“Tell me,” I said.
“Ma’am. Gilgamesh and I worked out a schedule to keep watch on each other, and he vanished from my metasense twenty minutes ago. He was at his office at the time. I headed over and found the place a skunked up mess. Then I called you.”
The ‘kidnapping’ was by inference. Well, inference and Crow instincts, normally quite good in situations like this. Gilgamesh’s engineering crew was part of the legal side of my operations, and I had their check scheduled for after I got back from the Plattsburg meeting. “Any hope of tracking him or who took him?”
“Nothing, ma’am.” I had to ask. Anyone capable of kidnapping a Crow should be able to damp his own metapresence at the very least.
“I’m on my way.”
Gilgamesh’s office sat just under five miles from my house, so he could keep track of me. Echo must have metasensed the meeting and figured out our plan. Dammit!
I rousted Hank from his office and Tom from his much-needed nap and headed off.
I sat down beside Hephaestus, who had sought refuge behind the office building where Gilgamesh’s small oil field service firm was located. I smelled vomit. “How can I help?”
Hephaestus looked at me as if I was insane. “Ma’am. I feel terrible. This was on my watch, and not only couldn’t I do anything about it, I metasensed nothing as it happened. What sort of worthless Crow Guru am I?”
We had been putting together pieces here for two hours. From the people who survived and maintained their sanity, I had managed to put together a story. One Angela Powell, a secretary, had gone into Gilgamesh’s office just before he arrived. The secretary, presumably Echo in disguise, had surprised Gilgamesh when he entered. Gilgamesh fought back for a moment with his rotten egg tennis balls and called for help; Echo had dropped him by the time help arrived, at which point Echo, still disguised, skunked the entire office. Out of this mess we had two induced transformations and nine people who would have died if Hephaestus hadn’t been able to clean the skunky dross off of them.
“Worry later,” I said. No comfort from me, now. “Do you have any tricks we might be able to use to track Gilgamesh? If he’s conscious at all, he should be able to leave us dross markers to follow. He’s done so before.”
“There’s nothing within my range,” Hephaestus said. “Other than my metasense, I don’t have any useful tricks for this.”
“Could you stick around? I’m going to try and arrange some things, and I might need you later.”
He nodded and covered his head in his hands.
“Fuck!” Keaton said. I stayed at Gilgamesh’s office for now, using his phones to try to contact anyone who might help: Keaton, Lori, Tonya. I even nerved myself up to call Focus Keistermann, who I had never talked to before, just on the off chance she might be able to help. She wasn’t available, either. Keaton was the first who returned my call. “This doesn’t make any sense. Why spy on Gilgamesh and his side business?”
“You don’t think it was Echo?” Gilgamesh’s office was small but neat, every item in its proper place. I paced, too tense to sit.
“Oh, I’m sure it was,” my boss said. “I’m also sure we don’t know the full story.”
“I think I’ve got part of it figured out,” I said. “I suspect Echo was sent here by Chevalier to keep tabs on Gilgamesh, not me. The information Echo’s selling to Rogue Crow, about the clean side of my operation, is only of secondary importance to what he’s been doing for Guru Chevalier. The most damaging thing is that he’s been able to keep tabs on Gilgamesh’s personal abilities and habits.”
“Rogue Crow wants Gilgamesh, then. Echo kidnapped Gilgamesh to deliver him to Rogue Crow and the Hunters.”
My heart sank. I had concluded the same. If Rogue Crow had him, how the hell would I be able to save him? “Gilgamesh knows everything.”
“I know that,” Keaton said. “Get him back. Assume they’re going north. Follow with a team. Get help. I’ll hire Inferno to do the security at the damned meeting so you don’t have to be there.”
“Should I still send Hank?” He was one of the featured speakers at the meeting.
“Yes. I’ll arrange for security for him at the other end.”
One of the other office phones rang. “Want to bet that’s Lori?” Keaton said.
“Of course it’s her.” I picked up the other phone and held it to my other ear.
“Yes?”
“Carol?” It was Lori. “What’s the emergency?”
“Echo kidnapped Gilgamesh. Can you do anything to find him?”
“Wait a second.” I waited. I heard Keaton talking on another phone, on her end, to Connie Yerizarian of Inferno. They agreed on a price of forty five thousand for the emergency guard mission before Lori spoke again.
“He’s either dead, being guarded by advanced Crow tricks, or not near a phone,” she said. She took a deep breath. “I can try again once night falls. Please don’t ask how.”
Ah. The Dreaming. Lori would be using tricks she normally held in reserve.
“I won’t. I’m going to be heading north, just in case. I’ll stop by lots of phones.” I hung up, cleared everything with my boss, and hunted down Hank. He was still at work on the casualties.
“You’re doing the meeting alone, Hank,” I said. I had to get out of here before I found either of the two new Transforms too appetizing to turn down.
“I understand,” he said, fearful and unhappy.
“Keaton’s arranging security at the other end. I’ll have Tom and his crew provide security on this end, until you’re on the plane. Get into your disguise and get moving.”
---
“Got him!” Lori said.
Midnight, Memphis, and hopefully as the Crow drove I was getting close, assuming Echo headed for Chicago.
“Where?” I said, from one of the rank of pay phones outside the city bus station. Engines hummed and chugged and spewed black exhaust into the air, and lonely people huddled under their coats, trying to get warm. The cold mist stank of exhaust and city smells.
“Dallas.”
Dallas, not Chicago? “What the fuck is going on here?”
“My Guru is there,” Hephaestus said, a Crow whisper. Crow instincts or something drove him to leap to the phone beside mine and dial a Dallas number. “I’m getting a ‘phone has been disconnected’ message.” Hephaestus melted to the ground and grabbed my leg for comfort. Now I had a panicky Crow to deal with, clearly not thinking right if he thought he might get emotional support from me right now.
I wasn’t in a good mood. Rather predatory. Also scared shitless. Arpeggio was one of our suspects, one of the most senior Crows. He didn’t like Arms at all, and me in particular he liked less.
“Carol, there’s more,” Lori said. Her voice was tinny over the phone. “Rogue Crow’s involved, directly, on his way to Dallas or already there. With backup, apparently Patriarchs.”
“How did you learn about this?”
“I got told,” Lori said. I heard tears in her voice, but she covered them well. I suspected she had learned this through the Dreaming, perhaps with the Madonna of Montreal’s help. “Don’t treat this as a full explanation. There’s a noticeable chance I’m not interpreting things correctly. Guru Arpeggio could be Rogue Crow.”
The Dreaming was notoriously inaccurate. “One I’m not going to discount,” I said. “I’ve got to get to Dallas. I’ll stop several times along the way.”
“I’m already on the move,” Lori said. “I need to get to Plattsburg by sunrise. Inferno and I. We’ve got Hank with us.”
I took a deep breath and thanked God that Hank was safe, or at least in less danger than before. “Keep an eye out for traps.” This sort of chaos would be a perfect spot for one of our enemies to try to take out the rest of us.
“On it.”
We drove.
Gilgamesh: January 26th, 1969
Gilgamesh joggled awake when the car stopped and tried to remember how he got here. A Crow, disguised as o
ne of his secretaries, had jumped him in his office. He had shouted for help as he detonated his rotten eggs, and…nothing.
Now he huddled under a ratty blanket, tied up in the back seat of a car, gagged and blindfolded, and so far down on juice and dross that he hurt. He couldn’t even summon up his metasense or his ability to gather dross.
The car’s driver got out. Without a metasense, he couldn’t tell whether Echo had him, or someone else. He remembered Sky’s advice and forced himself to keep his metasense turned off. He was a juice producer. Eventually he would generate enough juice to function again. He needed to be patient.
He heard cars and trucks, but not people. A freeway rest stop, Gilgamesh guessed. The driver walked six paces and stopped, then fed coins into something – a telephone, Gilgamesh recognized, once the driver started dialing.
“It’s me,” the driver said, with Echo’s voice. Gilgamesh decided Echo was the kidnapper as well as the driver. “I have something I want to sell to you. Gilgamesh. He’s tied up in the back seat of my car.”
“Sell? You’re as ridiculous as my quivering spy in Detroit. That isn’t how I work,” the faint voice on the other end of the phone said. Gilgamesh thrashed in the back seat in sudden overwhelming panic. This was Wandering Shade’s voice, the same one he had heard in Chicago when they spied on Focus Frasier. “You’re going to take him to me, in Kansas City, and give him over. I’ll owe you.”
“I want cash,” Echo said. “This job’s gone belly up. There’s no way I’m going back to Houston, so I want out, now, and I want to be paid.” Tiamat’s internal investigations had finally been about to find Echo, Gilgamesh realized. So Echo ran, trying to make a profit on the way out. Panicked Crow, with enough courage to be greedy.
“You utter fool,” Wandering Shade said. “Do you have any conception of who you’re pissing off, now, or what resources I have available? I own you now. I…”
“If I can’t sell him to you, I’ll just sell him to someone else. Such as Tiamat.”
“If you do any such thing, I’ll hunt you down, rip the Law into your head and turn you into baby Hunter bait.”
“Last chance,” Echo said. Okay, a lot of courage, Gilgamesh thought. “Make me an offer.”
Wandering Shade hung up.
“Motherfucking melodramatic lunatic,” Echo said, exasperated. “I knew Gilgamesh was more trouble than he was worth from the start.” Echo dialed again.
“Hello?”
“Guru Arpeggio. I don’t know if you remember me, but my name is Echo. Do you have a moment?”
“Of course, of course. I always have time for Guru Chevalier’s pet spies,” Arpeggio said. He didn’t sound the least bit happy.
“I’m looking for a buyer for a product I’ve managed to acquire. A Crow by the name of Gilgamesh. He’s a captive of mine right now.”
Arpeggio hissed.
“I’ve heard in the grapevine that you’re not much enamored of Gilgamesh, and I’m looking to unload him. Are you interested?”
“What conditions are attached to this offer?” Arpeggio said.
“None at all,” Echo said. “For all I care, you can set him free once you get him. Or kill him or bend his mind and make him yours. Whatever you want.”
“I’m willing to listen,” Arpeggio said. Gilgamesh thought the Guru sounded royally pissed. “What’s the price?”
“A hundred grand.”
“As if I have a hundred grand in my back pocket? I can offer you two thousand in cash.”
Echo snorted. Arpeggio bargained Echo down to forty thousand with ten percent up front. After Echo hung up, he walked back to the car and laughed.
“You worthless piece of shit!” he said. “Get back to sleep!”
Gilgamesh’s world blacked out again.
Henry Zielinski: January 27th, 1969
“I’m going to keep it short and sweet,” Polly said, as she began the Plattsburg meeting. “We have just three presentations, and everything here falls in the category of dangerous information we need to keep private. You first, Tonya.”
Tonya stood and gave her presentation. Zielinski, stuck in his Dr. Wilma Orza disguise and seated at a small wooden table by himself, attempted to ignore the odor of sauerkraut and spilled beer. He was slated to present next, but he wasn’t aware of Tonya’s topic, so instead of rehearsing his presentation in his head, he paid close attention.
Outside the German Alehouse and VFW meeting center in Plattsburg, Focus Rizzari ran security, coordinating with the bodyguard teams of Focuses Biggioni, Keistermann, Webb and Bentlow. Inferno had been keeping a close eye on him, guarding him ever since they picked him up in Boston.
Tonya started by reading a letter from Focus Hargrove. She detailed the blackmail attempt on Hargrove, and to his surprise, the information Hargrove was being blackmailed to assassinate Focus Adkins. Focuses Webb and Bentlow lost their restless air and riveted their attention on Tonya. Tonya explained how she went directly to Focus Keistermann, and how Polly had started a whole bunch of balls rolling. Tonya went on to talk about how she got the Arm, Keaton, involved, and why Keaton had been in Detroit to start with – arranged through Tonya by an unknown first Focus, likely Adkins herself, after the Hunter rampage in Detroit. “Arm Keaton is willing to help protect the Detroit Focuses and examine the problem. Arm Hancock is also involved, in ways our next speaker will explain.”
Tonya’s comment was his cue, and he stood and took his place at the podium.
“Pardon the disguise,” he started off, “but I’m a wanted man. Save for Focus Webb, you once knew me as Dr. Henry Zielinski. I work for Arm Hancock now. I’m here to talk about the Male Major Transforms we variously label as Male Arms, Beast Men or Chimeras.”
The best reaction was from Jill Bentlow, who gaped like a fish, not from the topic, but because he still existed. He suspected Jill had believed the story about his death in the jailbreak associated with his ‘rescue’. Zielinski wasn’t happy that two more people in the world knew about his rescue and escape, but he always suspected it would be impossible to keep the information indefinitely from the Focus Council and the first Focuses. Whether his help in the Rogue Crow affair would mollify the first Focuses and get them off his case remained an open question. Their reaction to Polly’s current antics might easily add all four of the Council Focuses in this room to the ‘to be assassinated ASAP’ list.
He worked through his slides and overheads, giving them the scientific basis behind the existence of Chimeras, the evidence he had collected, his knowledge about Chimera history and his own eyewitness accounts. Then he got to the hard part. “We now have evidence someone has found a way to produce a Chimera with a brain significantly larger and more complex than a normal human brain, using a withdrawal scarring variant. These Chimeras have been enslaved by a Crow who calls himself Wandering Shade, and he’s the one doing the withdrawal scarring. These Chimeras, who call themselves Hunters, have become a threat to us all.” Jill wore a dark frown at his words, and she looked like she was about to stalk out the door, but Focus Webb was intrigued. She wanted to see the evidence.
He went into the details. He had several sets of samples to show, one set from Dr. Wilson, Tonya’s pet researcher, concerning the Chimera Keaton had killed in the Philadelphia massacre, the other the Chimera Carol had killed in Chicago. Both had cerebral convolutions and brain surface areas significantly larger than human normal. This did not necessarily make them superhuman geniuses, given the mental costs of the withdrawal scarring, just potentially more intelligent than a normal human could ever be.
He then delved into the DNA question, which included a short fifteen-minute presentation on what DNA was and how chromosomes worked. Chimeras possessed the normal set of human chromosomes, plus some extras they acquired during their transformation. These extras somehow, in an unknown fashion, allowed them to shift their shapes over days and weeks, their shape-shifting limited in speed by the availability of élan, the Chimera juice variant, and food and water. H
e didn’t mention how the best of the Nobles, using the Great Enabler and Occum’s other tricks, could change from beast to human-form in less than a day. Their faster shape changing appeared to be the only benefit the poor Nobles had over the Hunters.
Lastly, he went on to his epidemiological work. This was his personal research, a project he started over a decade ago, which included some old published papers, and a lot of material from papers rejected because they were too radical. “There appears to be just one chemical trigger that turns a normal transformation into a major transformation. Thus, the number of Arm and Chimera transformations is the same as the number of Focus and Crow transformations. The reason we see far fewer predators than Focuses and Crows is due to excess mortality, as the predator transformations appear to be significantly riskier than the Focus and Crow transformations.” Hank’s audience gazed back at him in stark disbelief. To convince them he would have to elaborate.
“Transform Sickness has a listed mortality rate of 13.5%. We think of the mortality rate in this way: ‘people get sick with Transform Sickness. They recover and become Transforms, or they die.’ Well, why do people die? A large percentage of these deaths occur in the pre-pubescent, in post-menopausal women, and in men over the age of seventy. The rest appear to be failed major transformations, or failed transformations of a type we have yet to identify. I suspect, based on post-transformation survival, a significant number of these failed Major Transforms would have been Arms and Chimeras.
“In fact, based on sightings and encounters, we know there are more Chimeras than there are Arms. The evidence we have hints at dozens of surviving Chimeras.” Focus Webb nodded; his elaboration convinced her. Jill still frowned her angry frown, but the more Hank thought about it, the more he suspected she knew everything in his presentation ahead of time. She didn’t want this information revealed. Polly looked like she believed him, though if Hank had to guess, he suspected she would let the information settle in her mind for a while before she accepted it.
All That We Are (The Commander Book 7) Page 16
