“Yes. He was a good man.” Nathan said no more. He didn’t have to.
“Who was this tourist? Why was he involved?”
Nathan looked back at me. His face was lined with sadness and I noted a few more gray hairs at his temples. He looked drained of energy, like he could fall into bed and stay there for the next twenty-four hours. If just being a porter did this to you, no wonder he’d left Gatehouse.
“As far as we know, Burris was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I don’t know why he was at the church.”
“Sanctuary?”
“He might have thought it was open or that someone would be inside.”
Lake had been Eight, the number eight man in the twenty-member U.S. Gatehouse, the largest and most powerful of the many Gatehouse organizations around the world, and that meant he had been targeted. “It’s unusual to go after a Gatehouse man, isn’t it?”
“Very.” Nathan took a deep breath and sat erect in his seat. “Something’s happening, Jane. We’ve seen more incidents like this in the past week than we saw most of last year. All the levels are escalating, and we don’t know why.”
“Ditches are nibbling and nibblers are going rampant?”
“That’s about the size of it.” He reached into another coat pocket and pulled out a second photo. This one he laid face up before sliding it my way. “Manifest Manifest, after he became willing but before he turned.”
Tall and muscular, with light brown hair and cheekbones so high his eyes looked like sinkholes, the man in the photo wore a baseball shirt with his team’s name on it: Cosmo’s Titans.
“He used to work in a hardware store,” Nathan said. “Cosmo’s in Durango, Colorado. This photo was taken more than three years ago. Gatehouse is working on getting something more recent.”
It was rare to see a photo of a Sack taken before he’d turned, before he’d chosen evil. “He looks so normal.”
“Keep an eye out for him, but stay away.”
I nodded and took another sip of tea.
“I mean it, Jane. Stay away from him. He’s probably a Festal by now, after killing Steven.”
“They’re only human, Nathan. Isn’t that what Gatehouse keeps telling us? Sacks are not invincible, merely extraordinary.” I stuck the photo in my purse.
“Jane.”
“I have no intention of getting anywhere near this Sack.”
A woman walking by our table turned her head at the word “Sack.” It didn’t matter. All that was required of me or of any hunter was a little discretion most of the time. Our world—the world of hunters, porters, Gatehouse—was carefully guarded not by any CIA-like cunning, but by disbelief. I could have stood at my table, right then and there, and shouted its existence, but who would have believed me?
After all, Sacks are everywhere and no one gives them a second thought. They’re administrative clerks and charity shop owners. They’re college professors and athletes. They get colds and vomit with the flu. They wipe their mouths with their sleeves when they eat hot dogs. Their ordinariness is their finest shield. Though even in their ordinariness they are superb. Superbly crafted by ... I don’t know who or what. I’ve asked and received no definitive answers. All I get are instructions.
“I’ll keep my distance,” I continued. “I’m well aware of my shortcomings.” I knew I couldn’t deal with a Festal.
“All of us have to be aware of our shortcomings.” Nathan turned once more to the window. A couple strolled by carrying plastic bags from a nearby grocery, the adobe restaurant across the street turning amber with the lowering sun. “The sun’s setting earlier and earlier.”
My stomach was beginning to churn. He wasn’t telling me everything. “What is it, Nathan?” He glanced back at me.
“It’s a never-ending battle,” he said.
“I know.”
“Do you wish you’d never been told?”
“Sometimes. But now that I know, I don’t really have a choice.” If I didn’t exactly enjoy my job, neither did I loathe it. It was necessary. Someone had to do it. Every day.
“You do it for Emily.”
“For others too.”
“Things are changing.”
“You said that. Escalating.”
“No, it’s something else. They’re changing. From the Desires up to the Elations.”
“How?”
“They’re beginning to act together. To act in concert for the good of them all.”
“But they hate each other.”
“Their hatred of us seems to have overtaken their reluctance to work together. As far as Gatehouse can tell, they’re still killing alone, but their actions the past couple of weeks suggest a common goal.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Sacks working together? The Sacks in a single level, maybe—Desires with Desires, Alarms with Alarms—but Sacks as a whole? They didn’t even have a name for themselves as a whole. “Sack” was a hunter word. Sacks themselves knew one another only by their level names, and those they had given to themselves. And the hatred between levels was enormous, dwarfed only by Sacks’ hatred of non-Sacks and their non-Sack world.
“What common goal could they have?” I asked.
“We don’t know for sure.”
We. He was still close to Gatehouse, porter or not. I watched him, waiting for him to say more.
“That’s all I can say right now. I’ve told you everything you need to know to stay safe.” He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms over his chest. “And honestly, Gatehouse doesn’t know much more than I’m telling you.”
“Is this happening around the world or just in the United States?”
“For now it’s just happening here, and by here I mean the Rocky Mountain states, Montana down to New Mexico.”
“That’s weird.” I flopped back in my seat, considering this piece of information. “Are other hunters being told about this?”
“That’s up to their porters.”
“I think they should know.”
“So do I, and I’ve told Gatehouse that. I think the members are coming around to my point of view.”
I downed the rest of my tea, which was now cold, and watched as the last rays of the sun slid behind the restaurant. In an hour or two I’d be hunting a Desire named Banishment. “Maybe they’re tired of the never-ending battle, the status quo,” I said, looking back to Nathan. “Maybe they want to win and they’ve chosen their battlefield.”
“That would be insane, even for them.”
“Sacks aren’t known to be rational.”
“They’d lose in an open, all-out war. The military would get into it, they know that.”
“How many Desires are there now? In the world, I mean.”
“A million, probably.”
“That’s more than when I started.”
“A quarter of a million Alarms, forty thousand Resolutes, and about ten thousand Festals.”
“Elations?”
“That’s harder to pin down, but Gatehouse thinks about a thousand worldwide.”
“Still about one hundred Embodiments?”
“That’s the estimate.”
“So in a war they’d lose, but they could take millions of innocents with them.”
Nathan rubbed his hands together, warming them, but didn’t say a word.
“But you don’t think they want all-out war,” I said. “You think they want something else.”
He shrugged.
“If they succeed at that something else here, they can do the same thing around the world?”
Again he simply looked at me. It was infuriating. He trusted me, and I trusted him, but my God he played it close to the vest.
“So whatever they’re doing now,” I began, taking another stab at it, “looks like some kind of plan—at least to Gatehouse, right? It’s not just random nibbles and spurts.”
“Some of what they’re doing now doesn’t make sense unless they have a plan.” He spread his hands. “Anything else I coul
d say would be wild speculation.”
It was useless to keep chipping away at him. Nathan didn’t speculate. He was a quiet, deliberate thinker, and when he spoke on matters involving Sacks, he was a careful thinker—the sort of man, if you were a hunter, you could trust with your life. “Well, I gave it a shot,” I said with a grin.
“You did.” He gave a soft laugh and started buttoning his coat. “Now listen. Take an umbrella. She’s good with languages, but not much else. She’s overweight and doesn’t move fast, but you know all that. You know she smokes pot, right?”
I nodded.
“You found the car keys in the condo?”
“Yes.”
“She lives alone, but if you see anyone in the house or hanging around, wait. Don’t push it.” His coat buttoned, he rested his hands in his lap. His expression softened. He was no longer my mentor, my porter. He was my friend.
We hated this moment. The moment I left, on his instructions, for a hunt. We murdered human beings for a living. We were trained, government-approved killers.
Sacks killed innocents. They killed children and they had killed my sister Emily, toying with her—torturing her—first. They killed for the pleasure of it and sowed chaos where they couldn’t kill. But now, when I hunted, I felt something I hadn’t felt when I first signed on, before I shot Septimania the Desire twice in the chest. Just before she died, when the weight of what she had done with her talents pressed up close, I saw her terror and regret, and I felt pity.
Chapter 3
I went home to ready myself for the hunt, home being a Gatehouse-owned condo on Bishop’s Lodge Road. It was sparsely furnished, just the necessities, but that was what I preferred. The bare, modest look of the place kept my mind on the job at hand. When I was in Santa Fe for fun, I stayed at a hotel. This condo was strictly business.
I slipped my Seecamp into my belt holster and put two extra magazines into the mag pouch. The Seecamp was my backup. Nathan had told me to take an umbrella, the Gatehouse word for a foot-long baton rigged to inject a micropellet containing poison into the Sack, à la the umbrella murder of Georgi Markov at the hands of a Bulgarian assassin in the 1970s. Except our micropellets caused death within seconds. Markov suffered three days before dying.
Hunters were told to hang our umbrellas in specially made hoops sewn inside our jackets, pointing down, safety on, but I didn’t trust the damn things not to go off accidentally if I bumped into someone or tripped. So I usually carried my umbrella in my right hand. It looked like a blackjack, after all, not an unreasonable thing for a woman walking alone at night to carry. But tonight I wouldn’t be able to do that.
There were two knocks at my door followed by a loud “It’s just me, Kath.” I grinned and strode to the door. Kath Norwocki was in town. I’d wondered if Gatehouse had called her to Santa Fe from her home west of Albuquerque. If things were changing, hunters were in demand.
“Hey you,” I said as I flung wide the door. “Come on in.”
“Brent Vogel said you’d be here.” Kath gave me a quick hug then stepped inside.
“Vogel?” I said, shutting the door and leaning against it. “So you’re here for a hunt too.”
“Looks like it.”
“Where are you staying then? I thought they’d put you up here.”
“Nah. Nathan knows you like your privacy.”
“Yeah, that’s true.”
“I’m at an apartment on Paseo. It’s nice, actually.” She dropped her small green backpack to the floor, flung her coat onto an armchair, and glanced around the condo’s living room, her eyes coming to rest on the couch and the travel alarm clock on the end table next to it. “You’re sleeping on the couch?”
“What gave me away? The blankets and pillow?” I moved for the kitchen, motioning in the direction of the coffeemaker. “Coffee? I was just about to make some. It’s going to be a late night for me.”
“The bed in this condo is terrific,” she said, pushing aside the blankets and dropping to the couch. “Why don’t you use it?”
“I fell asleep with the TV on.”
“And the two blankets and pillow just happened to materialize.”
I shot her a blank look, one that said this is so inconsequential I can’t rustle up the energy to speak, before turning back to the coffeemaker and scooping coffee into the filter.
Two minutes later, coffee cups in hand, Kath and I sat at opposite ends of the couch, glad for each other’s company but now searching for words. I took a sip of coffee then broke the silence.
“Brent knows I have a hunt tonight?”
“Yeah.”
“When’s your hunt?”
“Tomorrow, I think. I’m supposed to meet Brent in the morning to get the Sack’s name. I just happened to run into him half an hour ago, thought I’d visit.” She fingered the hem on one of the blankets.
It had always seemed to me that Kath was much more at ease with hunting. She too saw it as a duty, though unlike me, not an onerous one. She didn’t hunt with pleasure, not exactly, but the pursuit and return of a Sack did not weigh heavily on her shoulders, not like it did with me and Zack Lowell, another hunter and a mutual friend. We felt awe at the responsibility—and were terrified at the thought that we might make a mistake and kill an innocent.
But neither Zack nor I had lost a child to a Sack, and Kath had. A beautiful one-year-old girl with the smile of a cherub and a lifetime ahead of her. A Festal determined to rise in the ranks to an Elation by means of an unthinkable murder, that of a young child, had struck her stroller with his car in a crosswalk, carefully missing Kath and her husband. The police arrested him the next day, and Gatehouse found his name on its list of Sacks. He pleaded distraction, wept crocodile tears in court, and was sentenced to five years in prison, well worth it for his promotion. Kath carried Mia’s photo with her at all times, and I’d seen it on more than one occasion.
Tonight, though, Kath was troubled. She continued to cradle her cup, but she hadn’t taken a single sip of coffee, and now she refused to meet my eyes. I wondered if she’d heard about the Sacks’ increased activity.
“Nathan tells me things are changing,” I said.
Kath nodded slowly. “I was on a hunt just a week ago.”
“Wow.” Kath was three years older than me, but I was ahead of her in hunts. After observing her on group kills for two years, Gatehouse was worried Kath was “emotional”—she’d laughed when she told me they used that word—and wanted her to settle down before they released her for solo kills. Finally they did, six months ago.
“So that’s two in one week,” she added.
“Nathan wants me for another return in a couple days.”
“Return.” Kath laughed. “You don’t use that word.”
“Yeah, but Nathan does,” I said with a grin. “His gentle nature is rubbing off on me.”
Kath let loose with a boom of a laugh. “Never!”
“Gee, thanks.” I pointed at her cup. “Drink that, it’s getting cold.”
“Yup.”
“What is it? You and Nathan, so doom and gloom today.” I twisted in my seat to put my cup down on the end table and turned back to Kath. “I know there’s increased activity, but we can handle it.”
“I know that.”
“Besides, we don’t know what’s happening yet, and until we do, there’s no sense worrying. Just stay alert.”
“Absolutely.”
At last she took a sip of coffee. When Kath became sullen and quiet, it was hard to nudge her into talking. In that we were opposites. I knew talking did a world of good, and I engaged in it all the time. But we were opposites in so many ways—not least of all in appearance. My hair was short and dark brown and hers was long, straight, and blonde. I was five foot nine and she was five foot five. We shared a background in sports, though, a skill Gatehouse often looked for when it contacted potential hunters. Kath had been a long-distance runner in college, and I had played ice hockey for Colorado State. We hadn’t part
icipated in those sports in years, but our backgrounds in them had taught us the value of being physically fit.
“I’d better go,” I said. I slapped my knees and stood, trying to appear more competent and gung-ho than I felt. I put on my favorite hunt jacket, a too-large black fleece one that concealed perfectly the outlines of my holster, and took careful hold of my umbrella.
“An umbrella?” Kath said.
“Nathan suggested it. I hate them.”
“I know you do.” Kath smiled faintly. “Would you mind if I wait here?”
“Mind? I’d love it. Help yourself to anything in the refrigerator. There’s some good cheese in there. The TV remote’s on the end table, and there’s wine on the kitchen counter.” It was time to go, time to walk out that door. I could have stood there forever, just jabbering about food and the television. Anything to put off doing my job.
I drove north on Bishop’s Lodge, my fingers tapping a rhythm on the Pathfinder’s steering wheel. I was sure I’d been in this SUV before, but Gatehouse detailed its vehicles and changed the license plates on them after every kill, so there was no way to be sure. If anyone spotted my SUV, they’d see a New Mexico license plate. And they’d never see me again. Gatehouse made sure its hunters came from out of town and didn’t visit the same kill town more than twice a year.
At a stoplight at the intersection with Artist Road, I tried to appear neither disturbingly nonchalant nor nervous as hell to the driver in the turn lane next to me. Nathan had once told me about a hunter, to “remain nameless,” he said, who had looked so nerve-racked walking to her first solo kill that someone had called the police on her, thinking she was a terrorist. Gatehouse got Nameless out of her pickle with the police, but the woman retired from hunting the next day. Being government approved, we were protected from prosecution and, if Gatehouse could help it, from arrest. It also helped that we hunted alone and Sacks worked alone. No witnesses, problem solved.
But Sacks were protected, too. They had politicians, attorneys, and police chiefs on their side. Sometimes the Sacks themselves were in positions of power. I’d heard of mayor Sacks and government bureaucrat Sacks. It sickened me. They got away with murder, literally. They positioned themselves wherever they could, spreading themselves and their influence like an infection.
All Souls: A Gatehouse Thriller Page 2
