a matter of national security, sir. I need to take this man back to Washington D.C.”

  “I’m sure that’s the way you see it,” O’Malley said. He waved a hand and three officers converged on a sputtering Blackstone, one on each arm and the third patting him down and taking his gun.

  “You’re making a big mistake,” Blackstone shouted at O’Malley.

  “No, Dr. Blackstone,” he said. “It was a mistake when an academic CIA desk jockey decided he wanted to play James Bond in my city.” He took Blackstone’s gun from the officer who was patting him down.

  “When word of this gets to Washington—”

  “You’ll probably be put on six months unpaid administrative leave,” O’Malley finished. He looked at Blackstone and shook his head. “Shall I draw you a map? There’s a burning ranch at the end of a runway. There’re at least two bodies. A lot of gunfire. Then we have you, a federal employee with no police powers, aiding and abetting a suspect wanted for questioning in a felony investigation, taking him on a flight out of state.”

  “You can’t—”

  “Did I say that anything you say can be used against you?”

  Blackstone shut up.

  O’Malley turned to look at me. “Maxwell?”

  “O’Malley,” I replied.

  “Not the smartest thing you’ve ever done.”

  “I didn’t have much choice.” I shrugged, my hands still locked behind my head. “Besides, is there a law against poor judgment?”

  O’Malley shook his head. “We don’t have prisons that big. But obstruction of justice might do for a start. Leaving the scene. Failure to report.”

  “You’re saying I should invest in a lawyer?”

  “Maybe in some common sense.”

  The majority of the officers started leading Blackstone away, one of them finishing the litany of rights that O’Malley had started. I watched him go and looked at O’Malley. “So you knew about him?”

  O’Malley looked back in Blackstone’s direction. “The Threat Assessment Office? Yes. As if we could keep the Feds from rooting around in our backyard.” He turned back and looked at me. “And get your hands down, will you? We need to go downtown. Some people want to see you.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  O’MALLEY rode in the back of an unmarked squad car with me as we took the freeway downtown. They didn’t cuff me, and looking at O’Malley I had trouble reading if he was going to charge me or not.

  He surprised me by saying, once we were underway, “Damn shame you got involved in this, Maxwell.”

  “My job, O’Malley.”

  “Is it?” he asked. He was gazing out the window at the sound barriers sliding by. “You stepped into a hornet’s nest, my friend.”

  “Did I?” I decided to throw my cards on the table since I didn’t seem to have anything to lose. “Was it investigating Aloeus’ death, or was it when your SPU elves decided to do some extracurricular leg-work? Or maybe it was set up with Bone Daddy? Since when do SPU units do traffic stops?”

  O’Malley shook his head. “I suppose you have an answer already?”

  “I know something corrupt is going on in the Special Paranormal Unit. I know that Aloeus was prominent in the decisions that Rayburn and company made about the Portal—with a quid pro quo that, in exchange for disaster assistance, some national Guard troops did some social engineering on the other side. I know the federal government is worried about influence across the Portal, stopping just short of accusing this city of harboring a fifth column bent on the overthrow of the U. S. government . . .”

  O’Malley was shaking his head. “The Feds are a sideshow. Have been since the Portal opened.” He looked across at me, and I noticed, for the first time, that he hadn’t shaved and looked as if he hadn’t slept in days. In short, he looked like I felt. “Maxwell, you’re smart, and I think you realize this; you have no real idea what’s going on here.”

  “Care to enlighten me?”

  He shook his head. “That isn’t my job.”

  We drove to Lakeside, but not toward the Justice Center as I expected. Instead, we went half a block farther, and pulled into the underground parking garage of City Hall itself. I could almost sense the tension, as if some sort of static energy had rubbed off from the nearby Portal.

  The car rolled down three levels underground, past ranks of city vehicles, then down a narrow one-way concrete ramp that read, “Authorized Vehicles Only.” I saw expensive-looking digital cameras, as well as crystal wards set into the concrete walls.

  The car drove another level down and into a nearly empty parking lot. The only light was a flickering fluorescent hanging roughly in the center of the space. Beneath the light, incongruously, sat a boardroom-sized table with about twelve executive leather chairs.

  The driver shut off the engine, and the lock on my handleless door popped open. The driver got out and opened the door for O’Malley, who walked around and opened the door for me. I stepped out and shivered. This place was about ten degrees colder than the day outside. The only sound in the whole space was the sound of an electric motor lowering a rolling metal barrier across the ramp we’d just driven down. It finished with the echoing clatter of metal locking home.

  “Welcome to the War Room, Maxwell,” O’Malley said.

  I had heard the rumors that Rayburn had established some ultra-secure meeting place in the early days of the Portal, back when the Feds were a military threat, not just a political one. I had taken the rumors, as had every one else I knew, as equal parts fact and exaggeration. Now I looked around at the space and decided that I, and the people I knew, probably lacked sufficient imagination.

  I could barely see the near walls in the light, but what I saw was covered in small inscriptions. Mystic text no larger than the type on your average printed page. The floor, too, was covered with inscriptions. Concentric rings centered on the conference table. Unlike Bone Daddy’s magic circles, these words were permanentl
y inset in the concrete, each symbol cast in gold, silver, or some semiprecious stone. The feeling in this place was like standing next to the main transformer at a nuclear power plant. The hair on my arms wanted to stand on end.

  O’Malley walked me toward the center of the room. I kept flashing back to a memory of Bone Daddy warning me, “The mojo’s been building here a couple hours. You break the pattern, boy, and it’ll be like someone shoved a stick of dynamite up your ass.”

  I wondered how long the mojo had been building up in this room. Fortunately, someone would need a jackhammer to break the pattern.

  O’Malley sat me down in one of the chairs at one end of the long table. He backed away, out of the light. My dark vision was shot now, and all I could really see was the conference table, the chairs, and the long fluorescent tubes above me. I heard a car door slam, and an engine start—

  I turned and yelled, “Hey!” into the darkness.

  I heard the car drive away, and the ratting metallic sound of another door closing.

  For a few long moments I was left alone here, wondering exactly what the hell I was supposed to do. I squinted out at the darkness, trying to make out any sense of movement. The only sound now, the electric hum of the fluorescents. The air was heavy, cold, and carried the humid smell of mildew—perfect atmosphere for a dungeon.

  Then there was the sound of a large electric motor, the sound so sudden in the enclosed space that I jumped. Elevator, I thought. I listened to its descent for what seemed an inordinately long time. Then the motor stopped and I heard the doors slide back. I also saw a narrow rectangle of light slowly open on the far wall across the conference table from me. The space revealed was huge, taller than the room I was in, and wide enough to take two cars abreast. All similarly embellished to the room I sat in.

  Three human figures were dwarfed in the revealed space, and the capacity of the elevator made me wonder if they ever met dragons in this room.

  The trio exited the elevator, and due to the ill lighting and misleading cues to scale, it wasn’t until they entered the domain of the fluorescent light that I saw for sure who they were.