Death and Conspiracy

by Seeley James

  At the far end of the hangar, Miguel pretended to work on something. Tania kept a low profile on the other side. A real executive jet service representative from the Seville operations center greeted me. Two others put the luggage in the cargo hold.

  Grizzly-Caleb had rented a car and driven across Spain in time to join us. I was dying to get a few words with my team. Arrianne had confirmed her destination as London, but with her right-hand man now tagging along a step behind Arrianne, I couldn’t risk it. He had seen them both on the last outing when they appeared to be skydiving outfitters.

  I signed off on the services performed while Caleb watched over one shoulder and Arrianne over the other. I stopped just before signing and looked at one, then the other. They weren’t intimidated. I signed.

  Arrianne went aboard first. I followed. Caleb crowded behind me. I leaned into the cockpit to say hello to the crew. With any luck, I could relay instructions to get London cops to meet us on landing.

  Arrianne craned around me to get a look at the pilots while her team of eleven filed into the back.

  In the tight confines, I elbowed her. “Oh, sorry. I didn’t see you there.”

  “Can I have a look?”

  “Sure, but don’t cross the threshold. You shouldn’t crowd the pilots.”

  I squeezed past her. She had effectively silenced my communications. Were they on to me for something specific? Was it the general paranoia Arrianne told me about when we first met? Whatever it was, it soured my mood.

  Grizzly-Caleb sat in the forward chair. I said, “That’s my chair. Out.”

  “I like it.” He smirked and pushed the button and tilted back.

  I grabbed a fistful of his shirt and yanked him to standing. “My seat. If the pilots have a question or need information, I don’t want them searching for me in your crabs-in-a-barrel crowd.”

  He yanked free of my hand and nosed up to me. “You think you’re real tough, don’t you, Stearne?”

  “All modesty aside, yes I do.” I punched him in the gut, spun him around and gripped him in a headlock. “When I flex my forearm, your windpipe gets cut off like this.” I flexed. He choked. “When I unflex it, you can breathe. Like this, see?” I unflexed. He gasped for air. “Before you ask a stupid question, ask yourself if you need to piss off a guy whose picture hangs in the Ranger Hall of Fame.”

  I kneed him in the butt and shoved him face down in the aisle at the feet of his men.

  He pushed up, blood rushing to his face, ready for a fight. Then he thought better of it. “I’ll get you, motherfucker. I’ll get you from behind like you did Diego.”

  “Hey, now.” Arrianne tugged my arm. “Was that necessary?”

  I resisted her pull. “Yes, it was.”

  Zack Ames figured only one of the three groups pursued a violent solution to their perceived problems. That group had to be Arrianne’s Birth Right people. They were the ones going to London. So why were Lugh and Paladin spray painting what had to be targets on the walls and curbs of the town? Maybe they were fantasizing. Maybe they were competing. There had to be more going on than London.

  To keep my eye on Paladin, I would drop her off, contact the local authorities, explain things without getting caught in a bureaucratic interrogation, and get back to Úbeda before dawn. No problem. Especially the part about walking into the offices of the London Counter Terrorism Command to say, “I just popped in to drop off twelve terrorists, but I must run. Good luck stopping them. Cheers!”

  If I didn’t get back to Úbeda and the British caught Arrianne, it would hit the news. As soon as they saw it, Lugh and company would know it was me who turned in their friends. Even if they disagreed on fundamental approaches, they wouldn’t take kindly to a snitch in their midst.

  I needed a lot more information.

  I turned to Arrianne, who’d taken the seat across the aisle. “You said a couple things I didn’t understand last night. What did you mean your dad was replaced?”

  “He was an accountant.” She narrowed her eyes and dropped her voice. “They hired a Jew to replace him.”

  Mercury leaned over her head. The fact that her dad drank a bottle of gin every night had nothing to do with it. His mistakes were just rounding errors of ten to twenty percent.

  “I’m sorry to hear that. And your mother, what did you say about her?”

  “Her company brought in a new VP who outsourced their production to China. She was depressed and fell down a flight of stairs. A Pakistani doctor got her hooked on Hydrocodone. He kept telling her to take more and more. But the Negro pharmacist wouldn’t fill her prescriptions. Claimed they were forged. She had to go to the street to find pain medications.”

  Mercury started to say something. I cut him off. Yeah. I figured that one out without a heavenly message.

  “And that’s why you feel your people are being slaughtered?” I asked.

  “Damn straight.” Flames in her dark eyes. “Don’t you see it? Our kind are endangered. There’s an invasion going on. You can’t stop them. Our people are shoved to the back of the bus. Our people are the ones being fed opioids. They’re trying to make us look like the problem so they can replace us.”

  Mercury said, I haven’t heard that logic since the Spanish Inquisition. The Spanish claimed the Moors and the Jews were taking everything away from Christians, so they tortured them for heresy and next thing you know, the Christians owned all the land. Wasn’t that convenient?

  That was all I could take for one sitting. But Arrianne kept going. My eyes glazed over and my mind wandered while I listened for any reference to ROSGEO or some of the other places like Duomo di Milano or Masjid Abu Bakar. She wasn’t giving those up. She was on a long, pointless rant about who forced her mom to become a junkie. I felt sorry for her on a human level but still wondered what she had planned in London.

  When we landed, we dropped Arrianne and the Birth Right crowd at the main terminal. I went to the cargo hold and tossed their bags down to them. I double-checked my estimate of their weight and scent. I’m not a bomb-sniffing dog, but no obvious signs of weapons stood out. I waved goodbye. Arrianne thanked me for the ride and blew me a kiss. I watched them walk across the apron in the gathering gloom of a drizzling sunset.

  Mercury helped me close the cargo door. You know what you gotta do, homie. It’s time to suck it up and make that call.

  I said, I can’t call the cops without my phone. Besides, which one of the fifty police divisions in the UK would take me seriously?

  Mercury said, Use the pilot’s phone. You’re changing flight crews here in London anyway. And, don’t play dumb—you know who you have to call.

  I said, I’m not calling him.

  Mercury said, You got to, bro. Put all your issues aside and call him.

  I plodded forward like a condemned man. The pilot handed me his phone. I dialed.

  The man I didn’t want to call answered.

  “Jacob, is that you?” Zack Ames asked. “We’ve been waiting for this call. Do not get out of the jet. Have your pilots taxi to hangar 7A. Hugo is there with a team from SO15. Your people kept us informed about the targets. We’ve been waiting an hour for you. You better have a damn good idea of what they’re going to attack.”

  “Actually, I don’t have a handle on what—”

  “After all the shit you put me through, you’re telling me you just popped in to drop off twelve terrorists?”

  CHAPTER 25

  Three trucks filled with heavily armed SWAT team members waited for me in the designated hangar. It turned out, SO15 is shorthand for London’s Counter Terrorism Command. They were assigned by the National Counter Terrorism Policing Network after Miguel and Tania first made the connection between the markings in the Ooze and the streets in the Financial District. My people kept SO15 informed right up to the minute my jet left Seville. Lots of people got involved. MI6 and MI5, not to mention Lieutenant Colonel Hugo and his sidekick, Zack Ames. They all waited to take credit for my undercover work.

/>   We traveled in support vehicles to the City of London, sometimes called the Square Mile. It’s the historic town, well inside the metropolitan area, originally settled by the Romans. SO15 set up the command center for the brass near the remnants of an ancient Roman fort. Hugo, Zack, and I observed from a separate “guest” van with audio and video feeds from the SWAT teams.

  Mercury wandered around outside, beside himself that the local Christians couldn’t be bothered to maintain a perfectly good military position for a few thousand years. It was made out of brick when the Angles were still living in mud huts. They could’ve replaced the bricks, shored up the walls. See, young blood? This is why Christianity is hopeless. Lazy-ass mofos.

  The team leader informed us over the video link that Arrianne had procured three rental cars for her team. MI5 used a six-car surveillance team, which was an impressive expenditure of personnel and resources. They weren’t messing around. A helicopter took over at certain points to make sure the tail went undetected. They augmented with CCTV in places. They followed Arrianne straight to the financial district. They were confident she had no idea they were watching her.

  The London Stock Exchange takes up a city block between Rose Street and Queens Head Passage, two of the markings back at the Ooze. Arrianne took the next street over, Warwick Lane. Saint Paul’s Cathedral, and its round-the-clock security, was three hundred feet away, but around a corner and out of visual range. The markings from the Ooze began to add up.

  It was night, after hours for stockbrokers, the place was deserted. Arrianne’s crew passed Amen Court and parked illegally next to a chrome sculpture. A large truck met them there. Three men got out, handed off bags heavy enough to make them stagger when they walked. Arrianne and her crew, having changed into black ninja-outfits, hoisted the bags and jogged across the street. The men who’d met them took their rental cars and left the scene. MI5’s surveillance team dispatched a car to tail the rapidly disappearing rental cars.

  Mercury banged on the window of my van. You need to get back to Spain, homie.

  I said, I want to see this through. Whatever’s going down will take an hour. I’ve got plenty of time.

  Mercury said, No you don’t. What you think is happening is not really happening. Something else is going on.

  I said, What do you mean? What’s going on?

  Mercury said, I don’t know.

  I said, What kind of messenger brings a message saying, ‘I dunno?’

  Mercury said, Hey, it’s not easy being a divinity. You want to try it sometime? All you get are complaints. People go to temples and churches and get down on their knees—to whine. Do they give thanks for the cancer we let them beat? No. They whine about the weather. They whine about their son’s car accident. They whine …

  Movement on the monitor grabbed my attention. The surveillance team had lost Arrianne and the Birth Righters when they entered an office building. It appeared to be a standard office building with a few international consulting firms. No obvious targets. The cameraman reacquired Arrianne’s crew on the roof. The Birth Righters were laying out rappelling lines and setting up jump points.

  They wasted no time. Right after they tested the anchors, they walked down the glass face of the office building. Two people stayed on the roof. The rest dropped down three stories, leveling out at the fourth floor. They pulled out glass-breaking hammers and smashed their way through the five-foot-tall, hurricane-proof glass. After clearing four windows, they went inside.

  A helicopter splashed daylight on Arrianne and another man on the roof. Two SWAT teams ran from the street into the building. Two more teams rappelled from choppers hovering overhead. Arrianne was easily identifiable by the dark curls pouring out from under her balaclava. When the SWAT team reached them, they pulled the mask off the man next to her. No surprise, Grizzly-Caleb.

  The MI5 commander started barking orders over the comms. “Stand down. Do not breach. Again. Stand down.”

  The SO15 commander responded. “Too late, suspects in custody.”

  “Bloody hell,” the MI5 man said. “This has gone pear-shaped.”

  A series of cars flew by outside the van. I slid the door open and caught the flash of blue emergency lights as the last one screamed past. It had a crown on it and the initials NCA.

  I closed the door and turned to Hugo. “Who are they?”

  “National Chaos Agency.” He rolled his eyes. “Anglais typique.”

  From the other side of him, Ames said, “Crime. National Crime Agency. What the hell did you get us into, Stearne?”

  On the monitors, the NCA cars pulled to a stop in front of the building. The SWAT people emerged from the building with Arrianne and her crew. The two factions of officials faced off. The sound stopped.

  Hugo fiddled with the volume knobs. “They cut the comm.”

  Ames leaned around the Frenchman. “You know what that means, Stearne?”

  “They’re talking about us.”

  I turned to Mercury. What in Avernus is going on here?

  “That.” Ames pointed at the monitor. “What’s Avernus?”

  “A volcano believed to be the mouth of hell.”

  Arrianne’s balaclava was off, her pretty face in full view. A man stood behind her, removing her handcuffs. When he had them off, he shoved her and Grizzly-Caleb toward the NCA people. They were escorted to a minibus and got in back. The minibus drove up the street toward us.

  I reached for the door handle, ready to slide it open and jump the bastards when they drove by. Hugo grabbed my arm with an iron grip. I looked at him, surprised.

  “You are the friend of France, oui?” he asked.

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “Then, with the British, we must be friends. Difficult as they make it.”

  I relaxed my reach and watched the screen for clues.

  MI-6, MI-5, and SO15 were being sidelined by the NCA. How could that happen? I didn’t know much about British internal politics, but that had to mean Arrianne meant something to them that I hadn’t figured out. Worse, she hadn’t been on a terrorist mission. Did she break into an office on behalf of the NCA? Not while heavily armed in a country that banned personal weapons. She couldn’t be working undercover at IDC because the MI divisions would’ve known about it. And they were not aware of Arrianne’s value to the NCA.

  Whatever happened, I had orchestrated a very large, expensive, and high-profile operation. One that would be a stain on many careers throughout the UK. Not to mention a big embarrassment for Hugo and Ames.

  The sound came back on. The MI5 commander shouted, “Bring me that bloody American tosser!”

  CHAPTER 26

  I didn’t get back to the hotel in Úbeda until five in the morning. Twenty-two hours without sleep, and my brain still churned through my expulsion from London.

  They’d dragged me into their mobile command center where the ranking officer from MI-6 was yelling at the ranking officer from MI-5. Who then yelled at the ranking officer of SO15, who yelled at the MI-6 guy. It devolved into a shouting match joined by the junior officers. Hugo held up a hand. They all got quiet. Hugo lowered his hand. Then he pointed at me. Their collective gazes followed. Hugo said, “Américain stupide,” which needed no translation. They had their scape goat.

  SO15’s commander yanked me by the collar, tossed me out of the trailer, and told me to walk home.

  Ames followed me for five yards while giving me his estimation of my critical thinking skills. A statement excessively punctuated with f-bombs.

  The conference filled the town with rednecks from all over the world. They got drunk every night and slept late. On my return, everything had changed. In the predawn darkness, the streets teamed with attendees, sober, armed, and focused.

  Stumbling out of the Uber, I climbed the hotel steps and nodded at the bellman as I crossed the lobby.

  Mercury kept pace with me. How they expect you to know Arrianne was working for the NCA? It looked like a mass shooting, it walked like a mass shooti
ng, it smelled like a mass shooting—it coulda been a mass shooting. Holy Apollo, they don’t deserve you.

  I said, You’re getting better on the inspirational stuff. Thanks.

  Mercury said, Course, if you were Roman, you would’ve had the decency to fall on your sword for the screwup.

  I said, Do you and the Dii Consentes ever wonder why Christianity spread through Rome like wildfire?

  Mercury said, Miguel told you Arrianne and her people had no digital past. Not even from childhood.

  I said, As if they were government informants. But what kind of informant does the NCA have? And how could they pull rank on counterterrorism? Birth Righters smashed windows in an office building.

  Mercury said, Your first two points are good ones, but the last bit about broken windows, that doesn’t sound like terrorism. Maybe they were doing something else.

  I said, Like what?

  The Roman god of eloquence shrugged.

  I opened the door to my room and flipped on the lights. Something in my bed wriggled under the covers.

  Nema sat up wearing one of my t-shirts. “Where’ve you been?”

  “You’re in my bed.”

  “The guys were talking. Saying things.” She hid her face in her shoulder. “Where have you been all this time? Arrianne was arrested an hour after you dropped her in London.”

  I tossed my jacket on the chair. “Arrested? What for?”

  “Where were you?”

  “Waiting for a hydraulic pressure sensor replacement on the apron. Not a stocked item at Heathrow. Had to send a pilot to Biggin Hill Airport.”

  She squinted at me. Confusion. Perfect.

  “Why are you in my bed?” I asked.

  “I wasn’t going to sleep in the chair again.” Her eyes got big and wet. “And some of those creeps followed me around. I couldn’t go to my room alone. I got scared.”

  I sat on the edge of the bed and pulled off my boots. “What did Arrianne do that got her arrested?”