ONSET: My Enemy's Enemy
Page 12
“Director van der Watt is in his office,” one of the older-looking women, the one standing next to the security unlock button, volunteered. “What’s going on?”
“We have reason to believe Talon Security was involved in a terrorist attack here in Seattle,” David said flatly. “You will all be interviewed before you can leave, but so long as no one resists, no one will be harmed.”
“There’s an armed contingent on the top floor,” the woman warned him.
“I know,” David replied. “That’s why I need to speak to the director.” He glanced back at the fireteam with him.
“No one leaves,” he ordered them. “Hellet, with me.”
With the other ONSET agent at his shoulder, he threw open the door the assistant had indicated and walked calmly into van der Watt’s office, his rifle held at the ready.
“Federal Agents,” he announced calmly. “Mr. Van der Watt?”
The shaven-headed man behind the desk was absolutely immense. Whatever his role now, it was pretty clear he’d started as a frontline soldier, with a clear scar from where a bullet had bounced off his skull visible on his head.
“I am Alexander van der Watt,” the man confirmed slowly, studying David calmly. “What is the meaning of this?”
“We have a warrant to search this facility and seize all of your files,” David told him. “We have the building on lockdown and will be interviewing all Talon Security employees before permitting them to leave.
“I understand you have armed personnel in the building,” he continued. “You will have them report to Captain Narita on the thirty-seventh floor and surrender their weapons.
“We are not responsible for the safety of anyone who does not surrender their guns,” he warned. “Resistance will be met with all necessary force. We have full sanction.”
“I see,” van der Watt replied. “I think you will need to speak to our lawyers before this proceeds any further.”
David smiled thinly.
“Due to the circumstances under which this warrant was issued, your lawyers will not be permitted to represent you,” he told the director. “State lawyers will be provided for the interviews.”
The big man paused, his skin paling.
“I’m sorry, what?” he demanded.
“Your company is believed to have been involved in an act of supernatural terrorism,” David told him. “You now fall under the jurisdiction of the Office of Supernatural Policing and Investigation. Your constitutional rights will be respected, but the situation calls for special constraints.”
“You expect me to believe there’s an office of the US government for the supernatural?” the director scoffed.
“I don’t need you to believe in me for my authority to exist,” David said calmly. “Or for the Office to be able to lock you away somewhere dark for a long time—or, most importantly today, for my men to shoot yours dead if they don’t surrender.
“Now, Mr. Van der Watt, will you stand your men down or is there going to be more shooting?”
“May I use the phone?” he asked after a moment.
David nodded, and the big Afrikaner picked up his phone and dialed a number.
“Harry, this is Alex,” he said flatly. “I’m assuming you have some kind of brilliant plan to deal with the gentlemen who’ve taken over our office?” Pause. “Thought so. You won’t execute it. They’re exactly who they say they are and they have the firepower to end you.
“You’ll report to reception and turn over your weapons.” Another pause. “No, Harry, if you shoot at federal agents, we are fucked. Give. Them. Your. Guns.”
Another moment of silence, then the director hung the phone up.
“He’ll cooperate,” he said calmly. “What now?”
“We finish securing the building, and then we’ll have to start some interviews,” David told him. “Get comfortable, Mr. Van der Watt. I wouldn’t expect to be going home today.”
Chapter 18
“The building is secure,” Narita reported calmly. “We have successfully evacuated all floors not belonging to Talon Security and moved them out through the perimeter. The only people in this building are us and Talon Security employees.”
“Any more problems?” David asked. The reception area was empty now, both the receptionist and her armed erstwhile paramour moved elsewhere as the open space became an impromptu command center.
“No,” the AP Captain replied. “The reaction force surrendered their weapons—in poor grace, but they surrendered them nonetheless.” He smiled mirthlessly. “If nothing else, they all have a very familiar and quite illegal modification for full automatic fire.”
“Same armor and rifles as our attackers, then?” David said.
“Identical, though these appear to all still have their serial numbers,” Narita confirmed. “Only circumstantial, I know, but…”
“A big-enough mountain of circumstantial adds up,” David agreed grimly. “And the rest of the Talon people?”
“We’ve moved them all to the fortieth-floor meeting rooms. I’ve got a squad keeping an eye on them while we wait for the interviewers to arrive, and another squad sweeping the offices for anyone we’ve missed.”
“And the third floor?”
“I have another squad down there. Two more on the main floor, and another on the roof with half my weapons platoon. My other weapons teams and my third rifle platoon are holding the perimeter.”
Narita shrugged.
“We’ve stretched pretty thin,” he pointed out. “But we’ve got it locked down. When do you want to start the interviews?”
“Alston’s team will arrive tonight to go through the paperwork and electronic files,” David told him. They’d been scheduled to come in the previous day, but the warrant delay had resulted in their being pulled into another case.
“Possibly tomorrow morning,” he admitted with a sigh. “De Bergen’s people should be handling most of the interviews. They should be here, with lawyers in tow, shortly.”
“I hope they appreciate the effort we go through to get them qualified lawyers,” Narita said.
“Mostly, people are upset they can’t use the very expensive firms they have on retainer,” David pointed out. “Unfortunately for them, those firms aren’t trained in supernatural law, so…”
He shrugged.
“Once we have lawyers near, I’m going to need to speak to van der Watt again,” he concluded. “In the interim, I’m going to search the executive offices for physical or magical evidence. Kate!”
Hellet had just returned to the reception area from her own sweep of the current floor. “Boss?”
“Find anything?”
“Not much,” she replied. Second Sight was, literally, magical—but it didn’t make it easier to know what documents were incriminating. “Nothing magical yet, at least.”
“I’m going to check in the c-suites and move out from there,” he told her. “Keep sweeping up; I’ll meet you in the middle.”
#
An investigator could tell a lot about someone by studying their office. An investigator with Second Sight could learn even more, studying not merely the furniture but the accumulation of days, months or years of emotion that sank into those objects.
Van der Watt’s office reeked of a level of self-gratifying gloating that almost made David want to find the man just to punch him in the face. The emotions weren’t particularly helpful in tracking down evidence, though, and there was a complete lack of anything magical in the director’s office.
Toning down his Sight, David studied the room, looking for any clues that leapt out to the regular eye. The man’s computer was currently useless, its network connection severed almost forty floors below him, but his papers and wall decorations held some hints.
One wall was covered in pictures, tracing a career all the way back to the pre-apartheid South African Army. Despite that suggestive beginning, the last photo of van der Watt in a South African uniform showed him shaking hands with Ne
lson Mandela, both men grinning at a joke long lost to decades of time.
The rest of the pictures were the man in various iterations of camouflage fatigues and mercenary uniforms. David was sure the uniforms and locations were meaningful to van der Watt, though he was left guessing that they were all in South Africa.
The opposite wall held two weapons: an AK-47 and a feathered spear. Neither looked new—or particularly functional—and again, David suspected their meaning was specific to van der Watt himself.
Nothing magical. No papers or objects that felt like blood gold or anything else so obvious. He’d expected that any operation of the scale that had attacked the Conclave would have been run through the regional director’s office, but if there was anything here to show his involvement, it didn’t look unusual.
David took a moment to skim through the papers in the man’s inbox. There was nothing special there—a handful of contracts to be signed for personal protection details, a quote for new, US-built helicopters, a letter of appreciation from a major Hollywood celebrity for his bodyguards’ work.
Van der Watt’s office was a bust. The man probably had been involved, but any trace of that was going to be in the computers Alston’s people would dismantle tomorrow.
Stepping out of the director’s office, David reached for his Second Sight again, sweeping a more general view across the glass enclosure of the executive offices. He wasn’t trying for the close-range inspection that would pick up old emotions, just a general sweep for anything unusual or magical.
What was that?
It wasn’t magical, not as David usually understood the term, anyway. It was a tiny little blotch of decay and power inside one of the offices. It looked completely out of place, and he shook aside his Sight and crossed to the office.
The name plaque informed him this was the office of Karl Adams, Western United States Operations Manager. The office inside was much plainer than van der Watt’s, with a simpler desk and no wall decorations.
Adams clearly hadn’t bothered to decorate the office to his own tastes. The computer was shut down, and a heavy Desert Eagle pistol had been left between the keyboard and monitor. There were no papers in his inbox, leading David to conclude the man hadn’t been in the office when they’d arrived.
That could be a problem.
Studying the room through his Sight, David located the strange splotch at the bottom right side of the desk. Pulling open the drawer there, he noted the object didn’t move. The drawer contained two spare magazines for the Desert Eagle—hardly magical artifacts of decay.
He pulled the drawer out, tossing it onto the floor as he studied the bottom of the desk underneath it. There was at least two inches of space between the bottom of the desk and the visible bottom of the inside of the drawers. The wood wasn’t that thick.
Shrugging, David grabbed the front part of the desk and ripped it off. It was faster and easier for someone of his strength than trying to find whatever catch opened the hidden compartment the damage exposed.
Reaching inside, he found what appeared to be a wooden box. Placing it on top of the desk with careful gloved hands, he studied it. It was a shallow thing made of lacquered dark red wood, roughly the size and shape of a textbook. The splotch of decay was clearer now, vibrating with magical energy at this distance.
The top of the box slid off easily, revealing a velvet-lined interior subdivided into four sections. One held a small black velvet bag, one held an unusually ornate black-and-gold USB stick, and one was empty.
The last, the source of the pulsating sense of decay, held four hypodermics, each full of a thick black substance it took David a moment to recognize as blood.
Vampire blood.
#
David returned to the impromptu command post in the reception area and gestured Narita over to him.
“What is it, sir?” the Anti-Paranormal Captain asked.
“That was my question,” David replied, opening up the box for Narita to see the contents. “I know what the blood is. The other two? I wanted a second set of eyes when I opened them.”
“My helmet is recording,” the gangly man volunteered to a smile from David.
“That’s exactly what I was hoping,” he told the soldier. Carefully, he removed the black velvet bag and opened its drawstring, emptying its contents back into the velvet-lined box and then inhaling sharply as the light hit them.
About two dozen small gemstones had fallen into the black velvet box, glittering with multicolored fire in the artificial light.
“I make it diamonds, sapphires, rubies and emeralds,” David said aloud, as clinically as he could manage. “Not sure of size; I’d guess about ten carats each.”
“That’s…ten to fifteen grand a stone,” Narita observed, his voice faint. “So…what, a quarter million in the bag?”
“Give or take,” David agreed. “Can you check the USB?”
“We can yank the Ethernet cable from the receptionist’s PC and disconnect it from the internet,” the soldier suggested.
Neither of the two officers was the most computer-savvy of men, but physically disconnecting everything except the monitor, mouse and keyboard from a desktop was in their capabilities. Once only those three cables were left, David inserted the USB stick into the computer’s front port and waited a moment.
“There’s just a text file on here,” he said aloud. “A…wallet.dat?”
“Digital coinage,” Narita said slowly, studying it. “I…have no idea how to tell how much that’s worth.”
David pulled out his phone and put through a call to Charles.
“Ye’ve found something,” the dragon said instantly.
“Yeah. A USB stick that seems to contain some kind of digital coinage. Can you take a look?”
“Not unless its attached to a live ’net connection, and I assume ye’re not stupid,” the dragon pointed out. “Link it to your phone and give me a minute.”
“How do I do that?” David asked after a moment of staring at the tower.
He almost heard the dragon roll his eyes before explaining it in small words.
Feeling somewhat like an idiot, the ONSET Commander hooked his phone into the computer and waited for Charles to review it.
“Well, well, well,” the dragon finally said. “Where did ye find this?”
“In one of their operations managers’ desks.”
“Well, it’s about a million dollars in basically untraceable cryptocurrency,” Charles told him. “Whoever ye took that stick from is going to be very unhappy.”
“For more reasons than one,” David said grimly. “It was hidden with his stock of vampire blood. If he’s made it to full thralldom, how long can he go without a dose?”
“Forty-eight hours, max,” the dragon answered.
“Thank you, Charles.”
Hanging up on the dragon, he turned back to Narita.
“Are the lawyers here yet?” he asked. “Because I think its time for me to talk to van der Watt again.”
Chapter 19
The lawyers arrived surprisingly promptly, along with Chief Inspector Catherine de Bergen and her team of interrogators. The apparent senior member of the legal team was a slightly overweight dark-haired woman with her hair in a prim bun who approached David as soon as she spotted him.
“Commander, I am Reanna Mulroney,” she introduced herself crisply. “I understand there is a suite of conference rooms we can take over?”
“Fortieth floor has a number of various sizes, I’m told,” he replied. “We’ll need to begin the interviews ASAP; there’s some evidence we’ve uncovered that I want to talk to Mr. Van der Watt about immediately.”
“We will need to meet with each interviewee prior to their discussions with you,” Mulroney told him. “While the situation is complex, their legal rights remain intact and must be respected. They will need to be briefed on the particulars of their situation.”
“We don’t need to tell all three hundred Talon Security employ
ees about the Omicron Branch,” David replied firmly. “Van der Watt and anyone we can directly link to the attack, certainly, but if we tell three hundred people about Omicron in one shot, you and I will both lose our jobs.”
She smiled thinly. It didn’t reach her eyes or her aura.
“Trust my people,” she told him. “We know this drill, Commander White. For the initial interviews, we don’t need to tell them much. Homeland Security’s authority in cases of terrorism covers our immediate needs. You do, however, need to decide quickly who will be charged and detained and who won’t. You cannot hold everyone here indefinitely.”
“I have forty-eight hours under the Omicron Code,” David replied. “I have no intention of holding anyone who wasn’t directly linked to the attack past that.
“Van der Watt is in charge of their entire operation,” he continued. “I’ll be interviewing him personally. He will need to be fully briefed on his rights under supernatural law. One way or another, he’s not getting out of this mess.”
“Then I will meet with him myself,” Mulroney told him. “Give me fifteen minutes, Commander White. That’s far too little to cover anything except the basics,” she said with a raised hand as he started to object. “I understand we are under time pressure here.”
She strode off, the other lawyers and an AP escort trailing in her wake like the tail of a comet.
Pell took her place a moment later, the pilot stepping beside David.
“Have you looked at the weather yet?” he said quietly.
“No,” David said after a moment’s thought. “It was supposed to be clear all day; didn’t think it would be an issue.”
“That’s changed,” Pell told him. “There’s a nasty-looking storm for Seattle, fast. The city is going to get dark at least two hours before nightfall.”
“That’s inconvenient,” the Commander said grimly. With vampires in play…the sooner it was dark, the sooner the possibility of supernatural attack increased. “Narita,” he called the AP Captain.
“Sir.”
“I’m told we’re looking at early darkness and rain,” David told him. “How bad?”