by Dakota Banks
“You are lovely, so lovely, just as you were when you danced with Oskar, what was his name, Oskar…”
He was referring to the minister of foreign affairs of East Germany in a mission with Abiyram in 1984.
“Mauser. I didn’t dance with Oskar Mauser. I broke into his office while you regaled him with your stories of the arrest of the Butcher of Lyon the year before.”
“Ah, of course. They say the memory is the first to go.”
In your case I think it will be carved on your gravestone, “He never forgot anything.”
“Remember when you smuggled that capsule to me right under Vatkov’s nose? He never suspected that you dropped it into my drink. Hah!”
“We can reminisce all you want, Abiyram, but I know what you are trying to do and I don’t blame you. I show up a lot like the woman you knew thirty years ago and you don’t trust me. All right. Something that was not on any report, not known but for the two of us. When I passed you that tiny capsule, it was through a kiss. We were posing as husband and wife. You were so nervous that you bit my tongue.”
“So I did, my dear. How did the unfortunate Louisa Kalb die?”
“Louisa Kalb burned to death in a car accident, but she is fictional. You made her up to have someone to blame for the loss of the Arkon papers that I stole from you, early on before we even knew each other well. You told me this later, the night I slapped your face for insulting Winston Churchill. Enough?”
“Why don’t we get out of the sun?”
He took her to a fourth-floor apartment with a shaded balcony. They sat outdoors sipping wine.
“Tell me, how is it that you have remained so young?”
There it is. The question I’d hoped never to be asked. Three choices: lie, tell the truth, or be mysterious.
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“A medical experiment or reconstructive surgery?” He took her hand and held it in his, then reached out for her face. “You are about fifty-five now, yes?”
“About that, yes.” Give or take three centuries.
“Tell me of this process.”
“As Shakespeare wrote, ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ Consider this one of those things.”
He was silent for so long that Maliha thought he would soon kick her out as a lunatic. Finally he leaned over, pressed hard on her arm, and then poked her skin in a couple of places. Suddenly, with a small blade that appeared from nowhere, he made a cut on her forearm. She didn’t flinch, but blood welled from the wound.
“You watch too many movies. I don’t have green blood. I’m not an android. I’m not going to unscrew my arm or something.”
“Let me get you something for that cut.”
While he was gone, she kept squeezing the slit in her skin so it would keep bleeding and wouldn’t close. He came back with a bandage and in a minute the wound was out of sight. He had made no apology for cutting her.
“What did you come here to talk about?” He reached for a bowl on a table between them and offered it to her. “Peanuts? I grew them myself.”
She took a handful. “I want to ask a favor.”
“I owe you my life. Ask, and if it is within my small power, I will do it.”
“I need information on the location of three people and background on a fourth.”
“That’s all? You are spending a life-debt on such trivia?”
“It’s urgent. I don’t have time to network for this. I’m…active in the field.” She knew he would interpret that to mean she was tied up on an assassination mission. “It’s very important. Many innocent people will die if I don’t find them.”
“You have my full attention. Give me what you know.”
She reached into her small handbag and pulled out an envelope. Inside were printouts of the photos from Fynn’s disk. The thought of the scientist triggered memories of Rasputin’s destruction of Fynn’s family. Mother and child are dead.
She shook her head to clear the memory of Betty Sue sitting motionless, her throat slit. The Black Ghost has no time for such things.
“First, Vincent Landry, France.” She handed over the photo.
“Don’t know him. But I know someone active in France who might.”
“William David Hall, England.”
“I’ve seen that face, once, years ago. I might be able to get to him fast.”
Maliha nodded.
“Third, a man or woman who goes by the name of the Leader and works with a secret council based at the Tellman Global Economic Foundation in Washington, D.C. I’m starting from square one on the Leader. No photo, no profile, no name.”
“Tellman Global Economic Foundation. Go on.”
“Last, I need background on a DEA agent, Jake Stackman, in particular on how he spent five missing years of his life.” She gave him Jake’s photo.
The white eyebrows pulled together and shadowed his eyes as he frowned. “Is the fourth related to the case of the others?”
Maliha lowered her eyes. “Stackman is not likely to be related to the others.”
Jake had told her that he still wanted to talk with her about his admission of continuing to kill after his demon no longer cared. He implied that there was a reason, and without anything else to go on, Maliha had decided to look into his missing years he’d asked her to take on trust. The more knowledge she had, the better. If anyone could get that information that Amaro couldn’t find, it would be Abiyram.
“I see.”
“I don’t ask lightly.”
“Then I will devote myself to finding the answer, as with the others. And then I will dance at your wedding. You must allow me that privilege.”
She nodded. The word wedding tugged at her heart.
“Now I may have something for you, my dear. You collect certain archaeological items. Tell me about them.”
“Another test? I network with archaeologists worldwide, asking to be notified of any artifacts that are out of place—they’re too advanced or too primitive for their time, or they simply don’t belong in that location. Anomalies. If anyone contacts me, he or she gets to be a character in my next Dick Stallion book. The scientists love it. Most of what I hear doesn’t turn out to be the right stuff, but I give them credit anyway. Did I pass?”
“What are you looking for? What is the right stuff?”
“Falls under more things in heaven and earth.”
He sighed. “I thought it might. I came into possession of a map that may be just such a thing a few months ago. Fate, eh? That you should come out of my past now? I have been studying it. Perhaps it will be of interest to you. I don’t want to be in one of your books, though. I’ve read one, though I didn’t know you wrote them. Dreadful.”
“Most honest review I’ve ever gotten. Show me what you have.”
“Give me a moment.”
He returned with a leather portfolio case, about a foot and a half on each side. Unbuckling the briefcase-like fastener, he displayed a piece of parchment with roughened edges. “It’s a rubbing taken from a stone, showing directions to a location in the Omo Valley area of southwest Ethiopia. Colors were added after the rubbing was done, so that it looks like a painting. What is peculiar about it is that it is made of papyrus from roughly the year 1040, yet the writing on it is in various languages considered long dead by that time, including Sumerian. I am something of a linguist, yet one of the cuneiform variations isn’t known to me. Odder still, the India ink used in those writings dates from a thousand years prior to the creation of the parchment.”
“Where is the original stone?”
“Supposedly in a portion of the Sof Omar Cave, also in Ethiopia. It was embedded in the wall of a small room that was flooded by the Weyb River four hundred years ago and remains so today. It was that river that originally carved the underground caverns and it has, throughout recorded history, filled some of them and drained others, almost at whim. No one knows which room holds the stone, exc
ept that it is not in any of the presently accessible rooms.”
“Has anyone else seen this?”
“Quite a few people. Copies are being sold in a curiosity shop in Addis Ababa. I was shopping for a present for a grandniece and wandered into a little shop. There was the map, in a glass case behind the counter. I asked about it and the woman said it was very old and that she had hand-painted copies for sale. ‘A map to a priceless treasure,’ she assured me. ‘If I were not so old and my back so stiff, I would hunt for it myself.’ It is beautiful, isn’t it?” She held the parchment to the sun. The colors glowed warmly. “The shop owner wouldn’t sell it to me, so I bought a copy. I waited a few days, came back, and stole the original. I left her a large compensation. She must have been satisfied, because she didn’t report the theft. Is the map of interest to you?”
Maliha struggled to keep the eagerness off her face.
“I’d like to look at it. Probably isn’t the right stuff.” She reached out to take the portfolio. He hesitated for a moment, reluctant to part with it, and she could see why.
“What I search for is of great importance.”
He sighed and handed it to her. “To your safe return.” He raised his wineglass to her.
“To success, for both of us,” she said, and clinked her glass with his.
“I will do my best.”
Abiyram invited her to his bedroom. She didn’t hesitate. There were perks to being the Black Ghost.
Later, at her hotel, Maliha pored over the map. The first thing she went after was the cuneiform that Abiyram couldn’t read. Her contract with Rabishu had been written in the same form. Her heart beat wildly when she translated it.
Anu, son of Anshar and Kishar, leaves this for the children of the Great Above, should their wisdom grow.
It was exactly the same inscription that she’d found on an artifact from Peru, which had led her to the first shard she’d collected. She ran her fingertips over the markings as though they would leap from the parchment, the whole thing springing into the air in front of her, as her contract with Rabishu had.
That is the writing of Anu, either by his hand or by his direction. This is the being who tips my scale from afar, from the third sphere of existence, where distance and time don’t matter, as Rabishu told me.
Rabishu had been talkative when it came to the Great Lens and the Tablet of the Overlord. But he’d kept from her their true purpose, which was dominion over the demons, including the option of killing them all by reading their individual weaknesses engraved on the tablet. This power was supposed to fall into human hands when humans advanced enough to figure out the purpose and location of the shards and tablet—and be able to retrieve them, a whole other story. In the attempts she’d made so far, she didn’t see how anyone but a demon’s assassin who’d taken the mortal path could do so on behalf of the human race. One of the Ageless certainly could—as Lucius had, by taking the shard she’d discovered—but they were bound to their demons and wouldn’t act on behalf of the human race.
It seemed that Anu had set things up so that only someone who had been through the black years she’d experienced and then made a decision on the side of hope could ever free humans. Right now, it was her turn. There must have been others who tried, because Rabishu had said no others of her kind had succeeded in balancing their scales, let alone put together the lens and tablet. If she didn’t succeed, the next opportunity might not happen for a hundred years or a thousand. Or ten thousand. She didn’t know how often the Ageless gave up immortality.
Perhaps the others had made personal redemption their only goal and couldn’t see beyond that. The way I see it, even if they had achieved balance and gone to the paradise of the third sphere, they would have failed. Failed the humans they left behind.
Alone in the world, she was carrying both the fears and the hopes of the human race, and very few even knew about it.
With the Great Lens and tablet in hand, she could control the demons or kill them. She thought for a moment what it would be like to be able to order Rabishu around, to have him do her bidding as she’d done his bidding for centuries. She could free Lucius from his contract with a snap of her fingers. She could make herself immortal without having a demon do it.
What’s done with the Tablet of the Overlord and the Great Lens is the last test for the advancement of the human race. If they are used for petty reasons, we are still a child race mired in chaos, this time of our own making and not the demons’. If the demons are destroyed, we have a chance to move on. To what, I don’t know, but it’s gonna be a wild ride.
Too much time spent trying to give shape to the future gave Maliha a headache. Deciding that fresh air and some exercise would help her thinking process about the map, she went out for a run. Discovering quickly that no one else ran in the afternoon sun, she wandered onto the promenade and rented a bike. It was a grand trip on the wooden walkway, with the sun warming her shoulders, the Mediterranean to one side and the skyline of Tel Aviv to the other.
I should move here for a while. It’s a wonderful city, wonderful climate. I could stay here to spend time with Abiyram, move when he is buried. Or at least spend ten or twenty years here. I don’t have to pretend around him, and the more I was here, the more of my story would come out to him. He’d be another member of my family.
Stopping for a drink at a beachfront café, she bought lemonade that was strong enough to pucker her lips. A man stood next to the table she’d taken in the corner.
“You are a tourist, yes?” His English was lightly accented. Ulster, she thought, but it had been schooled out of him.
Ignore or engage?
He was in his thirties, fit enough for a guy who almost certainly had a desk job. Dark eyes behind wire-rim glasses, dark hair in a businesslike trim. An analyst, probably in a junior role looking to move up. She dropped her eyes and checked out his body in an obvious fashion just to see what he would do. When her eyes came back to his face, he just raised his eyebrows: So what did you think?
That level of attention from Maliha would fluster many men. Instead, he slid into the chair opposite her.
Either very smooth or very oblivious.
She thought about giving him a night to remember, but she found herself reverting to preferences established when she was the Black Ghost. If he wasn’t romantic, powerful, rich, an incredible physical specimen, dangerous, or all of the above, she didn’t want to fuck him. She was keenly aware that Jake qualified on all five, but the world was full of perfect fives.
Including Lucius. Okay, I’ve admitted it. In RandySpeak, Lucius is über hot. Then there’s Dac, who only scores in the romantic category, maybe half a point as a good physical specimen but not incredible, yet my night with him is something that keeps popping into my head. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it. Does that mean romance trumps all the others?
“I was here to attend the medical conference. Cardiovascular research, at the Hilton.” He jerked his head to the right, which as far as Maliha knew from her basic orientation in the city was wrong. He’d just indicated the old city of Jaffa. “I only have one night left before I go home to England.”
Mmm. He’s no more a doctor than I am a…beach ball. She’d caught sight of some children outside the Lemon Tree Café batting one back and forth.
“May I buy you another lemonade? They’re really good here. Or something stronger? My name’s Scott, by the way.” He thrust out his hand. “And you are?”
She was reading his aura, finding it menacing and dark. Very controlled, contained, possibly murderous. An aura with a stain spreading over it. Her concern must have flashed across her face.
“Something wrong?”
White Rabbit time.
“I’m late for a very important date.”
She stood up, brushing past the arm he put out to block her exit. It seemed like rejection didn’t suit him. As she was leaving, she saw him approach the table of another lone woman and sit down. The woman smiled and starte
d a conversation.
A simple pickup or something much worse? Damn.
She reached for her phone to call the police, then considered. What was she going to say? But Officer, you need to arrest him because of his aura.
She hesitated outside the door of the café. Her bicycle beckoned. The sun was setting over the Mediterranean, a sight lovely enough to wipe thoughts of Scott from her mind. Almost. The Black Ghost would walk away. If that woman ends up raped and fed into a meat grinder, it’s none of my concern.
They came out of the café together. His arm around her waist looked a little too possessive, too soon. Creepy. Oh, to hell with the Black Ghost for now! Something’s off here.
She left her bicycle and followed them on foot. The parking lot set back from the beach was crowded, so Maliha didn’t have to worry about him picking her out as following him. Besides, he was totally focused on reeling in his catch.
Don’t get in his damn car, you idiot woman!
He handed her the keys and she got into his car, in the driver’s seat.
Shit, shit, shit! It’s as if he’s using mind control.
She was aware of the experiments in China, North Korea, Russia, and the United States. But all of them required some sort of preparation of the subject. Unless this woman was a plant among the customers, previously prepared and susceptible to Scott’s proposition, mind control wouldn’t work. Or did Scott have something new here?
Hah! A plant in the Lemon Tree Café.
Maliha zipped along sidewalks or wove in and out through traffic when necessary, at a fast run or a blindingly fast run, whichever was called for. It was a long drive. The woman headed north into the wealthiest areas of the Tel Aviv District, home to the upper class of business leaders, the wealthy who made their retirement homes here, and a sprinkling of foreign diplomats.
I should turn back. This is a guy who got lucky and picked up a woman. So he has a dark aura. Lots of people do, like me, for example.
