Changeling

by David Wood

  Gabrielle reached out and took his hand again. Shah felt an electric tingle at the touch. “This is how the world works now, Atash. A lunatic shoots a school full of children. What does the gun lobby do? Do they apologize for the behavior of one crazy person and admit that maybe some common sense regulations might be a good idea? Not a chance. They double down and turn the tables, blame the victims for not having guns of their own and paint everyone who says otherwise as the real extremists.”

  Shah stared back dumbfounded. “You can’t be serious. We created the CDL to fight that kind of echo chamber mentality.”

  “We created the CDL to defend Islam. Our enemies will try to use this against this. We have to make it work to our advantage.”

  Her passion radiated through her hand into his, burning through his reflexive opposition. “How exactly do we do that? Do we say it’s Roche’s fault for not being Muslim?”

  He said it half-jokingly but to his astonishment, Gabrielle nodded. “Just like we did after the Charlie Hebdo shootings. We’ll release a statement saying that, while we do not condone what happened, we strongly condemn the sort of blasphemy that prompted a young man to martyr himself.”

  Shah’s forehead creased in a frown. “The cable news outlets will make hay out of rhetoric like that.”

  “It doesn’t matter what they do with it.” She squeezed his hand again. “All that matters is that your people—our people—will recognize your strong and decisive leadership.

  Shah felt his resistance crumbling. “You’re very persuasive.”

  “Only because I’m right about this. Trust me. And don’t worry. We’ll run the statement past legal to make sure it’s airtight.” She paused a beat. “You said this happened in Peru? What was Roche doing down there?”

  “I have no idea. He’s been hiding out ever since…that thing with his publisher.”

  “The shooter, he was a student, right?” Gabrielle pressed. “An archaeologist? We need to know how he came to cross paths with Roche. The old crank might be dead, but he can still hurt us if he told someone what he knows or gave them his book.”

  “I’m not sure there’s much we could do about it if he did.”

  Gabrielle’s expression hardened abruptly, her dark eyes boring into him. “Atash, I don’t think you fully appreciate just how serious this situation is.”

  Shah gaped at her. “How can you say that? I’ve been in damage control mode ever since I heard about the shooting.”

  “I’m not talking about Roche’s death. I’m talking about his secret. It must stay buried. At all costs. If he’s shared this knowledge with anyone we have to find out. And we have to silence them.”

  “Silence them?” The question came out much louder than Shah intended. He imagined the government surveillance team hastily sweeping his building with parabolic microphones, trying to reacquire him. In a more subdued voice, he continued. “We’re journalists, Gabrielle, not killers.”

  Gabrielle regarded him with a cool gaze. “You’re right, Atash. We’re not killers. But this is a war and whether you intended to or not, you have built an army. There are a lot of young men like this Rafi Massoud out there just waiting for someone to tell them what to do. The only question is whether you have to courage to be their leader.”

  Shah swallowed. He did not feel very courageous, but he knew he would never be able to say ‘no’ to her.

  PART TWO- FACES

  SEVEN

  London

  As Jade stared at the queue of black TX4 Hackney cabs lined up outside the arrivals gate at London’s Heathrow Airport—all facing the wrong direction, or so it seemed to her—she could not help but think back to her last visit to the city and her first meeting with Gerald Roche. Although that trip had been a net success, it had not gone smoothly and she had left believing that she had made an enemy in Roche. Now, Roche was dead and she was back in London, hoping to solve the mystery behind his murder and possibly fulfill his last request.

  “Truth is the only protection,” Roche had said just before his death. “But knowing the truth is not the same as proving it.”

  Proving Roche’s pet theory was not her objective. The only truth that she cared about right now was the truth about why Roche had been killed, and why Rafi, without any apparent provocation, had pulled the trigger and subsequently immolated himself. She did not know if there was a connection to Phantom Time, or one of Roche’s other wild conspiracy theories—her instincts told her there was—but it was a starting point.

  Professor selected the third taxi in the line and waved for Jade to join him. She shouldered her backpack, the only piece of luggage she had brought along and crossed to the waiting cab where he was holding the door open for her. It was early afternoon but the gray sky seemed unusually dark and depressing after the sunny equatorial clime of Peru. Nevertheless, despite the fact that she was exhausted from the trip—long flights and even longer layovers—Jade was eager to get started, and couldn’t resist tapping her foot and shifting in her seat throughout the forty-five minute ride from the airport to Bedford Square in the Borough of Camden, where Chameleon Press International’s offices were located.

  The idyllic setting, nestled amid garden squares and elegant historical buildings that dated back as early as the 17th century, seemed wholly inappropriate for a publisher who dealt primarily with sensational speculative topics, but like its namesake, Chameleon seemed to blend right in, occupying a small corner of the Bloomsbury district, a place synonymous with London’s historic literary culture.

  The office was little more than a room with two cluttered desks and a handful of chairs, occupied solely by a handsome if a bit harried-looking man, about her age, with light brown hair and blue eyes that peered out through tortoiseshell framed spectacles.

  As Professor opened the door and stepped aside to allow Jade to enter, the man at the desk looked up from his computer screen, then jumped to his feet and rushed over the greet his visitors. “Hello. You must be Dr. Ihara.”

  Though she had never seen him before, Jade recognized the friendly voice and understated accent from their earlier phone conversation. She put on her most winning smile and extended her hand. “And you must be Mr. Kellogg.”

  “Please, it’s just Jordan.” After introducing himself to Professor, he gestured toward the chairs positioned in front of his desk. “I am sorry that I wasn’t more help over the telephone. Things have been a bit chaotic of late. Recent events…” He shrugged. “I’m the…well, I used to be the assistant editor and vice-president, but that’s not as impressive as it must sound. There was only ever just Mr. Parrott and myself, and since his disappearance, it’s essentially a one-man show, and I’m the one man.”

  Jade heard no trace of lingering grief in Kellogg’s tone at the mention of Parrott’s fate. Maybe three weeks had taken the edge off the tragedy. She decided to probe a little deeper. “How will Roche’s death affect the business?”

  “Well this may sound a bit ghoulish, but business has never been better. As soon as word of his death hit the news, the booksellers started calling. I’ve emptied the warehouse and I’m going to have to order print runs of several backlisted titles. Tricky business, that. It’s impossible to predict how long we’ll be able to capitalize on public interest. If the buzz fades away too quickly, I’ll be stuck with a warehouse full of unsold books.”

  “Must be tough,” Professor muttered, and Jade had to bite her lip to keep from laughing. Kellogg however seemed immune to sarcasm.

  “You have no idea. Thank goodness for e-books. That’s where most of our money is made anyway. Instant gratification.” He tapped the side of his nose in a gesture that meant absolutely nothing to Jade.

  “Roche told me that he was working on a new book,” she said. “Will you be able to release that?”

  “Sadly, no. I know that’s what you’ve come here for, but Mr. Roche shared the manuscript with Mr. Parrott in electronic format and I haven’t been able to locate the file just yet. As I said, thi
ngs have been chaotic.”

  “Even so,” Professor said, “I would think you’d want to strike while the iron was hot, so to speak.”

  Kellogg spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “As soon as it turns up, I’ll publish it.”

  Jade decided to push a little harder. “Roche believed that Parrott was murdered to keep the book from being published. What do you think about that?” The man’s eyes widened in dismay, but Jade pressed ahead. “And now Roche is dead too. Do you think he was right?”

  Kellogg spent several seconds shaping his answer. “I don’t wish to speak ill of the dead, but…Mr. Roche was right bloody-minded about these theories”

  “So you don’t believe any of it?” Professor said. “It’s all just grist for the mill, right?”

  The other man answered with a guilty shrug.

  “Could the manuscript be at Roche’s home?” Jade asked.

  Kellogg raised an eyebrow as if he found the possibility intriguing. “Why, I don’t know. I would have to get permission to search the premises.”

  “Mr. Roche gave me permission,” Jade said quickly. “Not in so many words of course, but he told me about the book and wanted me to look for more supporting evidence. I think finding the manuscript is the obvious first step, don’t you? Here’s an idea. Why don’t you come with us to Roche’s place? Once we’ve had a look at the manuscript, you can take it and do with it what Roche intended.”

  She almost said “cash in,” but decided not to push that particular button too hard.

  “Can’t argue with that,” Professor added quickly before the other man could reply.

  Kellogg frowned as if the logic of the statement troubled him. “How would we get in?”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Professor said. “We have a key.”

  An avaricious gleam appeared in Kellogg’s eyes. “Well, what are we waiting for?”

  Professor’s “key” was a set of lock-picking tools which, in his expert hands, would be able to defeat the lock securing the door of Roche’s Mortlake townhouse almost as quickly as if he possessed an actual key. Breaking into Roche’s home had been their plan all along, but enlisting Kellogg’s assistance was necessary to give their illicit intrusion a veneer of authenticity. A pair of foreigners lurking about the dead man’s front door might arouse the suspicion of locals. This way, if the police did come to investigate, Kellogg would be able to explain that they were there on official business.

  It was a fragile illusion, and as it turned out, an unnecessary one. When they arrived at Roche’s residence on the south bank of the River Thames, they found the door standing slightly ajar.

  Jade’s breath caught in her throat. We’re too late. Someone beat us to the punch.

  Someone wants that book.

  It was an enormous leap of logic, but Jade knew it was true. And when taken with what had happened in Paracas, and the disappearance of Ian Parrott, the conclusion was inescapable.

  Roche had been right about everything.

  Professor raised a hand, warning them to freeze, and then touched a finger to his lips. Jade dragged Kellogg a few steps back, while Professor crept forward and pushed the door open a little more.

  “What’s going on?” Kellogg whispered the question, but it sounded as loud as a shout to Jade, who immediately shushed him. She tensed, half-expecting the intruder to burst through the doorway like a homicidal jack-in-the-box, but nothing happened. Professor moved inside and then, after a full two minutes, came out and signaled for them to join him. She could tell by the look on his face that her earlier assumption was spot-on, and as soon as she stepped inside, she got final confirmation.

  The tastefully decorated sitting room—where just eight months earlier, Jade had sipped tea with Roche, blissfully unaware of the trap he had laid for her—was a shambles. Every stick of furniture had been overturned, every seat cushion slashed with a razor. The content of drawers and cabinets lay strewn haphazardly on the floor amid piles of furniture stuffing. The intruder had even knocked holes in the wall plaster in an evidently futile search for a wall safe or some other secret compartment.

  “The whole place is trashed,” Professor said, breaking the ominous silence. “But if it’s any consolation, I don’t think they found what they were looking for.”

  “How can you know that?” asked an aghast Kellogg.

  Professor waved his hand in an expansive gesture. “Look at this place. This kind of overkill is the result of frustration.”

  Jade did not find this the least bit consoling. “Roche kept his collection of Dee memorabilia in a basement room. Maybe there’s something down there. Something the burglar missed.”

  “I saw the room you’re talking about. It’s been completely ransacked, but I guess since we’re here, we might as well take another look.”

  Kellogg found his voice again. “I say, shouldn’t we call the police before tramping around and destroying the evidence?”

  Jade ignored him and headed for the stairs, descending the familiar route to the basement. She had last trod these steps eight month earlier, racing up them with a gun-wielding Roche chasing after her. The memory haunted her until she reached the bottom step, whereupon the scope of the damage wrought to the collection of unique artifacts and books snapped her back to the present.

  The room was unrecognizable. All of the bookshelves that had once lined the walls had been toppled, and now lay atop their scattered contents. The glass display cases which had held remarkable clockwork devices from the Elizabethan era, as well as exotic occult items of dubious provenance, were smashed apart, their contents scattered. Jade stared in disbelief at the ruined collection, feeling both angry and helpless. “Looks like we’re back to square one.”

  “This was always a long shot, Jade,” Professor said from behind her. “It’s the 21st century. The manuscript, if it even exists, is probably a computer file stored on a secure Cloud server.”

  Jade knew he was right but that didn’t make the pill any easier to swallow.

  “There’s a line from an old James Bond novel,” Professor went on. “‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time, it’s enemy action.’”

  Jade tore her gaze from the wreckage and stared at him. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “Rafi didn’t do this. And I doubt very much that he was involved in the disappearance of Flight 815. I could almost believe that Roche’s death and Parrott’s disappearance on that plane were coincidences, but this…” He waved to the room. “Strike three. Enemy action.”

  “But who? Who’s the enemy?”

  “That’s what I intend to find out.” He took out his phone and began tapping the screen, scrolling through his contacts list. “The disappearance of the plane is the piece that doesn’t fit. Roche’s murder and this break-in both could be the work of disorganized Muslim extremists, but making a plane vanish completely requires planning and sophistication on a different order of magnitude.”

  He held the phone to his ear and was silent for a moment until the connection was established. “Tam, it’s me.”

  Jade returned her attention to the wreckage while Professor updated Tamara Broderick on what had happened and what he intended to do about it. Broderick was the director of a special CIA cell—code-named “Myrmidons”—primarily tasked with battling the Dominion. She was, technically speaking, Professor’s boss, though the arrangement was a little more complicated than employee-employer. Professor had a great deal of latitude when it came to operations, as long as he kept Jade safe and occasionally saved the world. Jade had briefly worked with the Myrmidons as a contractor, which was how she and Professor had initially became acquainted, though at the time, he had been working directly for her as a researcher, and international intrigue had been the last thing on either of their minds.

  She knelt over a pile of books, scanning the titles. Some were leather-bound gilt-edged tomes—collectible books, not meant to be read, but one overturned shelf had cont
ained a number of perfect-bound trade paperbacks, ranging in subject from geography and history to political science to UFO encounters. Most of the titles on the more speculative end of the spectrum sported amateurish and often lurid cover art. She opened one and idly thumbed through it, noting pages that had been marked with sticky notes and entire paragraphs highlighted in fluorescent yellow.

  She realized that she was looking at Roche’s research library, the garden where he had gathered the raw ingredients to brew up his outrageous conspiracy concoctions. It was an apt metaphor. The pieces to Roche’s Phantom Time theory were lying scattered before her, but the exact recipe—the specific ingredients and proportions—had died with the man.

  “I really don’t think you should be touching anything,” Kellogg said from the relative shelter of the stairwell. “This is a crime scene. We should step away and summon the police.”

  Professor threw him a withering glance, and cupped a hand over his phone and continued speaking in a subdued voice.

  Jade set the book aside and turned to face Kellogg. “What exactly do you think the police will do?”

  “Well…”

  “The police will write this off as a simple break-in,” She continued. “Vandalism. Nothing more. But they will probably seal this place off so that we can’t conduct our own investigation. Is that what you want? Is that what you think Mr. Roche would want?”

  “I see your point.” Kellogg’s eyebrows drew together in a frown, then he brightened. “Do you think there’s something here that will help us crack the case?”

  Crack the case? Jade thought. This guy has read too many Sherlock Holmes stories. “I doubt the people who did this will have left any evidence behind, but that’s not what we’re looking for.”

  “What then?”

  “Just before he died, Roche told me he wanted me to find something. Proof that this latest theory was right. I don’t really know exactly how to do that, but maybe if I can retrace his steps, so to speak, I can figure out what sort of proof he wanted me to find.”