At 8:17 PM, the musical performances began.
The first performer was some dark-haired woman in a tight dress with an electric guitar. I never paid much attention popular culture since I was always busy stealing things for Morvilind, but I recognized her as someone both Russell and James listened to, one of their shared tastes like novels about the Crusades by Malcolm Lock. I think her name was Elizabeth or Elsa or Eliza, something with an E. She sang a rendition of “God Bless America and God Save The High Queen” with a backdrop of electric guitars.
The guests gave her a standing ovation at the end.
Elizabeth or Eliza and her team vacated the stage, and the second musician came up. As far as I could tell, she was nearly identical to Elizabeth or Eliza, save that she was blond instead of dark-haired. I don’t know if you have be pretty to succeed as a popular musician, but I guess it doesn’t hurt.
My earpiece crackled as the blond musician started her song.
“It’s time,” said Nicholas. “Gather near the stage.”
I swallowed, took a deep breath, and headed towards the stage with an armful of dirty plates.
Chapter 13: Break The Bank
I saw Morelli and Murdo pushing a pair of carts, and I dropped my load of plates into Murdo’s cart and fell in step next to him. Beneath the hair net and bandanna, his face was solemn, almost grim. He looked like a tired man doing a hard job, but I knew him well enough by now to see the focus there. Murdo looked like that before going into a fight.
And if this went wrong, we might find ourselves fighting for our lives against the Elven nobles gathered near the stage.
Or the golems and the fire elementals waiting below.
Murdo and Morelli halted near the stage as Nicholas, Hailey, and Lorenz approached. Nicholas was carrying a stack of dirty plates. Hailey and Lorenz, I noticed, were not. I wondered if Lorenz had ever done a day’s work in his life. Then again, I was a thief and a shadow agent, so perhaps I was not in the best position to judge.
“Morelli?” murmured Nicholas.
“Ready,” said Morelli, drawing out his phone.
I took a careful look around. The musician and her backup singers were launching into the chorus, and the entire audience’s attention was on the stage as far as I could tell. We were close to the gate that led behind the tellers’ counters. I took a deep breath, calming myself and preparing myself to cast spells. When the lights went out, we would have a few minutes of confusion to use. I memorized the position of every obstacle, hoping that I would be able to make my way in the dark.
“Now,” said Nicholas.
Morelli nodded, rearranged the stack of plates on his cart, and hit an icon on his phone.
Nothing happened.
At least, nothing noticeable happened. The music coming from the stage drowned out any noise, but I felt a faint vibration beneath my shoes, and I heard a very distant thumping noise. The explosions that took out the backup generators must have been loud, and everyone outside the Bank would have been able to see them, but hardly anyone inside the lobby noticed. A few people blinked and looked around, and we had a few seconds before the Homeland Security officers outside realized something was wrong and contacted the security forces inside the building.
“Here we go,” murmured Morelli, and he muttered something in Italian. Maybe it was a prayer. Maybe it was a curse.
He tapped another icon on his phone, sending the call to the bombs in the utility tunnels.
For about ten seconds nothing happened. I took the opportunity to pull on a pair of thin gloves, and the others followed suit. Best not to leave fingerprints behind.
Nicholas reached into the base of his cart, drew out a black backpack, and slung it over his shoulder. I wondered why the hell he had brought it. Catering workers did not walk around with backpacks while on the job.
And then a lot of things happened at once.
All the lights went out, plunging the lobby into darkness. Some emergency battery-powered lights kicked on over the doors, but there weren’t many of them. The sound system cut off with a crackle of static. The musician and her backup singers, wrapped up in the music, kept singing for a few seconds and then trailed off in confusion. A murmur of consternation rose from the lobby as people began whispering in alarm, and I heard Duke Maelaeyar demand to know what the hell was going on.
“Go!” hissed Nicholas.
We hurried forward in the dark. It was so dark I could barely see anything, but I saw Murdo’s shadowy form, and I followed him as we passed through the gate and reached the door to the stairs behind the counter. Behind me, I saw flashes of light as people pulled out their phones in response to the darkness, and I felt faint surges of magical power as the Elves began calling spheres of light to provide illumination.
“The lock,” said Nicholas.
I nodded and summoned my own magic. With all the Elves casting spells behind me, hopefully one more magical surge would go unnoticed. I focused my will and cast the spell Morvilind had taught me to open locks. The lock holding the door was intricate, but its electronic protections and alarms had been disabled, and the bolt released.
“It’s open,” I said.
Nicholas nodded and pulled the door open. “Go. Wait for us at the door to Vault Level One. Do not go through the door until we’re ready.” Murdo and Morelli went first, followed by Lorenz and Hailey, and Nicholas and I brought up the back.
The click of the door closing behind us was very loud.
There was absolutely no light in the stairs, but Lorenz called a ball of blue light over his hand, and we followed it into the gloom. My eyes settled on the windowless steel door leading to Vault Level One.
Behind that door waited the elementals and the golems.
And any other traps and defenses that I failed to notice.
“We won’t need that light once we’re through the door,” said Nicholas. “The light from the Seals of Unmasking and the Seals of Binding will provide adequate illumination. Our Seals will be centered on Hailey and myself. My Seal should have a circumference of thirty yards, and Hailey’s shall have fifteen. Do not on any account step outside the Seals. The golems and the elementals do not appear to possess sapience, and follow a set of predetermined instructions, much like a computer program. Yet if even one of them detects us, they will attack, and if one of them attacks us, all of them will attack and then we are dead.”
I already knew all this. We had gone over it in the planning phases. That said, it was good to repeat it. Lorenz tended to ignore instructions and do what he wanted, and right now that could get us all killed. But Lorenz looked grim in the pale blue light of his sphere, so maybe the message had sunk through the thick shell of narcissism that encased his brain.
“Hailey,” said Nicholas. “The Seals.”
She nodded, took a deep breath, and started casting a spell. Nicholas followed suit, blue light flashing around his fingers and he gestured. Both Nicholas and Hailey finished their spells at the same time, and the floor lit up with interlocking sigils written in blue-white light. Lorenz dismissed his spell of light since it was no longer necessary.
“Miss Stoker,” said Nicholas, his voice hard as he concentrated on maintaining the Seal. “The lock.”
I summoned more magic and cast my spell again. The heavy locks in the door clicked and clanged as they released.
“Good,” said Nicholas. “I’ll go first. Lorenz, Stoker, with me. Hailey will bring up the back. Murdo, protect her and make sure she doesn’t fall behind.” Murdo nodded and stepped to Hailey’s side. Her face was a rigid mask of concentration. She wasn’t as powerful as Nicholas, and she was having a hard time holding the Seal.
I really wished that Nicholas had taught me the spell. I was stronger and more skilled than Hailey, and I could have held a larger Seal with much less effort. But Nicholas wasn’t willing to trust his safety to me, and whatever he might say about Hailey behind her back, she was completely loyal to him.
I’ll say this for
Nicholas. He wasn’t a coward. Without hesitation, he reached out, pulled the heavy metal door open, and stepped into the corridor.
The rest of us followed, my heart hammering in my ribs. The corridor had not changed since my last visit. The Seals of Unmasking still glowed at regular intervals across the floor, though Seals of Unmasking and Seals of Binding could overlap without consequence since they affected different kinds of magic. (Apparently overlapping two Seals that dealt with opposing types of magic could cause a catastrophic explosion.) The doors of massive steel bars still sealed off the entrances to the vaults, and the golems stood in the corners, the fire elementals prowling up and down the corridors.
And, wonder of wonders, the Seals of Binding worked.
Nothing attacked us. Nothing raised the alarm, and as the light of our Seals passed over them, the elementals went motionless. Any elemental or golem caught within the circumference of the Seals would be paralyzed. From what I understood, the elementals and the golems outside of the Seals could perceive us, they just couldn’t act against us. Of course, the minute the Seals went down, they would attack.
We jogged in a tight clump down the corridor. Nicholas had originally wanted Hailey to stay twenty yards away from him, to cover the maximum amount of corridor, but I had pointed out that it made much sense for their Seals to overlap. That way, if either Nicholas or Hailey lost concentration and their Seal collapsed, we would not be unprotected.
I just hoped they didn’t lose concentration at the same time.
It was strange passing the elementals. They went motionless as the light from the Seals fell over them. Like, completely motionless – even the flames of their bodies stopped flickering. It was almost like looking at a sculpture made from frozen fire. I felt a strange urge to touch them, but since a single touch of the elemental would probably burn my hand off, it was easy to restrain the impulse.
At last Vault 19 came into sight.
“Stoker, Murdo,” said Nicholas, moving so his Seal covered the corridor and the entirety of the vault’s interior. “Cut a hole as quickly as you can.”
I nodded and stepped towards the door of massive steel bars. “Wait. No. We can do something quicker. We’ll cut the door away from the lock. Here, here, and here.” I traced my fingers above and below the lock, and along the left-hand side. “I’ll cut the top, Murdo, you do the bottom, and we’ll meet in the middle.”
“Fine,” said Nicholas. “Do it.”
Murdo nodded, and in unison, we cast the elemental blade spell. A sword of white-hot fire sprang from my fingers, and though the spell protected my hand, I felt the heat of the blade beating against my face and arm. Murdo’s spell produced a longer blade of elemental fire, likely to accommodate his far larger hands, and his fire flickered and danced in his grasp.
We set to work.
I wish I could have just slashed my blade through the bars and sent the door collapsing to the floor. Unfortunately, it didn’t work that way. The steel bars were too thick, and even with all my magical strength, I couldn’t conjure a fire hot enough to do that. Instead, Murdo and I had to saw through the bars one by one.
An old memory came to me. After the Archon attack in Milwaukee, I had helped the Marneys rebuild their living room after an Archon had blasted through the wall.
That was exactly what cutting through the bars felt like, almost as if I was using a hand saw to cut through a two-by-four. Except my hand saw was two thousand degrees or hotter, and if I slipped, I would kill myself or Murdo with it.
“Hurry up,” snapped Hailey. “Holding the Seal is a lot harder than it looks.”
I didn’t look at her as I finished slicing through a bar, its ends glowing red-hot. “Complaining won’t make it go any faster.” Truth be told, maintaining an elemental blade at that temperature was almost as difficult as Cloaking.
And Murdo was cutting faster than I was. He had already cut through the bars at the bottom of the massive lock and was working his way up the left-hand side. How was he doing that? I was a stronger wizard than he was. Maybe he just had more experience with the spell.
I finished cutting away the bars at the top of the lock just as Murdo finished the left-hand side, and something shivered and clanged in the door. I stepped back, fearful that the heavy steel would fall on us, but the door only settled in its concrete track.
We had cut the door away from its lock.
“We’re going to need to push the damned thing open,” said Murdo. “It’s motor operated, and the power’s out. Morelli, Lorenz, put your backs into it.”
Murdo dismissed his blade and gripped the bars, pushing the door to the left. He was strong enough that the massive grate of steel slid a little in its track. Morelli started pushing as well. Lorenz sighed, grasped the bars, and started to push. I released my elemental blade and gripped the bars as well, gathering more magical power.
Lorenz let out a sneering laugh. “Little girl. I could lift you above my head with one hand. Why are you bothering?”
“Hey,” I said. “When I hit you, and you flew across the room and landed on your ass, did that hurt? I bet it hurt.”
I cast a spell, sheathing my hands in gauntlets of invisible force, and pushed. Lorenz was right about one thing. I was strong for a woman my size, but I still wasn’t all that large. But with the gauntlets of telekinetic force, that didn’t matter. Together the three of us heaved the door open far enough that I could turn sideways, inhale, and slip past the wrecked lock and into Vault 19.
Deposit Box 547 was at my eye level.
It wasn’t all that big, no larger than a shoebox. After all the magical and physical defenses outside, the deposit box was only secured with a simple lock. Granted, it was a very good lock and picking it would have been a pain, but my spell made short work of it.
I opened the door and drew out the items within, holding them up to the light to get a better look.
The first item was a laminated sheet of paper. It was a typewritten archival form, the sort used in the warehouses of museums and art galleries. The form had a database number and noted that the artifact in question was a flash drive and that it had been found…
I blinked in surprise.
The form said that the artifact had been found in the jacket pocket of General Jeremy Shane when he had been assassinated in Chicago in Conquest Year 3, or 2016 according to the pre-Conquest calendar.
A second entry on the form said that the contents of the artifact had resisted all known methods of cryptanalysis and that further study was recommended. Since the artifact had been sitting in this deposit box for God knows how long, I suspected that no one had ever gotten around to further study.
“Kat,” said Nicholas. “Hurry.”
I nodded and took another step towards the gate, looking at the second item I had taken from the safe deposit box.
It was a small plastic bag holding an ancient USB thumb drive.
The realization burned through my mind. The drive was encrypted. Not even the Inquisition had been able to break the encryption on the device, and they could use the powerful data centers Homeland Security and the police services in other nations employed to monitor the Internet and cell phone calls.
The Inquisition couldn’t unlock the drive, but Nicholas could.
That was why he had sent me into Chicago to find Shane’s briefcase. Shane’s blast-proof Department of Defense briefcase had been buried with him in Chicago, but somehow this flash drive had ended up in the Inquisition’s archives. I was suddenly certain that Nicholas had found the encryption key to the thumb drive in Shane’s briefcase.
Whatever Operation Sky Hammer was, whatever Shane had been working on or building when he had been assassinated, I suspected its secrets were on the thumb drive resting in my hand.
And I was about to hand that thumb drive over to Nicholas.
I had the overwhelming urge to smash the thing on the floor, to let whatever grisly secrets it held vanish forever into the dust of time.
“Ka
t,” said Nicholas, his voice taking a cold edge. “We don’t have time.”
Damn it.
I pushed through the gate and handed the paper and the thumb drive to Nicholas.
“Yes,” Nicholas said, examining it. “Yes, this is it.”
“Super,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Instead, Nicholas dropped to one knee, reached into his backpack, and yanked out a laptop.
“Nick,” I said, “what the hell are you doing?”
“This will just take a moment,” said Nicholas. The laptop powered on, and in the glow of the screen, I saw that he had mounted his USB to UDE adapter on the machine’s side.
“We don’t have a moment,” I said.
“For once, I agree completely with Miss Stoker,” said Lorenz. “We have to go.”
“Pre-Conquest electronics are fragile,” said Nicholas. He plugged the USB thumb drive into the adapter, reached into his pocket, and drew out a piece of paper with a long hexadecimal key written on it. “And this is ancient. Any jostling might destroy it. The data on this drive is utterly priceless and completely unique. I dare not risk its loss. From here the cellular signal is just strong enough that I can copy the encrypted files to a remote server. Even if the drive is destroyed, the data will be preserved.”
“Well, whatever you’re doing, hurry up,” I said.
Nicholas did not respond. A decryption prompt flashed on the screen, and he typed the long hexadecimal key in haste. The word DECRYPTING appeared in the prompt, and then the laptop started copying and opening the files on the drive.
I stared at the screen. Nicholas tried to cover it, but that was hard to do while on one knee, and I saw a lot of the files as they opened and copied. Of course, they flashed by so quickly that I couldn’t make much sense of them. There was a schematic for some sort of spherical machine, which I had seen before when Nicholas had opened Shane’s briefcase. There were several Department of Defense documents with the words OPERATION SKY HAMMER – TOP SECRET TS/SCI/RD/Q-CLEARANCE REQUIRED stamped across the top. There were satellite images of the western United States, and then several maps of the state of Nevada.
Cloak Games: Hammer Break Page 21
