by Brian Fuller
“Oh, I deal with the normal human employees around here from time to time and end up at lunches more frequently than I’d like. Anyway, I’ll take you and the newly minted Sapphire in the Buick. I’ll pick you up at your apartment around 11:30. Cassandra, Corinth, and Goldbow will meet us at the restaurant.”
“That sounds great. Goldbow is back, then?”
“Did he go somewhere?”
“He didn’t fly back with us from Seattle,” Trace explained. “I think Archus Mars had him doing something.”
Lear led him toward the exit. “Goldbow answered his phone and said he was coming, so I guess so.”
At that moment, Archon Ramis passed with Athena in tow. He avoided Trace’s gaze and regarded Lear’s disheveled appearance with disdain. Lear smiled back defiantly.
Athena glanced up from her clipboard and patted Trace lightly on the arm. “Don’t feel bad, sweetie. I’m sure you’ll qualify next time.”
Trace gave her a thumbs up in response and looked around for Cassandra, who had apparently bolted out another door.
“So where are we going?” Trace asked Lear after Athena and Ramis had moved on.
“Don’t worry my friend. You’ll love it!”
Mac’s Steak and Shakes. Trace loved it.
Long-legged waitresses in stretchy pants and T-shirts roller-skated by with fluid grace, balancing trays crammed full of sugary drinks and fatty sandwiches. Modern rock blared from ceiling speakers, and sporting events played on TVs hanging about the room. They took a table in the center of the chaotic dining area. Their waitress, Nora, whirred around them, expertly placing their food in front of them while somehow still maintaining her balance. Meat. Onions. Mango-peach shake. Homestyle fries. All of it unhealthy and delicious. He could eat a mountain of it with no consequences to his weight or clogged arteries. Heaven, indeed.
Lear and Sapphire flanked him, Corinth separating a tense Cassandra and Goldbow on the other side of the table. Fortunately, Cassandra had dressed down in jeans and a tank top so she didn’t seem like a royal princess lunching with the peasants. A jovial Lear tried to keep a conversation going to little avail. Prescilla couldn’t keep her eyes off of the roller skates, and Corinth couldn’t keep his eyes off the roller skaters. Cassandra and Goldbow stuck to their food, which left Trace as the target of most of Lear’s banter. Trace didn’t mind. Nothing could go wrong with a steak sandwich and a mango-peach shake in hand.
Trace finished his second shake before trying to get a texting Cassandra’s attention. “So you want to drop any hints on what’s up for the next assignment?”
“No.”
“The team?”
“You’re on it.”
“The price of beans in China?”
“Too high.”
“My morphing performance?”
“Sucks.”
Lear laughed. “Give up, Trace. She must be texting an Archus or the Almighty Himself.”
“So how did you die, Trace?” Corinth asked. All eating stopped, all eyes glued to Trace. He swallowed the bite of juicy steak sandwich he was chewing. Oberon would want him to tell the tale without shame, but the ugly feelings wanted attention, and he just couldn’t do it in a place like this with all these people.
“You want to tell the story, Lear?”
“Um, you sure?” Lear asked, putting his hand on Trace’s shoulder.
“Yeah. One sec. Waitress? Could I get another shake please?”
She nodded affirmatively, brow creasing as if worried for his health—or perhaps disgusted at his gluttony—and skated off.
Cassandra resumed her texting, and Lear got to it. “Well, Trace here was married to his gorgeous wife, Terissa, for three years. She started having some, um, extracurricular activities with a guy she worked with.”
“Extracurricular activities?” Prescilla asked.
“Sex.” Cassandra provided bluntly. Prescilla gasped and put her hand to her mouth.
“Er, right.” Lear continued. “Anyway, Trace found out at a party Terissa’s company put on. Trace went to pack up his stuff. Terissa came home. Then this guy she was cheating with, Simon, drives up to the house and tells them his wife has gone crazy. She has and shows up with a gun, looking for Terissa and Simon. Trace gets in the way of a bullet meant for Simon and wrecks his truck trying to drive himself to the hospital. Did I get everything, Trace?”
He nodded. It still hurt to hear it, but the general sympathy at the table felt good. Prescilla’s eyes actually watered. Corinth said, “Dude, that sucks.”
“How about you, Cassandra?” Trace prompted.
She didn’t look up, absorbed in her phone. “You tell it, Goldbow.”
Goldbow, startled but pleased, perked up. “Cassie here was a detective in Chicago. She’d been with a new partner for about two weeks. They went out one night, and this new detective tells her to stay in the car while he goes into some building, some abandoned theater called—get this—the Red Angel. Cassie waits for a while and decides to follow him in. When she goes in, she can hear her partner begging for his life. She pulls a weapon and goes in to rescue him, but the last thing she remembers is a loud bang and falling to the floor. Probably capped by the guy shaking down her partner.”
“Corinth?” Trace continued.
“It was a counter-terror op in Iraq. We got intel from one of our sources that some terrorist honchos were meeting in a school building. I was spotting to direct the go/no-go for the air strike. The bad guys show up on time, and I order the go, but a boatload of kids shows up right after the meeting starts. I try to abort, but it’s too late, so I come out of cover and start firing my weapon in the air to get the kids to move off. One of the sentries dropped me with two hits to the belly. I bled out on the way back to base.”
“Mine was similar,” Goldbow said. “My team hit a Taliban base in Afghanistan. We attacked, but more guys were there than the intel indicated. We pulled back to reposition. I got blown apart by an RPG trying to cover the retreat of my squad. The Scholus had a hard time figuring out where they should spread my ash. They had a few spots to choose from.”
“Lear?” Prescilla prompted.
“My theater company wasn’t extremely popular or well-to-do, so we ended up playing and staying in some places that, shall we say, attracted a rather base sort of people. A colleague of mine—Jerry—and I were trying to hail a cab in a seedier part of town when we got mugged. Jerry was a cocky idiot and decided to take the knife-wielding assailant down using his stage-fighting skills. He got himself stabbed. I intervened and got stabbed worse. Like Trace, the Scholus gave me a low-percentage chance of having died a sacrificial death because the reports were unclear about whether I was helping Jerry or myself. Jerry, of course, told the cops he was trying to protect me, but here I am.”
“I suppose only I remain,” Prescilla said. From her fidgeting hands, Trace could tell she felt about as comfortable talking about her death as he did about his, but Oberon’s advice no doubt ran through her mind, too. “It is quite simple. I was helping slaves on my husband’s plantation escape to the North. I did this without my husband’s permission. He caught me after I had said farewell to my latest beneficiary and beat me to death with a fire poker. I no longer felt an attachment to the man, so my heart, perhaps, is not as broken as Trace’s is. Still, the memory is fresh and painful.”
“Hey, Cassie,” Goldbow said after she didn’t so much as emote after Prescilla’s story. “Are you trying to win a texting contest or something? Big clothing sale somewhere?”
She held up one finger to signal for him to wait, and Trace could tell something had completely preoccupied her because it wasn’t the middle one. She continued to pointedly ignore them for a few more seconds while Trace slurped down the recently arrived mango-peach shake.
“What the hell?” Cassandra exclaimed, tapping her phone. “Is anyone else’s phone down?”
Everyone dove for their pockets. Trace didn’t bother; his normal-person phone wouldn’t provide
any information.
“Mine’s out,” Corinth confirmed.
“Bricked,” Goldbow added.
Prescilla handed Trace her phone. “Is this ‘out’?” she asked.
Trace inspected the screen. The signal strength was zero, and the phone had gone into lockdown, the screen presenting a graphic of a lock with “Searching for active . . .” typed underneath.
“Hers is locked out with no signal strength,” Trace reported. “Do they lock up when they can’t get service?”
“Yep,” Cassandra said. “As a precaution, the phones store no information on them. Everything is saved and recalled from servers in real time. If the phone is stolen, there’s nothing that can be gleaned from a sim card or local memory, and they can disable the phone remotely. Unfortunately, it also means that if service goes down, your phone is a brick.”
“Does service go down a lot?”
“Hardly ever. But this might be different. I was texting Maggie. She said there was some strange chatter over at Trevex and her link to them went completely dead just a few minutes ago. She was trying to see if it was just a glitch, but, well, I’m—”
“Uh, Cassie?” Corinth interrupted. “Look.”
All eyes went to one of the TV screens, now with a scrolling red marquee over a helicopter shot of Trevex propane. Trace clenched his fingers around his shake. Trevex was a blackened ruin. It looked like it had been bombed. Belching smoke and fumes pulsed into the sky from flaming pipes and craters where storage tanks once stood. Smaller explosions erupted periodically as the inferno ejected fireballs into the sky.
Lear tossed a wad of money on the table, and chairs flew backward as they abandoned their table and scrambled for the door, eliciting startled glances from the clientele. Cassandra’s Caddy waited on the curb, and Goldbow still had the Taurus.
Cassandra took charge. “Lear, get Prescilla to a safe house. Jarhead’s with me. Goldbow, you and Corinth follow!”
Chapter 20
Primus
“The phones should switch over to a different node,” Cassandra explained as they angled through traffic and up onto the highway.
In the distance, the smoke from the explosion billowed into the clear afternoon sky, its mushroom shape making the blast appear nuclear. Whatever speed Cassandra hoped for on the freeway was lost amid the stream of sluggish, rubbernecking gawkers and the frantic press of emergency vehicles powering north at only a slightly better rate. An ever-increasing flock of buzzing helicopters swirled around the inferno like flies waiting for a good spot to set down on a carcass.
“Do the Dreads know about Trevex Propane?” Trace asked. He already knew the answer but thought that responding to the question might deflect an impatient tirade that appeared ready to burst from a wired Cassandra.
“At least some of them have known about it, that’s for sure. If they really are organized now, then it’s a safe bet most of them do. Still, I have a hard time believing they would attack it directly. I mean, fires and explosions are death to the Dreads. An open assault in the middle of the day is insane. It may not seem like it, but Trevex is well defended. There are Michaels stationed there full-time. I can’t imagine the Dreads organizing the kind of numbers they would need to do this.”
Trace nodded as Cassandra paused to hunt for a break in the traffic. The Caddy was small and fast, but everyone seemed to be diving for the same lanes, their progress coming in spurts punctuated by hard stops as Cassandra tried to exploit the slightest of gaps. Trace kept watch on her phone, waiting for the “Searching for active node” notification to clear. They had lost sight of Goldbow and Corinth’s cobalt-blue Taurus, which had lagged progressively behind them.
Bloop!
The phone’s luminescent screen bloomed to life, the “Searching for Node” message replaced with Cassandra’s background screen, an old, desaturated photo of a young girl by an inflatable pool. Cassandra reached over to pry it out of Trace’s grasp as the applications started to load, her distraction nearly sending them into the back bumper of a UPS truck.
Trace kept it from her. “You drive! I’ll call. Who do you want me to—” The phone rang before he could finish his sentence. The caller-ID pictured popped up. “Uh, looks like Hitler is calling. Should I answer?”
“That’s Ramis. Get it.”
“This is Trace.”
“Trace? Is Cassandra with you right now?” Ramis sounded like he was teetering on the edge of panic.
“Yes. We’re headed to Trevex.”
“Don’t go there. Athena and I are headed to a safe house. Tell Cassandra we’re going to the facility code-named Walter. Tell her we have an 8-2 situation. They got Primus. Meet us at Walter. Fast.” Click.
“What’d he say?” Cassandra asked, eyeing the phone as if to chance another grab at it.
“He said the Dreads got Primus and to meet them at Walter. Fast. Something about an 8-2.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. What’s a—” The phone rang again, and the caller ID popped up. “Looks like the Prince of Darkness himself this time. Goldbow?”
“You’re smarter than you look.”
“Who is Corinth? Stalin? And what do you have for me?” he asked.
“Answer the phone, Jarhead!”
Trace punched Accept and relayed their position to Goldbow as well as Ramis’s instructions. The former Navy SEAL was as shocked about Primus and the 8-2 as Cassandra was. She bullied her way through three lanes of traffic, working the clutch and the brake until Trace thought they might drop out of the car. In between yanking the steering wheel and the gearshift, she would lay on the horn, cramming the nose of the Caddy into unaccommodating traffic in a mad attempt to reach an off-ramp and maneuver back onto the city streets.
“What’s an 8-2 situation?” Trace asked. “I haven’t heard of that one before.”
“In an active operation, it’s a code that indicates the odds. What Ramis was saying is that he and whoever is in the car with him are being pursued by approximately eight Dreads. But that’s the least of our problems. The Dreads have Primus.”
“Primus? The computer program?”
“It’s not just a computer program. It’s the primary database, a mirror of the one at Deep 7.”
Trace had learned about Deep 7, the Ash Angel Organization’s command center, in one of his classes.
“Don’t they have a security precaution for this kind of thing?” Trace asked.
“Yeah,” Cassandra said. “It should have been autodestroyed in the event there was an attack on Trevex. If the Dreads are able to decrypt it, the Ash Angel Organization will be severely compromised. And I mean everybody-run-for-a-South-American-country-and-pick-coffee-beans-for-a-couple-years kind of compromised. It’s impossible. Just impossible. It’s got a GPS transponder, unless they figured out how to shut that off.”
“And Walter?”
“Saint Mary’s Basilica. It’s an old Catholic building downtown. There’s an Ash Angel substation there underground.”
Cassandra let out a celebratory yes as she managed the relatively traffic-free off-ramp with only a couple angry middle fingers for her abrupt tactics. Her phone rang again. This time the screen was a graphic with “BFF” in swirly red letters.
“Your BFF is calling,” he said. “Are we fourteen now?”
She lunged and stripped the phone from Trace’s grasp just as he was about to answer it.
“Maggie!” Cassandra said. “What happened? How could they have taken Primus?”
Trace could only wait as the side of the conversation he could hear consisted of “Uh-huh,” “No way,” and “You’ve got to be kidding me.” It ended when Cassandra said, “Ramis is trying to call through.” She tapped the screen and handed it to Trace. “You talk to him.”
“This is Trace.”
“We’re not going to make it to Walter,” Ramis yelled. A scream and shattering glass came next, followed by silence.
“They’ve been hit,” Trace said. “The call di
ed. Not sure if that means the phone did too.”
Cassandra swore. “Quick. Hit the home screen, contacts, find Ramis, click Options, and then track. Fast, Jarhead!”
Trace’s thumbs went into overdrive as he pecked the screen. When he tapped Track Phone, the message said, “Phone unavailable.” Trace told Cassandra, and she shook her head.
“Did he say who was with him?”
“Athena!” Trace whipped back to contacts, finding Athena—her picture a warty-nose witch—and repeated the process. “I’ve got them. They’re about a mile east of here. Looks like they’re still moving—slowly though.”
Cassandra wheeled the car around and stomped on the gas. “We’ve got to see if we can do this without giving up our advantage. Just remember, we may not be able to save Ramis and Athena. They’re not what’s important.”
“Guess Ramis might get to see if he likes being 44-2ed.”
Cassandra shot him a disappointed look. “Don’t be cold, Jarhead. No one likes doing it, and no one likes being left to die. You stay in the Ash Angels long enough and you might have to call it yourself. Might be today. Where am I going?”
It was odd to hear Cassandra defend 44-2 or Ramis. Trace guided her through the streets toward the glowing dot on the phone. The boxy buildings of downtown Phoenix cast shadows over the roads, the wide streets and walks filled with people and cars and normalcy, a mass of humanity unaware of the struggle roiling around them.
“There they are,” Cassandra said. Ramis, morphed younger than usual, was limping down the sidewalk in his dark slacks, blue shirt, and red power tie. A wide-eyed Athena in black slacks and a white shirt walked glued to his side. Something about her gait wasn’t right either, not so much as a hitch in her step as too much of a sway. A group of five men, red auras burning, tailed, looking like a noonday gang out for a stroll among the average citizens on the street.
Trace tapped the witch picture in contacts and handed it to Cassandra when it rang through. “You got any weapons in here?”
She pointed at the glove compartment, where he found two Stingers. He shoved them into his inner jacket pocket.
