She closed the door.
Steve shouted, “Hey, why do you get the only real bed?”
“Because I’m a girl and you were raised to be polite.” The answer came back over the sound of the lock being thrown. “That and I’m better armed. Good night.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
In the morning, Steve awoke feeling definitely disgruntled. To be accurate, this was better than he felt most days, but he didn’t consider the lack of a hangover sufficient to compensate for the lack of coffee. For a while, he just stood in front of the refrigerator and idly considered the possibility of concocting a cup out of Miracle-Gro.
“That would definitely kill you.”
He jerked upright, dropped the bag of fertilizer he was holding, and for an instant noticed a golden sheen in the air around him. Ace, who had approached quietly, nodded approvingly. “Nice reflexes. You had that bubble up pretty quick.” She sat down on one of the kitchen’s high stools. “I could have killed you several times before it was up, but it’s a lot faster than yesterday.”
Steve stared at her. “Do you always begin your mornings with a discussion about killing the people around you?”
“Not always, but it’s far from unusual.”
“Who would have thought life in a SEAL team was so much fun?” Steve closed the refrigerator door and regarded the granules of Miracle-Gro now spread across the kitchen floor. “Does the ambassador have a cleaning service?”
“I think it’s a Naval Intelligence squad with top secret-code word clearance and a death curse in case they feel talkative.”
“Serves them right,” Steve said. “I never could stomach the way television makes those idiots in the NCIS look good.” He turned and headed for the door. “So, I vote we get out of here and find some coffee. Also, unless you’ve been sneaking MRE’s on me, we haven’t eaten in twenty-four hours.”
They took the underground tunnel and emerged on 3rd Street SE, just north of the strip of bars and restaurants along Pennsylvania Avenue. Steve led the way to the Tune Inn, which stood next to the more famous Hawk ’n’ Dove, but, happily, didn’t share the Hawk’s popularity with young congressional staffers. The Tune Inn, an old-time bar-restaurant of the type now known as a “dive bar,” had long been one of Steve’s favorite places, but as they walked up, he noticed something he’d missed over the years.
In bright blue neon script, there was the motto OFF THE CORNER. ON THE SQUARE.
He pointed at it and asked, “That would be a Masonic phrase, right?”
Ace glanced up. “I think so, but even Masons have to eat.” Without a pause, she pulled the door open and went inside. Steve shrugged and followed.
They sat in one of the pleather booths and ordered breakfast. Steve was surprised when Ace asked for a double order of scrapple with her scrambled eggs. “Most people won’t touch that stuff.”
“Shows how little they know,” she answered. “One of the healthiest things you can eat. Pork stock and cornmeal.”
“With a couple of tongues and snouts for extra flavor.”
“Adds to the overall excitement of a healthy breakfast.”
She appeared to retreat behind her Ray-Bans and Steve assumed that conversation was over for the morning. Or at least until they had finished their first cup of coffee. He looked around the place. There were a dozen men at the bar, clearly regulars and enjoying their first beers of the day.
“Seven of Cups.”
A tall, slim man in a dark cloak slipped into the seat next to Ace, who ignored him completely. Steve was amazed that the man still had all his parts and then realized that Ace couldn’t even see him. She continued to scan the door and everyone who passed on the street, but it was as if no one was sitting next to her.
“What’s the Seven of Cups mean?” Steve asked.
The man gestured at the morning drinkers. “Debauch. Indolence. At least, in most of the decks. The Italians used to read it as a precursor to waking nightmares.”
“I’ve had a good number of mornings like that. Waking nightmares, that is.” Steve pointed a thumb at Ace. “Why hasn’t she killed you?”
“She can’t see me.” The waitress brought two coffees and the thin man immediately took Ace’s and started drinking it. Fearing for his own safety, Steve shoved his cup in front of Ace and motioned for the waitress to bring another.
After a long and apparently satisfying sip of coffee, the man said, “I’m Buddy Ringwald. Your little Chinese friend said you were looking for me. I would imagine it’s about all the changes that happened yesterday.”
“Changes?”
Ringwald gestured at his cloak. “Yeah, changes. I mean, since when has anyone worn a cloak? I may be dead but I still have limits.” He pulled at the dark fabric with clear irritation. “I woke up this morning carrying a lantern and wearing this. I feel like a damn fool.”
“No. I’m the damn Fool,” Steve said automatically. “I think you’re the Hermit. Seeking wisdom and all that.” He looked around. “What did you do with the lantern?”
“I left it outside.” Ringwald gave a disgusted scowl. “I keep trying to get rid of it and it keeps popping back into my hand when I’m not paying attention. Irritating as hell.” He took another sip of coffee. “So, what do you want to know? The Asian kid on the intercom said it was urgent.”
“Really? So there is a ghost intercom?” Steve asked. “Damn. I was sure Send Money was wrong on that one.” He looked at Ace again. Then he reached one hand slowly across the table and waved it in front of her eyes.
“What the hell are you doing?” she said. “Just drink your coffee like an ordinary person, will you?”
“Sorry, I was just stretching.” Steve turned back to Ringwald. “So, she can’t see you?”
“Yeah, she won’t even hear when you talk to me. I figured this conversation should be strictly between journalists–undercover military assassins tend to make me jumpy. Regardless of how cute they are.” Ringwald settled back. “So, something is going on. You tell me what you know and I’ll reciprocate.”
Steve ran through the events of the previous day. He didn’t try to hide anything, because he had no idea what was worth hiding and what wasn’t. Ringwald listened and occasionally nodded as if he was just getting confirmation on a lot of the facts. He only looked surprised at the mention of the alien ambassador.
“Damn.” He said. “You mean that old carrot exists? There’s so much crap written about Roswell that I just stopped paying attention.”
“Yes, he’s real.” Barnaby spoke up for the first time–the smartphone had been cutting into Steve’s side when he sat down so he’d unclipped it from his belt and laid the phone on the table next to his plate. “He finds humans to be tiresome. He insists that the only reason he demands that all world governments keep his existence a secret is to keep from being invited to appear on Dancing with the Stars.”
“Perfectly reasonable,” Ringwald responded. “I would guess that you’re Barnaby.”
“Yes. Nice to meet you.”
“And this phone is the Chinese kid who hit my etheric buzzer last night?”
TOO. GHOST FACTORY WORKERS. MISSED THE NET
The screen flickered
GHOST OF FACTORY WORKER. I MISSED THE NET.
“Oh, you mean the suicide net around the factory?” Ringwald asked.
YES. GENERALLY JUMPING PLEASURE.
“I’d guess it would be. Not much else to do around there, I’d suppose.”
The screen showed a thumbs-up picture.
Steve decided that he’d heard enough introductions. “So, what can you tell me about Washington since the magic hit yesterday?”
Ringwald pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his breast pocket and lit one up. He offered one to Steve who asked, “Can you smoke in here?”
“Sure. I’m a freaking ghost, remember? No one can see me and these are only the memory of real cigarettes anyway. I’d guess you’d call them ultra-ultra low tar.”
Steve
took one, lit it up, and inhaled gratefully. “Hey, these taste as good as I remembered.”
“That’s because they’re your memory of… Never mind.” Ringwald shook his head sadly. “Let’s move on to what’s new in this already peculiar city. Some things are obvious–now Ted Leonsis’ basketball team really are wizards. They still can’t win, but the light show after a jam or a three-point shot is spectacular. The Mystics are doing palm-readings in the stands after the game, but they still can’t draw flies.” He chuckled briefly. “The best thing is that Danny Snyder has turned a pleasing shade of deep burgundy. Not only is it just desserts for the worst team owner in football, but also it just might get them to change the name to something less blatantly racist than the Redskins.
“OK, that’s enough back-of-the-book tidbits.” The older man’s face turned serious. “The Republicans are becoming increasingly shorter, hairier, and angrier, hard as that last part might be to believe. Their conservative wing is literally digging in–about two hundred feet down the last time I heard–and the most radical have begun to carry pickaxes. They say it’s only a symbol of a national desire to cut the government down to size, but they’re damn sharp all the same.”
He shook his head. “So far, the Speaker is still the Mountain King and able to keep the most volatile members of his caucus in line through his floor leaders and whips–well, his floor leaders using whips, to be precise.”
“And the Democrats?” Steve asked.
“Well, the president has renamed the White House the Alabaster Palace, the old bulls in the Senate are cultivating floor- length beards, and there’s a movement to replace armed drones with dragons, but those are all fairly minor changes, if you ask me. In general, being flighty and enigmatic simply means more of the same with those guys. No, the real problem is on K Street.”
“You mean the lobbyists?”
“Of course. They were pretty evil before, and now they’re downright demonic. The power nexus is centered on Scott Circle– midway between the Chamber of Commerce and Moveon.org– with large economy-size ley lines stretching out to the AARP, Freedomworks, the Podesta Group, and the Heritage Foundation. The smaller fish take power feeds of the bigger ones. It works just the way money always did before.”
Steve considered the tidal wave of political contributions that regularly swept through Washington and wondered if the equivalent amount of magical power could be any worse. “So, are the K Street dwarves and elves the same as the politicians?”
“Hell, no.” Ringwald shook his head. “These guys are out to do battle, so everyone has a lot of Fire mixed in, and they all need money, so that means that there are Pentacles involved. The result is everything from ogres and cherufes–those are lava creatures–to selkies and ice demons. Then you have the foreign trade groups, which means djinns roaming around Massachusetts Avenue and a wendigo camped out in the upper reaches of the American Indian Museum. Just yesterday, the Australians had to dump a deputy ambassador in the pond below the Capitol after he woke up feeling extremely ‘bunyippy.’ Apparently, no one noticed much of a change until he began to eat the junior staff.”
He puffed on his cigarette for a minute. “Now, I’ve been told of a few dragons and some minor deities, but they’re as hard to find now as when they were when they were human. You know, you didn’t see the Koch brothers or George Soros wandering around Farragut North before the Change and you aren’t likely to find them now.”
“Any chance that the competition will turn physical?” Steve thought. “Or metaphysical, as the case may be. More violent, at any rate.”
“Well, I think most things are going to trend towards violence eventually. For example, someone sent a Honey Island Swamp Monster through those big glass walls at the Cato Institute–no one is talking, but the smart money is on James Carville–and the Libertarians had to muster all their economists on the second balcony and drive it off with a massed reading of Ayn Rand. Poor thing was last seen heading for a sewer grating on 11th Street with smoke pouring out of its ears.”
Ringwald leaned back and lit another cigarette. “No harm was done, but when the next idiot’s idea of a joke ends up with opposing ideologues turned to stone or burned to cinders, we’re talking about mass violence at the World of Warcraft level.”
Barnaby spoke up from the speakerphone. “Have you picked up any chatter about who performed the Sacrifice?”
“Nothing substantive.” Ringwald shook his head. “My sources at the CIA have gone all Delphic–not that you could understand them at the best of times–and the FBI has its hands full. The Catholic agents are trying to deal with appearances by every angel from Azrael to Zephon, and the Mormons are busy answering phone calls from a good number of their ancestors who just woke up baptized into a religion they never heard of when they were alive.”
“I’m actually fairly happy about the whole thing,” the ghost said. “Magic was a hobby of mine before my death. I always wanted to be able to break the story that magic was real but there was never any hard evidence. This morning, I was pleased to see it working–although I could have done without the costume. I was sure that the military had some sort of black ops group dealing with the supernatural, but all the evidence was completely hashed by the psychos who actually wrote about it. One guy even wrote that there was some sort of manual–”
“–Manual S-O slash O-T-N.” Ace said. “Special Operations / Other Than Normal.”
Ringwald and Steve stared at her for a second. Steve said, “I thought you couldn’t hear us.”
“You thought I was shut down by a badly cast third-level No-see-um spell?” Ace sniffed. “I’ve got two sigils tattooed on my butt alone that can break a wimpy spell like that and a runic knife that’s been begging me non-stop to let her seek out and kill the person who cast it.”
Ringwald smiled. “Not much use in my case, I’m afraid.”
“You really think that all deaths are the same?” She shook her head. “Oh, you have so very much to learn.”
Ringwald’s smile faded.
“Please don’t re-kill him, at least not right now,” Steve pleaded. “He’s given us a damn good overview of the state of play around town.”
Ace nodded agreement and Steve continued. “OK, Buddy, we know that the Illuminati were involved in this so finding their headquarters would probably be a good start. Any ideas?”
Ringwald said. “Well, their clubhouse is up on 16th and X.”
Steve shook his head. “That’s an old joke. Washington doesn’t have a J Street nor are there X, Y, and Z Streets.”
Ringwald smiled smugly. “Well, if you’re going to take that sort of shortsighted attitude, I guess you’ll never find an underground organization like the Illuminati.”
Steve’s eye was caught by maps flickering across Send Money’s screen–everything from L’Enfant’s original 1791 plan to Metrobus routes and satellite images. Suddenly, Send Money began playing U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name” while using the F-16 Flight Simulator built into Google Earth to do a barrel roll down 16th Street.
“Stop showing off,” Ace growled. “Just show us what you found.”
As the jet crossed Florida Avenue, the nose pointed to the sky in a straight climb. At about 10,000 feet, Send Money did a hammer-turn, cartwheeled 180 degrees, and headed straight down. Just before the camera viewpoint hit the ground, he switched to a slideshow of pictures of water flowing down a long, formal cascade ending in a round pool, accompanied by a delicate pastoral passage from Tristan and Isolde.
“Of course, Meridian Hill Park,” Ace said. “Formerly Malcolm X Park. It’s on the axis from the Washington Monument through the Alabaster Palace, and it’s where the American Prime Meridian and the Appalachian fall line intersect. It’s probably got more ley line power than anywhere else in the city. And it’s where X Street would have been if it existed.”
“Underground?” Steve commented. “This city is a swamp–it’s hard to believe that they could excavate a proper villain�
��s lair in a sea of mud.”
Ace shook her head. “That’s the whole point of the fall line. It’s where the swampy and soft land of the coastal plain suddenly rises a hundred feet to the solid stone of the Appalachian Plateau. My guess is that Meridian Hill is sitting on a solid piece of white quartz–or ‘white flint’–which is where the name of White Flint Mall came from.”
“Before it closed.”
“Before it closed,” Ace agreed. “Anyway, it all fits right into the occult mindset that runs from the Illuminati through the New Thought Movement, the Theosophists, the Golden Dawn, and all the other social clubs for peculiar people.”
“I’d say that makes our next step fairly obvious,” Steve said. “We go up to Meridian Hill Park and gently release Weishaupt and company from the eternal cycle of suffering.”
“Right, we waste the bastards,” Ace said as she began to check her weapons. Again.
Ringwald smiled at her. “I admire the way you cut right through all this ontological crap and go directly to the point.”
“It is one of her best talents,” Steve said.
The jukebox, which had about twenty years of dust on it, suddenly came to life.
“Remember that even if we defeat the Illuminati, it’s almost certainly only a beginning,” Barnaby said through its speakers. If the bartender or his customers heard any sound from the ancient machine, they gave no sign of it. “Our new adiabatics–you know, the D-Waves from Canada–are claiming that their quantum annealing algorithms indicate several alternative universes where either the Illuminati were all killed by the Church or they never developed Hermes Trismegistus’s immortality potion and, yet, yesterday’s events still occurred.”
“We really need to find a better label than ‘yesterday’s events,’” Steve said. “‘9/11’ is clear and simple. So are ‘Hiroshima’ or ‘the Holocaust.’”
Send Money’s screen flashed.
THE FIRST DAY OF DRAGON KING
“No. None of your Chinese mysticism,” Steve objected. “We need–”
“It’s not Chinese.” Barnaby interrupted. “It’s a term from chaos theory. Major disruptions in extremely complex or chaotic systems–from earthquakes to financial market crashes–have been named ‘dragonkings.’ They replaced the concept of ‘black swans,’ which were things no one thought could happen, so the statisticians aren’t to blame for not seeing them.”
The Last American Wizard Page 19
