“That idea’s got holes an imbecile could drive a blimp through. You must have come up with it yourself. You’re quite the gumshoe.”
Crow came off the desk, hand curling into a fist. Francis concentrated on the heavy paperweight, reached for his Power, and-
Nothing.
Crow knocked him silly. Francis hit the tile and Crow kicked him in the face. Francis got his arms up to protect himself as Crow kicked him repeatedly. “You tried to use magic on me? ” Crow stomped him hard, again and again. One shoe caught the cast and ground the freshly broken bones. Francis cried out and curled into a ball. The door flew open with a bang. Several Miami cops spilled into the room. Crow was roughly pulled away and dragged from the room. shouting, “Magic won’t work on an OCI man, asshole. You better warn your friends.”
The cops were trying to help. Somebody asked him a question. His head was swimming and he couldn’t remember what his answer had been. His Power had failed him. For the first time in his life, when he’d reached for it, the magic hadn’t been there. They got him onto the bench. Somebody stuffed a towel against his nose to catch the blood. There was more commotion in the doorway. Francis recognized the man standing there waving a briefcase as a UBF attorney. How had his Power failed? Somehow he was on his feet, and weaving his way down the hall. The lawyer was talking to the police, rapid-fire legalese flying faster than bullets. They were heading for the exit.
Crow had been backed into a corner and blocked off by two cops. His face was red. “Everything’s changed now, Francis. Your kind aren’t untouchable anymore.”
“This isn’t over!” Francis shouted back.
“We’re watching you.” The cops had to hold Crow back. “Hunting season’s coming! Opening day…” He stuck out his finger like a pretend gun. “Bang.”
Francis made it outside. He hadn’t realized how late it was. The darkness was a bit of a shock. He stumbled down the steps to a waiting car. Flashbulbs popped and photographs were taken. The attorney made sure that the press got plenty of shots. From how hot his face felt, he knew he had to look like a bad meatloaf. The driver came around and opened the door.
“Get us out of here. Snap to it,” Francis ordered. The attorney barely had time to climb in before they were rolling. “Give me your pen.”
“Huh?”
Francis reached over and snatched a golden ink pen from the lawyer’s pocket. He held it in the palm of his hand and concentrated. The pen lifted, spun in a lazy circle just like he wanted it to, then fell back in place. His Power had returned. It felt perfectly normal, but when he’d tried it against the government man it was like his magic wasn’t even there.
He tossed the pen back to the surprised attorney. “Crow’s right,” he mumbled.
“Excuse me, sir?”
Francis stared out the window. “Everything has changed… Driver, get us to the airfield.”
The Miami Police detained Crow. Federal lawman or not, he had just assaulted a prisoner, and not just some prisoner off of the street, but an extremely important man, and the press knew. Heads were going to roll. The locals put calls in to contact Crow’s superiors, but rapidly discovered that his superiors were very difficult to reach. Crow waited long enough for the cops to not have a direct eye on him and then easily made his escape. There was no cell that could hold him if he didn’t feel like it. He even stopped long enough to pick up everything that had been confiscated: his fabricated identification papers, his. 45, the Dymaxion nullifier, and his coat, before walking right out the door.
Later, the police would finally get through to somebody at the mysterious Office of the Coordinator of Information, only to be told that they had no officer by the name of Crow. The U.S. Attorney’s office would be stymied as well. Eventually the whole thing would go away like these things tended to do.
His men picked him up on the corner. The automobile barely even slowed as he got into the back. “Status?” he asked in greeting.
“The President is going to live, but he might still lose the use of his legs.”
“That’s unfortunate news.” Crow feigned sympathy rather well. “I don’t know if the country is ready for a cripple to be in charge. What about the prisoner?”
“He’s been secured, sedated, and sent with two Dymaxions to headquarters.”
“Good news. Where is Stuyvesant now?”
“Heading for the air station like you predicted.”
“Excellent.” Crow’s manner was completely different than when he’d been questioning Stuyvesant. Inside, he’d acted hot-headed, erratic, and violent. That had been necessary. He needed Stuyvesant rattled. Out here it was back to business, so Crow was collected and focused. Hot, cold, good, evil, friendly, vicious, it didn’t matter, they were just modes. He picked the one he wanted and wore it like a suit. It was all about whatever it took to get the job done.
The brazen assault on Stuyvesant would raise questions as to why an investigator had been so angry with the rich kid and supposed hero of the hour-even though Stuyvesant’s presence had been an unexpected development and certainly not one to be wasted-but with the press there, rumors would begin to spread about Stuyvesant’s possible involvement. And all that would occur without the OCI having to say anything official at all.
“I rattled him. I want Stuyvesant’s every move watched. I want to know who he talks to, who he calls, who he meets, where he goes. I want to know how his breakfast tastes and I want to know the temperature of his bathwater. The second he meets someone else on the list, do the same to them.” He thought about it. “And I want two layers on that kid. Make one obvious but put our best men on the second. When Stuyvesant thinks he’s lost the first, that’s when he’ll make contact with his conspirators. Don’t underestimate him. He’s sharper than he looks. Most importantly, watch out for that Traveler girl. The second she shows up to check on her boyfriend, I want her brought in.”
“Yes, Mr. Crow,” the OCI agents answered in unison.
“ Alive. ” The girl was the most valuable one in the bunch. If they lost her, the boss would be very upset. “What else have we got?”
The driver spoke. “The situation in New York has improved. That mercenary girl found the Heavy. Our men will snatch him shortly.”
“No. I want a soft touch on that one. Play it easy. Check the reports. He’s worked with the Bureau a bunch. Find somebody he doesn’t hate, if there is such a thing, and use them to make contact. Borrow whoever we need to, but do not let the BI know what this is about.”
There was a serious professional rivalry developing between the new OCI and the entrenched Bureau of Investigation. J. Edgar Hoover thought that Active criminals should be treated like any other type of criminals. He saw OCI’s lumping of all undesirable Actives together as foolish. Hoover grumbled about violating civil liberties, but Crow figured he just didn’t want to lose clout.
“Let the Heavy take the call and see what that’s all about. Then we’ll take him down.” Crow didn’t use the word arrest, because from what he’d heard about the Heavy, it would be a bloodbath. “Nothing flashy. There’s no way we could take that one alive.”
They only knew who a handful of these people were. Stuyvesant was one, but he was just a kid. The Mover was like a tree. You could shake a tree to see what fell out. Sullivan? That son of a bitch had strolled through Second Somme. The Heavy was a rock. You shake a rock and it was liable to just roll over and squish you.
“How do you want us to handle it?”
“Wait until he’s done talking, then put a bullet in him… Make that lots of bullets. Don’t let our boys take any lip from the military intel types that are there, either. Let the Heavy take the call, then pop him. I’ll fill out the paperwork.”
“Yes, Mr. Crow.”
Crow wasn’t his real name. He’d gone by dozens of names over the years, doing things outside the law for people too squeamish to do them through official channels. He’d worked for everyone from United Fruit to Woodrow Wilson, though this was
the first time he had an entire government agency at his disposal. Plus the laws were actually on his side for once, or would be soon at least. Those were being written now.
No, Crow wasn’t his real name, but it was real enough to accomplish his current assignment.
Eliminate the Active group known as the Grimnoir Society.
Chapter 3
The more we progress the more we tend to progress. We advance not in arithmetical but in geometrical progression. We draw compound interest on the whole capital of knowledge and virtue which has been accumulated since the dawning of time. Some eighty thousand years are supposed to have existed between Paleolithic and Neolithic man. Yet in all that time he only learned to grind his flint stones instead of chipping them. But within our fathers’ lives what changes have there not been? The railway and the telegraph, chloroform and applied electricity. All before the invention of magic. In the span of my own life what has man not accomplished? Telekinesis, teleportation, pyrokinesis, biological manipulation, communication with spirits. Ten years now go further than a thousand then, not so much on account of our finer intellects as because the light we have shows us the way to more. Primeval man stumbled along with peering eyes, and slow, uncertain footsteps. Now we walk briskly towards our unknown goal.
— Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The History of Wizards, 1926
New York City, New York
There was a knock on the apartment door.
Sullivan was already awake and waiting by the time the visitor made his presence known. He’d been a light sleeper his whole life, a trait that had only been reinforced during the war. The deep sleepers hadn’t lived through the nighttime poison gas barrages.
The echo of a man’s footsteps in the hall had been enough to rouse him, and the fact that those footsteps had stopped at his door had been enough to clear his head and put his big Browning. 45 automatic in his hand. There was a bit of yellow city light leaking in around the curtains, just enough for him to make out the hands on his watch. Nearly midnight.
Odd time for a caller, but if it had been the Imperium, they probably wouldn’t have knocked.
The apartment was tiny, in a nondescript old building half a mile’s walk from the library. He lived there under a false name. He associated with no one, had no friends, didn’t even hit the bar downstairs. Nobody, not even the Society, knew where he was. He checked the black and gold ring on his finger, but its spells weren’t warning him of anything. Flexing his Power, he let his senses adjust to the world of pulls, mass, and density to get a sense of the surroundings. There was only one man in the hall.
The knock came again. A muffled voice called out. “Sullivan? You in there?”
He always left his clothes where he could find them in the dark. You never knew when you’d have to leave someplace in a hurry. “Who is it?”
“Sam Cowley. Can I come in?”
Cowley was from the Bureau of Investigation, one of Hoover’s men. Unexpected. Technically, he had violated the terms of his parole by bailing out last year, but Pershing had set things in motion to clear Sullivan of his obligations and Francis’ lawyers had made sure that everything had been signed, nice and legal. For all he knew, he should have been in the clear.
Besides, if the G-men had come to haul him in again, they would’ve known better than to send a lone agent. They would have sent a crack team and a whole lot of guns. Sullivan had cultivated a bit of reputation over the years. Throwing his shirt on, he kept the. 45 behind his back and opened the door a crack.
He kept his voice flat. “What’re you doing here, Sam?”
“Looking for you, obviously.” Cowley stood there politely, hat in hand, obviously waiting for an invitation inside.
Sullivan stuck his head into the hall and looked around suspiciously. “How’d you find me?”
“Modern law enforcement has all sorts of scientific resources.. ” As in, none of your business. “We need to talk.”
Agent Cowley was a soft-looking, plain-spoken, but hard-working cop. They had worked together on several cases and Cowley was about as scrupulous as a government employee could possibly be, but Sullivan had been burned by the BI before. The list of people he trusted was a very short one, and he wasn’t about to start putting any of J. Edgar’s men on it anytime soon. “Time’s served. Hoover’s jobs are done. I’m square with the BI.”
“The director didn’t send me. Can I come in or not?”
Sullivan stepped out of the way. “Not much to look at, but have a seat.” He gestured at one of the two ratty chairs beside the round table in the kitchen. There really wasn’t much to the apartment other than the kitchen and a closet with a bed squeezed into it, but at least the rats were small, so he’d lived in worse. With Society money, he could certainly afford something nicer now, but nicer wasn’t low profile.
They shook hands. Sullivan was careful not to squeeze too hard. Cowley was a paper pusher, and Sullivan had a grip that could make boilermakers flinch. The crumbling old building had been wired for power, but it seldom worked right, so Sullivan lit an oil lamp on the table. As expected from a criminal investigator, Cowley immediately took note of the several mirrors hung on the walls and the items on the table: a notebook, a package of marking pens, a bloodstained towel with several scalpels and picks arranged on it, and some corked vials filled with a black liquid. “Whatever have you been up to?”
Casting spells, something that nearly everyone thought was impossible. After he’d figured out how to carve a healing spell into his own chest last year, he’d had a few of his fellow knights volunteer for the same treatment. Since he’d managed not to kill Lance or Heinrich, he’d started experimenting with some of the other designs that he remembered from his viewing of the Power. Since this was uncharted territory, he had stuck to drawing them on himself. It was terribly painful, but since he hadn’t died, he called that real progress. It was terrifying work, but the next time he went up against a magically augmented Iron Guard, he’d be ready.
“Nothing important.” Sullivan swept the containers of demon smoke off to the side, covered them with the towel, and set his pistol on top.
Cowley pulled out a chair and sat down. He didn’t bother removing his overcoat. Apparently he wasn’t planning on staying long. “Well, Jake. Good to see you again. Been awhile.”
“Since Chicago…” It had been after his initial encounter with the Grimnoir. Cowley and the other BI agents had been easily defeated by Dan Garrett’s team, but Sullivan had tried to chase them down on his own. He’d managed to fight his way through most of them, thereby impressing Black Jack Pershing, and the rest was history. “When your boss chewed my ass for getting tossed off a blimp.”
The G-man sighed. “You know, Mr. Hoover’s not a bad man. He just has a very stressful job. We put a lot of bad characters away.”
“He told me I was a slave.” It was still a sore spot. Cowley had no response to that. “How do you think he’d react if he knew that you could do even a little bit of magic?”
“Got me there…” Cowley said slowly. He was a passive Torch, with just the barest glimmer of ability to create and control fire. Hoover’s distrust of magic and dislike of its users was well known. It was a growing and popular sentiment in positions of authority, especially since the destruction of Mar Pacifica. “Times are changing. Probably going to get even tougher on magicals too, I imagine, after what happened today.”
Sullivan hadn’t been close to a radio all day, hadn’t seen the paper, and his only human contact had been beating the hell out of a gang of hoodlums, so he had no idea what Cowley was talking about. “What happened today?”
“You don’t know? An Active tried to assassinate President-elect Roosevelt.”
This was not what his people needed. “How bad?”
“I don’t have any details yet. My superiors did send out a cable that he’s alive. I hear it was bad. Big crowd of admirers there when it happened. The police in Florida are still collecting body parts, so they don’t even kno
w how many people died yet. It’s a real mess down there.”
“They sure it was magic?”
“Don’t know what kind, but he was making the air explode with his bare hands.”
“Hmmm…” That sounded like the descriptions of a Boomer, though he’d never actually met one. “Imperium, anarchist, communist, or nut on his own?”
“Nobody knows yet.”
“This is a nightmare.” Sullivan rubbed his face. “Absolute nightmare.”
“Poor Roosevelt,” Cowley agreed.
“Poor Roosevelt, hell. Poor us. I saw a mob try to lynch a little kid once because they thought his magic was scary. What’s gonna happen when they’ve got a reason to be scared?”
Mar Pacifica had been his brother’s doing. His big brother had been a genius, an evil genius, but a genius nonetheless. The Imperium had drawn first blood, weakened its enemy, and gotten away with it. That same attack had cost Delilah her life. Matty, I hope you’re slow-roasting in hell.
“Whole place is going to blow up now. Good thing it’s too cold to riot tonight,” Sullivan muttered.
“Not down South it’s not. I’ve heard some awful things have happened already. Business burned, random Actives gunned down…”
He’d have to get in contact with the Society quickly. They would be doing damage control, and hopefully, if the assassin belonged to some group, making the rest of them go away permanently. This kind of thing was exactly why the Grimnoir existed, protecting Actives from Normals, and vice versa. He’d gotten rather good at communication spells, and that was much cheaper than a telephone call, but first things first. He needed to get rid of Cowley. “So why the visit?”
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