CHAPTER FOUR
Every Breath You Take
Dennis Lee and Mercedes Lackey
…and some of us were spurred to find new resources.
Victoria Victrix Nagy felt as if someone had hit her in the head with a brick; the revelation was so sudden, and yet, so logical.
It had struck her as she closed herself up in her office and began tickling the firewalls of the various networked Echo computers to see what she could get into. Their systems, of course, were severely compromised, as were most of the computer systems of the world. Great damage had been done in cyberspace by the Thulians. Inadvertent, but nonetheless, real. Security systems were offline or damaged, there hadn’t been new security updates for most software in weeks, and Echo was actually in better shape than many.
But they were still compromised, which was why she had been able to hack into Tesla’s datebook and personal scheduler as fast as she had, a few days ago.
Vickie’s secret vice was hacking, and of course, because of her talents and training, she had a few more tools at her disposal than even the most sophisticated geek, be he white-hat or black. She was a techno-mage, which was a very rara avis indeed; she was one of only a handful that she knew of, and the only one who specialized in computers and computerized systems. A great many mages had a lot of trouble with technology, some to the point where things stopped working catastrophically around them.
Not Vickie. She could do things that were not technically hacking to get in, should she need to.
And it was clear that if she put her mind to it, she could get as deep into the Echo system as she wanted right now. Or rather, as deep in as she had patience for, given the limits of her own system. Why, at this very moment, without much trouble, she could pull up the feeds for every single security camera they had, and if she worked at it, she could empty their personnel files—it would take a lot of work, though, and more storage space than she actually had. She had thought to herself that it was a pity she couldn’t do this to other people, instead of getting dragged out into the field—
And that was when it hit her. The revelation of how she could be of real use to Echo, and not end up so sick with agoraphobia and panic attacks that she couldn’t eat for days. More than that. The way she could—or so she hoped—prove to Red Saviour that she was worth trusting.
She scooted out of the Echo system, leaving herself a back door, and went shopping.
***
She was under the desk with a flashlight in her mouth and her hands full of tools when she heard Bella’s key in the lock. She knew it was Bell, because she knew the sounds of all three deadbolts on her door, and she had only left the one Bella had a key to in the locked position.
She dropped the flashlight and called out, “I’m in here!”
Bella’s footsteps marked her path to the office, then the sounds stopped at the doorway.
“Holy mother-of-pearl—”
Vickie finished making the last of her connections and emerged from beneath the desk, hair messed, nose smudged. She put the tools back where they belonged in the correct drawer in desk number four, and surveyed her new kingdom.
What had been a Spartan spare office—she had three bedrooms and she used the biggest for her writing office—with just the desk, a chair, and her admittedly very good hacking/gaming PC, now looked like something out of a TV producer’s idea of a CSI or CIA computer room. There were twelve identical flat-screen monitors, a server that would make a geek weep with desire, the kind of storage rack most big law offices would envy and four of the best multi-core computers not available on the market. They were not available, because the friend of a friend who had made them for her did not make these for money, only trading favor for favor. He was currently very happy with the favor he had gotten in return. He’d always wanted to see and verify with his own eyes real magic. Not metapowers. Real magic. Now he had. For most of his life he had lived with the haunting fear that the only thing that had made his hellish childhood bearable had been nothing more than a hallucination. Now he knew it had been real, he was not crazy, and suddenly there was a suppurating wound in his soul that could heal.
But that was another story.
“Romances must pay well,” Bella said dryly.
Vickie shrugged. “Well enough. When you never leave the house, there’s not a lot to spend money on.” She sat down in the brand new zero-gravity chair. Since she was likely going to be in this thing for long stretches at a time, she had gotten the best. She put on the feather-light Echo-tech headset and microphone, took a deep breath, and hit the switch.
All twelve monitors came to life, and the room filled with the hum of computer equipment coming online and testing itself.
Quickly. Very quickly.
The plain blue screens began to switch to other things as her systems booted up, but right now, there was only one picture she wanted to see. Her fingers flew over the keyboard as she used her back door into the Echo systems. She got to the sys-admin screen, which asked for a password. Now she moved her right hand to the Ouija-board planchette, next to the keyboard, mentally detached her hand from her own control, triggered the spell, and picked out the word with her left hand as her right spelled it out. Techno-magecraft. The system “knew” which password it “wanted.” The screen image “knew” which password worked, as a combination of letters and numbers was the one most often tried. The one most often tried would be the right one, because the ones that failed, due to mistyping or other hacking attempts, would not be tried again, or at least not with the frequency that the correct one was. Her spell linked her to the screen image, to the system behind the screen image, and let her hand pick out the right sequence on the Ouija board. This was the Law of Contamination at work; it would be even faster if she had some personal object belonging to the sys admin.
As it was, it was no more than a minute. And she was in.
As Bella watched in utter fascination, Vickie worked her way through directories and subsystems until she found the one she wanted—the feed to Alex Tesla’s desktop. Once again, the planchette gave her the password, and she was in. This time it was faster; she had Alex’s hair.
And she took his computer over.
A few keystrokes, and his camera was activated. A few more, and so was hers. He stared at her—or rather at his monitor, with startled eyes. In the monitor to the right of the central one, Vickie’s solemn face appeared, a reflection of what he was seeing.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Tesla,” she said, and smiled. Behind her, Bella stifled a chuckle as he jumped.
“Who—who the hell are you?” he asked hoarsely. “And what are you doing in my computer?”
“My name is Victoria Victrix Nagy, and I am one of your Echo Ops,” she replied, keying up her own file and causing it to appear in a new window in the bottom left of his screen, “as you can see there. That’s my file. You met me with Red Saviour and Belladonna Blue in your office a few days ago. I was the one with all the papers and the information.”
Strange. Now that she was here, physically here in her safe place, the place where she was in control, she felt as assured, as cocky even, as her old long-ago self had been. Small wonder he hadn’t recognized her. “As to what I am doing—I am giving you a little demonstration. Not just of how I can get into the Echo computers, but how I can get into a great many other places as well. Name a place. Any place.”
“Uh—New Orleans. Cafe du Monde.”
Her fingers flew. A new window opened, while one of the left-hand monitors came to life. In the new window, a grainy black and white feed of the Cafe du Monde appeared from an odd angle. “Traffic cam at the stoplight,” she said, as the same feed appeared in her new monitor. Then the scene changed to directly across the street from the famous home of beignets. “Security cam in the ATM across the street.” Last of all, a view from inside the cafe, partly blocked by a large young man frowning at something. “Camera in the laptop of Daniel Soleil, a stockbroker, currently on his lunch break and using the wifi hotspot. Silly man, doesn’t even have a firewall. I’ll show you what he’s surfing if you like—”
“No, no!” Tesla exclaimed, and she slid out of Daniel’s PC as easily as a fish swimming through a kelp bed. “That’s fine.” He took a deep and visible breath. “You’re one of my people, which means you’ve passed a lot of rigorous security checks. I realize that especially at the moment the Echo systems aren’t as secure as we’d like. Is that what you’re trying to prove to me? Or is it something else you want? Did you want to be moved to the computer systems group? Why are you showing me this?”
“What I want…” She hesitated a moment. “Let’s take the last question first. I am showing you this to prove to you that I can do what I say I can. And what I want—” She gazed solemnly into her own camera. “What I want is to be Echo’s all-seeing eye for select teams, not the ones patrolling or handling calls, but the ones doing special ops or covert work. Your guardian angel. Your invisible guardian angel.” She managed something that was not quite a laugh, but would pass for one. “I can be with your chosen field team, assisting them, feeding them information, warnings, accesses—”
He nodded. “Like something out of a spy movie.”
“A lot like that,” she replied. “Sometimes I will even be able to disable alarms and unlock doors remotely or run distractions. This isn’t just computer hacking, Mr. Tesla. This is magic-based computer hacking. There isn’t anyone in your organization who can do this. I want to be a full and valuable Op, but I also want to make you never ask me to leave my house again.” She took a deep breath. “What I want, sir, is nothing more, and nothing less. Now, give me a team. Give me a test.”
***
In the monitor, Bulwark tried on his headset. Djinni had already gone somewhere out of sight to remove the red wrappings that swathed his head, neck, and shoulders and put the headset on underneath. “This is rather melodramatic, isn’t it?” he asked.
“I can cue the Mission Impossible theme if you want melodrama,” Vickie replied. Bulwark was looking into the security cam of what was laughingly called the “briefing room” on the Echo campus—laughingly, because, like just about everything else there at the moment, the room was in a portable office building trucked to the site. “How comfortable is that?”
“Very,” Bulwark replied, which was pretty much as Vickie expected. The Echo-tech headsets were practically invisible. They should be comfortable. They were what some of the higher level Ops had used in the pre-Invasion days on their crime-fighting sessions. “I’ve never needed to use one of these before.”
“Is this thing on?” Djinni did not appear in the monitor, but Vickie hadn’t expected him to.
“As soon as you put it on, yeah,” she replied. “Here’s the fast tour, full disclosure, Djinni. You’re on an Echo-tech comm unit, one each. It’s powered by you; uses your body heat. I can’t actually see you unless you are in view of a camera I can tap. I can’t see what you’re looking at unless you also wear the minicamera that goes with the headset. Yes, it has something like a GPS so you can be tracked with it. That’s so I know where you are so I can scout for you, by using security cams in whatever area you’re in. Right now you’re on an open feed, so you can hear and be heard by the whole team. You can elect to talk only to your team leader, and you and I can also talk privately.”
She knew where he was going to go with that before he opened his mouth. “So, does that mean you wanna talk dirty to me, Victrix?”
She was in her safe place, and it wasn’t the fear-paralyzed neurotic that answered him. “That’d be five cents a word, and my agent would get fifteen percent, Djinni. I don’t think you can afford my rates.”
Bulwark’s mouth twitched and his eyebrows arched. While he took a moment to be amused, Vickie switched to private mode on the Djinni’s pickup. “I know what’s going through your head. It runs on your body heat and the kinetic energy generated by movement. Do the math. You can shut it off just by taking it off, or making it cold, or just doing your shifter thing and giving it no heat. But remember if you shut it off, that means not only won’t we know where you are, it means I can’t help you. This isn’t another control thing. I just want to be your eyes in the sky.”
Before Bulwark could notice or Djinni respond, she switched back to open channel. “Most of Echo isn’t going to need this system, only the people going covert.” She wasn’t entirely certain why she had told Djinni how he could disable his system. Maybe it was honesty. Maybe it was because she knew from his new Echo file how much he hated having a leash on him. If he saw it as a lifeline rather than a leash, if he was in control of it, maybe he’d be less inclined to dump it. “Which would be you, obviously.”
Djinni still wasn’t going to like this, but he would probably put up with it…she hoped.
Bulwark’s mouth twitched again. “Maybe you ought to cue up the Mission: Impossible theme then.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that, Bull,” Djinni drawled, in a tone of voice that practically promised trouble. “I think the first thing we should do is take in a little entertainment.”
***
Djinni and Bulwark settled into the cramped and primitive passenger seats of the Echo cargocraft; the sight of those skeletal contraptions in Bull’s headcam made Vickie’s back ache with sympathy. As they were strapping their gear down and themselves in, she gave in to a whim.
“Welcome to Echo Atlantic City Flight Two-Eleven,” she said, in her best stewardess voice. “Please stow your carryons under the seat or whatever looks most like an overhead bin. There is no meal or beverage service, but feel free to scavenge for whatever crumbs or dropped items might have been left by the previous passengers. Your inflight entertainment will be me. In the event of an emergency, figure out where is a good place for an exit, because that’s where you’ll be putting one. In the event of a water landing, this thing floats about as well as a boat flies. If the cabin depressurizes, it will be important to know how long you can hold your breath, because it will take the pilot ninety-three seconds to drop to breathable altitude. If the passenger next to you is a child or acting like one, feel free to cold-cock him. At the conclusion of the flight, please stow your flight attendant in the upright and locked position. Thank you for flying Echo Airlines.”
After a moment of surprise, Bulwark grunted what passed for a laugh and even Djinni unbent enough to make a sound that might have been a chuckle.
“I meant that about the inflight entertainment,” she added. “You two got any preferences, musicwise?”
“Doubt you’ve got it,” Djinni grunted. Victoria smiled to herself and gazed fondly at the multiterabyte storage stack that was music only. “Try me,” she challenged him.
“Apoptygma Berzerk,” he said. Smugly.
Stump the DJ, hmm? She cued up “Welcome to Earth” and sat back. In the window that showed Djinni’s headcam, she could see Bulwark’s face. He looked pained. She switched the feed to Djinni’s personal freq, and cued up Miriam Stockley for Bulwark. His eyes registered surprise, then amusement. He closed them, and settled back in the dubious “comfort” of the seat.
“This might not suck,” was all Djinni said. The rest of the flight passed in silence from both of them.
The target was in Atlantic City, and—as was to be expected, considering that this was a petty criminal—the target was not in a nice part of Atlantic City. Vickie ignored the buttonhole cams for the most part, as Djinni and Bulwark took their rented beater past the new casinos and the Triumph Tower and all the rest of the frenetic glitz, tracking them by the innumerable security cams, getting used to switching from cam view to cam view. She had an ace in the hole if she lost them: two more of the elaborately folded spell-packets plugged in via USB cables.
The “bit of Bulwark” had been easy; she asked for a couple of hairs, told him why, and he obligingly gave them to her.
Djinni, however, was not someone she wanted to approach for a “sample” and he was surprisingly careful. She had resorted, at last, to Jenson, Bulwark’s superior. Jenson didn’t like Djinni. Jenson would do everything he covertly could to put Djinni back behind bars. And Jenson didn’t know her from Adam. So using her old FBI credentials, she’d gotten Jenson to get her something of Djinni’s when he and Bulwark were out on a recruitment. Something personal. And what Jenson had brought her were books.
The Count of Monte Cristo, and Franny and Zooey. The former was marked with margin notes in a tiny, precise script; both were paperbacks so often read that the covers were soft. She photographed the notes and took tiny scrapings from the covers of both, then had Jenson return them to their proper places. She hadn’t studied the notes, but the scrapings and one of the note pages were in Djinni’s packet.
It wasn’t only that she wanted an arcane way to track them, it was that she couldn’t work actual magic for them at that far a distance without a magical connection to them.
The books themselves, the fact that they were something he read over and over, said a lot about the man. Add to that, the notes—she was not sure she wanted to know that much about him.
Well, right now, as they drove deeper into the seedier part of Atlantic City, it was moot. “Where exactly are we going?” Bulwark asked, as Djinni finally parked the car in front of a boarded-up storefront.
“I told ya, we’re gonna take in a little entertainment.” The glee in Djinni’s voice made Vickie close her eyes and count to ten. He was going to try to do something to punish her for this. Never mind that what she was doing would be useful and might even be life-saving—
“You have bogeys at your eight o’clock,” she said softly, as the security cam in the parking lot showed her movement behind them. She zoomed and clarified the image as much as she could. “Three, males, large, weapons. I see pipe and a baseball ba—”
Djinni moved. Fast. He was beside the three before they could blink. “Hello boys,” he said, genially. “Out for a stroll?”
The widest of the three cursed and started to swing; the tallest grabbed the pipe before it had moved more than a few inches. “Yeah, bro. A stroll. Fresh air, good for ya.”
Djinni nodded. “So they tell me. Well, you boys keep on strolling.”
Red turned his back to them and moved away, whistling. The thug with the bat made a gesture to follow, but the tallest held him back, shaking his head. Pipe boy cursed and turned away and the others followed. Djinni didn’t look back and favored Bull with a chuckle as they continued across the lot.
“Preventative action?” Bulwark asked dryly, as Vickie’s sophisticated sound analysis picked out most of what the would-be muggers were saying. The first continued to swear but the second silenced him. “—was a meta, you idjit. You wanta mix it up with a meta?”
“Something like that.” Djinni was unwrapping his face. “There. Anything showing?”
In Bulwark’s camera view, Djinni was wearing a face she hadn’t seen before. It might have been pleasant, if it hadn’t been marred by a couple of scars. He evidently wasn’t going to bother with a hairpiece this time. She looked for the throat mike, the wire for the earpiece, and realized with a shock he’d grown skin over them both to conceal them. Oh, smart. “No, nothing,” she replied. “Not even a lump.”
“Good.” Oh, she didn’t like that grin. “All right, Jarhead. Let’s go take in the nightlife.”
The seedy-looking bar he was heading for was the only establishment showing any signs of life on this street. She already had a sinking feeling, and when the sign managed to flicker on long enough for her to read gentleman’s club, she knew what he was planning to do to try to shock her.
She shook her head as they paid the cover charge and passed the bouncer, emerging into a barely lit room throbbing with pounding music. There was a runway-type stage with three poles; a very limber girl with patently artificial enhancements was twined inelegantly around one of them. Djinni sat down at a table near the stage, right in front of the middle pole, and ordered a beer. Bulwark did the same.
“I hope that girl didn’t pay too much for those bazookas,” she said dryly in their ears. “In ten years they’re going to be hard as rocks and she can rent them out as paperweights.”
Vickie was doing her job; seeing if the club security cams were running on wireless. They were; within moments, she had them all. “Eight wireless cams,” she said. “Four in the main stage, one in each of two private rooms, one in the office and one in the dressing room. In the main stage area you have one in each corner. They have fish-eye lenses, so there’s not a lot of blind spots. There’s two people in the office, none in the private rooms and four more girls in the dressing room. Besides the bouncer at the door, there’s another one down behind the DJ, and the bartender has a sawed-off at each end of the bar.”
Djinni gave the slightest of nods to show he’d heard.
The girl with the artificial chest untangled herself from the pole. “Let’s give it up for Brandy!” said the DJ, with staged enthusiasm, to a spattering of bored applause. “And let’s hear it for Kara Kane!”
The replacement was met with some real response; it was easy to see why. If her boobs had been pumped, it had been by someone who knew what he was doing. She was long-legged and long-haired and looked like a head cheerleader that you just knew was as active under the bleachers as in front of them. She was also a much better dancer than Brandy, who was making the rounds of the tables until she found someone who would “buy her a drink.”
The new girl was concentrating on her dancing, right up until she switched poles to the one that Djinni had parked in front of. As she finished her first swing around it, she got a good look at him. Her eyes widened. In recognition?
If so, Djinni gave no sign, other than tucking some bills in her g-string. And she didn’t linger at “their” pole, but she didn’t hurry the routine up, either.
But when her place had been taken by a woman who looked and danced as if she ate men alive on toast, Kara Kane managed to sidle her way to Djinni’s table. She meandered through the crowd, giving her clients devastating and winsome looks full of promise. Seemingly on a whim, she stopped by Red and Bull.
“Hey, handsome,” she purred breathlessly, planting one hip on the table and bending over so that her chest was just about eye level. “Buy a girl a drink?”
“Actually my friend and I were lookin’ for a private dance, darlin’,” Djinni drawled before Bulwark could say anything. “Think that can be arranged?”
“You just follow me,” she replied.
What the hell? Vickie thought.
“Djinni—” growled Bulwark over the channel. “Just what do you think you’re doing?”
“Come on, Jarhead,” Djinni said genially, slapping Bulwark on the shoulder and propelling him forward into the private room. “Time for you to loosen up and have some fun.”
Kara closed the door; in a remarkably short period of time, Djinni was in a chair, she was grinding her pelvis into his lap and her natural endowments were filling the screen in Djinni’s button cam.
“Djinni, what the hell is going—” Vickie kept her voice as even as possible.
“Say hello to Miss Nagy, Kara,” Djinni said in a throaty whisper. “Right now she’s got the best seat in the house.”
Vickie was aghast. “Jesus Cluny Frog!” she sputtered. “You just want to go out and announce to everyone that you’re wired?”
Djinni chuckled. “Just Kara. Or, actually, Ms. Barbara Kronstein, to use something besides her stage name. This is our target, Victrix.”
“Red? This is you, right?” The girl’s tone of desperation was at complete odds with the way she was “dancing.” “Red, I can’t believe you just showed up; it’s like you knew I needed help! Please, you’ve got to get me out of here—”
Bulwark interrupted. “Victrix. Audio?”
She’d already checked. These guys were cheap. “Nothing. No audio monitor in this room. But tell her to keep dancing, the camera is hot and the guys in the back are watching.”
“Eyes in the sky, darlin’, keep making the customer happy. Tell me what’s going on, and give ’em a show. Bull, pull out that stack of bills. As long as there’s money on the table, they’ll leave us alone.”
The girl pulled her long hair up on top of her head and shimmied. Vickie opted to watch the other cam feeds. “There’s this creepy guy.” Kara’s voice was strained. “He bought into the club about six weeks ago, right after the Invasion when no one was coming in and Jimmy really needed the money. Now he’s here all the time, and Red—” there was an edge of panic in her voice “—Red, I think he knows about me! He keeps dropping hints about my talent, and how he knows a better use for it, it’s not the regular kind of come-on!”
“Blacksnake?” Bulwark asked, alarmed.
“This isn’t their approach, they just come in and make a direct offer,” Djinni replied, sounding remarkably detached for a man with a pair of mammaries a centimeter from his nose. “Besides, I know their recruiter.”
“Who, then?”
Kara leaned back and did a belly-dancer-type undulation. “He kind of slipped once. He sounded German.”
“—oh, hell no—” Vic muttered.
“What is it you actually do, miss?” Bulwark asked carefully.
“That’s what I don’t understand,” she said plaintively, as she somehow did a fast reverse on Djinni’s lap and the mammaries changed places with a shapely derriere. “It’s nothing—weapony. I just turn sound into light.”
“Oh, hell no,” Vickie said again, aloud this time, aghast. “A pocket amplifier—”
“Or a convenient source of a lot of sound,” Bulwark agreed, grimly. “And you have a living flashbang.”
At just that moment, on one of the main stage cameras, Vickie caught sight of something that set all her internal alarms ringing. A man had just come in, and the bouncer was showing him deference. Quickly she froze a half-dozen frames as he turned, and ran them through her facial-recognition program. The answer set her nerves on fire.
“Oh, bloody hell, no! Bull, Djinni, get out of there now,” she snarled, fingers flying over the keyboard to look for exits. “Your girl’s mystery date is out in the main stage area and I am pretty sure it’s Doppelgaenger, ’cause whoever he is, he’s wearing Doc Bootstrap’s face.”
Bulwark was quicker at remembering what kind of an asset she was than Djinni. “Exits?”
“Checking.” She called up the plans from the last Health and Safety inspection. And meanwhile she started futzing the feed on the cameras—all of them, to put suspicion off for a few more precious moments. She told the wireless signal to drift; on her monitors she could see the feed start to get static. “Out the front, the way you came. Both bathrooms have a window big enough to squeeze through if you break it, but take the women’s if you have a choice; the girls have their own and it’s likely to be empty. Fire exit directly left as you exit the room. Roof access—pop the panel in the center of the room you’re in, it’s a hard ceiling, crawl ten feet south and there’s a hatch.”
“Don’t leave me!” Kara begged. She froze on Djinni’s lap.
“Tell her to keep dancing. I’m screwing with their feed but it’ll take a minute.”
“Keep dancing, darlin’, we’re working on something.”
In the office camera feed—which was, of course, also starting to snow out—she could see one of the men hitting his security monitor with the flat of his hand.
“You can’t take the chance that Doppelgaenger will recognize you, Bull,” Djinni was saying.
The monitor feeds went to pure static.
“If you’re gonna go, go now!” she urged. “The cams are down, but if they’re smart, they’ll have it fixed in a second. The fire exit’s a mechanical alarm, I can’t shut it off.”
“Split up?” suggested Bulwark. “You take the girl, I’ll make the noise.”
Djinni nodded. “Roof. You get the car if you can. See you back at the airport.”
Bulwark headed for the bathrooms. Djinni pushed Kara off his lap and climbed onto the chair. The buttonhole cam got confused, then dark, then there was dim light as Djinni popped the roof hatch. Bulwark’s cam was more straightforward; in through the door marked “Dames,” he did something and an invisible force punched the window, frame and all, out of the wall. Then he was out and running down the dark alley, heading for the parking lot and the car.
Djinni wasn’t wasting time with finesse or niceties. He sprinted to the edge of the roof, tossed the girl down into a dumpster, followed her, tossed her over the side to the ground and tumbled out himself. Djinni glanced down, noted Barbara’s elaborate stiletto heels with more straps than a racing harness holding them to her feet. He grunted, threw her over his shoulder and sprinted down the alley.
The monitors in the club all came back to life. The men in the office were just now realizing that the men and the girl were gone from the room. Doppelgaenger was shoving his way towards the back; he must have heard Bulwark punching out the window.
“You’re going to get pursuit in a few seconds,” she warned. Meanwhile she was calling up everything she could for both men. “Bulwark, your car’s been ’jacked. City bus is approaching the lot, get on it. They’ll never look for you there.”
In Bulwark’s cam, she could see the bus; no one would think twice about a man running to catch it. The driver must have had a modicum of heart; he stopped and waited. Bull got on, dropped change into the fare box until it beeped and threw himself into the nearest seat. The bus pulled out. Vickie switched her attention to Djinni.
“Next right,” she said, just as the monitor showed Doppelgaenger in the private room. He looked up, his face contorted in a snarl. He leapt like a cat, presumably caught the edge of the open trap, and pulled himself out of sight. “Left. Doppelgaenger is on your tail.” She tried to remember what the file said on Doppelgaenger. From what she’d seen, he was fast. Very fast. No way of telling if he had some enhanced-senses way of tracking Djinni but best to assume he could. Above all, he was ruthless, cold and brutally efficient and if he caught them…“Left again.”
She had them on the map; with a sudden burst of inspiration, she called up the utilities map and layered it underneath. Yes! There—
“Left and left again.”
“Where’re you—”
“Stop!”
Vickie grabbed Djinni’s packet to connect herself and him, gathered power—
—and the earth opened beneath his feet and swallowed Red and the girl whole.
***
Djinni had wrapped the girl in his coat; it didn’t cover much, but it was better than just a g-string in the storm sewer that Vickie had dumped them into. He was muttering under his breath.
Vickie was exhausted. It took a lot of power to operate at that much of a distance. That power had to come from somewhere; in this case, since she’d had no time to prepare, it had come from her.
“Next right,” she said. “Then go up the ladder. The manhole is in the alley behind the Triumph Tower. Bulwark is waiting right at it with a car.”
She hadn’t just dumped them the twenty feet down into the sewer; she’d made sure to give them a ramp. And it was a storm sewer, not a sewage outlet…
She’d closed the earth up after them, too. Fifteen feet of dirt should be enough to confuse even the keenest of meta-senses. And she’d been watching their trail in aboveground cams the whole way; there’d been no sign of Doppelgaenger. Bulwark had been able to get another car without a lot of trouble, and she’d given him directions to the nearest place she could bring Djinni and the girl out.
“We’re here, Bull.”
Bulwark pried up the manhole cover.
Djinni helped the girl start up the ladder, then stopped. “Private mode,” he growled.
Too tired to question or argue, she switched.
“That was magic,” he said, in a very flat tone of voice.
“Yes.” She matched his tone.
The string of curses that followed left her wilting in her chair. “If you ever do something like that to me again…” He paused, then left the sentence unfinished.
“You coming, or sightseeing?” Bulwark called down the hole.
Without another word, Djinni climbed up.
He didn’t say another word to Vickie after that. Not when Kara (or Barbara) thanked her, not when Bulwark said in a warm tone of congratulations, “Good work, Operative Victrix,” not when she cued up more music for him for the return trip. He talked to the girl, he even talked to Bulwark, but he ignored Vic’s presence as if she didn’t exist. Just after touchdown, he got up and moved out of sight. When he came back out, he was wearing his wrappings, and he had the throat mike and earpiece in his hand. He dropped both in Bulwark’s lap, detached the button cam from his coat, added that, and walked out.
“Terminating link now,” said Vickie. She shut the rig down, took the spell packets and filed them in a box of others, and left the room, turning off the lights.
She was too tired to get any further than the living room. Bulwark would definitely green-light this. Djinni could sit and rotate; his opinion wouldn’t count.
But now it hit her: those girls—
She sat down hard on the sofa and cried bitterly, her face in her gloved hands, crying until the gloves were soaked and her eyes were sore. Not one of those girls, could they see what she really looked like, would trade their lives for hers. The handful of people who had seen had been unable to control their revulsion. She would never again have the things that they took so much for granted that they didn’t even think about it; people looking at them with pleasure, men wanting to touch them without a second thought, or indeed, any thought at all. Sun on their bare skin. Beautiful, unmarred skin. Feeling where they were touched…
It took a tremendous effort of will, once she had stopped weeping, to get up off the sofa, to go into the dark bathroom, strip off the gloves, bathe her face in cold water, and find another pair of gloves and pull them on again. But will was what a magician was all about; regardless of what she was, she had skills that were needed.
She went back into her Overwatch room and fired everything back up again, checking the time. Not a moment too soon; she switched to an entirely different set of comm frequencies.
“Reading me, Bella?” she asked, pleased that her voice was not too hoarse.
“Five by five,” came the cheerful voice. “Video input coming online now.”
A room in CCCP HQ appeared in the live-cam monitor. A room that was, in comparison to the one she sat in, what the radio room of the Titanic was to the comm room of the average supertanker. But it was what the CCCP had, and there was her counterpart, looking frail and wide-eyed, the tall, storklike Gamayun, just now putting on a headset of her own.
“Vi menia slishite, tovarish?” Vickie asked.
The woman nodded her head, a dark forelock falling into one eye. “Slishu vas gromko e chetko, tovarish Victoria,” Gamayun replied.
“I think we’re ready to rock and roll.” Bella moved and the camera viewpoint proceeded down a hall, around a corner, and into Red Saviour’s office.
“Shto?” Saviour asked, the essence of impatience. “What silly toy you are having to show me now that Echo thinks we are needing?”
“Not a toy, and not Echo, Comrade Commissar,” Bella replied. “A little something Comrade Victrix cooked up that I’m going to demonstrate for you. Ready, Vic?”
Vickie’s gloved fingers flew over the keys of her computer. Once again, it was magic time.
***
Doppelgaenger had faith in the universe. It was a perfect machine. Things ran as they should. For everything, there was balance. Harmony. His brethren believed in contingencies and fail-safes. In strategy. They had their place in the way of things, yes. He saw the strength one could attain simply by planning ahead. But when all else failed he believed in the simple waxing and waning of order and chaos. When plans failed, when strategy couldn’t hope to predict your opponent, the universe would provide. One simply needed to look hard enough.
Take the video feed, for example. His quarry had vanished. There was no trace. Aerial support had reported no changes in the spectrum above the establishment. No one, cloaked or otherwise, had taken to flight. Where there were three, became two, then none. The ignorant security of the club had lost the first man. No matter. It was the girl who had been important. But where her and her rescuer’s footsteps went cold, so had their trail. Detailed readings of the location revealed nothing. As for the in-house surveillance logs, they had been replaced with hours of footage from the Kill Bill films.
At least those had been somewhat entertaining.
Still, all visual record of the infiltrators had been irrevocably lost.
And then, and here Doppelgaenger had to smile, the universe had stepped in. Was it chance that brought these men here last night? Had the girl gotten word out somehow? Had she sensed danger? If so, they were men on a mission. Echo men, there was little doubt. The heroes of Echo, doing their good deed. And they had been careful, oh yes. They had erased all evidence of their passing…
…save, of course, for the base, desperate actions of lesser men.
Doppelgaenger motioned, and the frightened man played the tape again. His name was Douglas. His last name didn’t matter. A regular at the Silver Corral, Douglas’ favorite pastime was sneaking in a small, portable camcorder and capturing, to be watched over and over again, his little slice of heaven. A small, sad little man, who had been tolerated because he did bring money to a club in desperate need of it. He had been caught once, and now paid hefty bribes to one of the club’s bouncers. When Doppelgaenger had expressed his displeasure that the security footage was missing, the bouncer had been quick to remember Douglas and his hobby.
Doppelgaenger watched the scene play over again. The girl, those men…they had been men of Echo, he was sure of that now. He recognized one of them. He had, in fact, studied the face and mannerisms of this Bulwark several times. It had been enough. The huge man would barely waggle his brow, much less make any sustaining expression. And the other…?
“Kindred,” Doppelgaenger whispered. He recognized the talent, having so much more of it himself. “You see it, small man? You see what this man does not do?”
Douglas stared at Djinni, and back at Doppelgaenger. He shook uncontrollably. Any word could mean his death. And probably a very painful one. He risked a glance sideways and flinched away. The remains of his wife were still twitching.
“Nn-nnnn-no—” Douglas stammered finally. “What do you mean?”
“His skin,” Doppelgaenger purred. “It doesn’t…it doesn’t breathe right.” He fixed Douglas with an encouraging smile. “Look closer; don’t you see it now?”
Douglas stared back at Djinni’s boyish grin, and looked helplessly back at his captor.
“Look closer!” Doppelgaenger roared, and smashed Douglas’ head into the television, an old-fashioned cathode ray tube. The screen exploded. Douglas screamed, jagged glass shards slicing his weak flesh, his screams becoming gurgles. His body shook a few times from the current, then fell still, smoke bellowing from the debris.
Doppelgaenger rolled his eyes.
“Wunderbar. American electronics are scheisse. Someone find me a good German television set.”
Behind him, a soldier saluted smartly, turned on his heels, and made as if to leave.
“Wait!” Doppelgaenger barked. “On second thought, we will return to base.” He reached down and picked up the blood-spattered camcorder lovingly. His fingers moved with a surgeon’s grace as he plucked out the cables.
His grin was beatific as he glided away.
“Finally, I get to play.”