Chameleon's Death Dance

by BR Kingsolver

  A cutting board, knife, and bowl of vegetables appeared on the table in front of me. “I know you can’t cook worth a damn, but you do know how to use a knife. Slice those up.”

  I dutifully began slicing vegetables while he went back to whatever he was stirring on the stove and continued his story.

  “His ambition extended to art collecting. A couple of my informants tell me that he has a real passion for art. Unfortunately, his tastes and his bank account were at odds. So, he began commissioning works that he wanted. That also led him to brokering some pieces.”

  Commissioning was parlance for paying someone like me a million credits to steal a fifty million-credit artwork.

  “And then he found a talented forger,” I said.

  “So it seems. It’s brilliant, actually,” Dad said. “Commission a high-value piece, make a copy of it, sell the copy, and you make money while adding to your collection.”

  He took the chopped vegetables and put them in a pot on the stove. The kitchen was starting to smell really good and my mouth began to water.

  “Anyway,” Dad said, “He was making billions, spread into Scotland, and then ran into some resistance. A couple of years ago, he barely escaped an assassination attempt and decided to hide out in Vancouver for a while.”

  “What are his main businesses?”

  “The usual. Drugs, human trafficking, arms. His cover business to give him legitimacy is the same as yours—security. He provides men as security guards, short and long term, in addition to installing and monitoring security systems. If gives him an excuse to keep a private army.”

  “And now he’s back in Ireland.”

  “Not yet, or at least, not that anyone knows. But his rivals in Scotland and Northern England suffered unexpected accidents recently, shortly before your friend O’Bannon turned up in Vancouver.”

  “So, if he does go back to Ireland, where would he go?” I asked.

  Dad chuckled, and a screen on the kitchen wall came to life. Some of the billionaire corporate executives built incredibly luxurious houses, but what I saw on the screen surpassed anything I had seen in Canada.

  “Castletown House,” Dad said. “One of the largest palaces ever built in Ireland. Completed around 1729 and remodeled about thirty years later. It was owned by the government in the twentieth century, but when the Irish government collapsed in 2087, a corporate executive bought it. It’s changed hands a couple of times, and Reagan bought it about fifteen years ago. The interesting thing about the house is the legend that it’s haunted.”

  “Ghosts?” I wondered what kind of mutant might imitate a ghost.

  “No, the devil himself. The legend goes back hundreds of years.”

  “Where is it?”

  “A little less than an hour west of Dublin. Maybe thirty or forty minutes from the airport on the main cross-country highway. He also has a place in Dublin, but it’s not as showy.”

  “Wife? Kids?”

  “Acknowledged children by three different women. Two sons and a daughter. The oldest son is a vice president of his security business. The daughter spends her time partying in Europe. The younger son is a teenager at a boarding school. I found evidence of a wife, but that was thirty years ago and no mention of her since. Reagan doesn’t mix with the corporate crowd, but he does socialize with the arts set.” He handed me a chip. “Everything I turned up is here.”

  Wil flew in two days later and took me to dinner.

  “I’ve put out a world-wide watch for Reagan, Murphy and O’Bannon,” he said as we waited to be seated at my favorite restaurant. “The yacht docked in Vietnam, and Murphy was spotted on deck. No telling where they’ll go next.”

  The hostess escorted us to our table. Wil ordered wine, then said, “No comment?”

  “I’m thinking. Can’t you hear the gears grinding together?”

  He smiled and waited. After our meals came, I said, “It wouldn’t hurt to go to Ireland before they get there. I can scout things out and make some contacts. But it doesn’t make sense to go there if they don’t. Maybe when we have a better idea about where they’re going and when they’re going to get there.”

  I called Dad the next day. “It looks like my trip to Ireland will be delayed. Reagan is taking the long way around to get home.”

  With time on my hands, I checked with Dad and found seven backed-up orders for security system installations. Figuring that Vietnam was a long way from Ireland, I took the largest job first. At that point, I remembered why I had been so willing to jump at Myron’s offer, other than the money, of course. Work was a lot of work. And while I was good at all the ordering of equipment, tracking invoices, and keeping the books straight, I didn’t enjoy it. For the first time, I thought about hiring someone.

  I did enjoy the design work, and there was something soothing about the physical part of the work. It didn’t take long to fall back into the pattern of my pre-Vancouver life.

  The thing I did enjoy the most was seeing my friend Nellie and hearing her sing. The night I got into town, after I had dinner with Dad, I went down to The Pinnacle. When I walked in, Nellie was on stage belting out an Ella Fitzgerald song. I strolled over to the bar, and Paul Renard, my other best friend, gave out a whoop. He rushed around the bar and scooped me up in a hug.

  “Damn, Libby. I never thought I’d say it, but I missed you.”

  I kissed him on the forehead. “No one to give you a hard time?”

  “Oh, just the usual, but things have been kind of boring around here. No one getting blown up, no mass murders,” he dropped his voice and whispered in my ear, “no uber-rich corporate types wailing about their toys disappearing.”

  He pulled back and smiled. “What are you drinking?”

  I heard Nellie’s voice falter. Both Paul and I looked toward the stage, and saw her staring back at us with a huge smile on her face. She picked up the lyrics again, but her gaze was locked on me, as mine was locked on her.

  She finished the song and jumped off the stage just as I was taking the first sip of my drink. Dark hair flying behind her, she skipped across the room on stiletto heels like a ballerina. Paul’s hug had been very tight, but I thought little Nellie would crush my ribs. Absolutely uninhibited, she buried her face between my breasts and inhaled deeply.

  “Oh, God, I have missed you,” she said. She pulled my head down and kissed me with a lot of tongue.

  When she finally let me up for air, I managed to gasp, “I missed you, too.”

  I didn’t get much sleep that night, so I was fairly fuzzy when we arrived at my mom’s restaurant for brunch the next day. Mom knew I was coming into town, so I probably shouldn’t have been surprised when Glenda, the street urchin I had semi-adopted, came flying out of the kitchen.

  “Miz Libby!” she squealed, giving my poor ribs one more crushing squeeze. There was a lot more of her than when she first came to live with Mom. It was more like hugging a girl than a little kid.

  “Are you working?” I asked. Mom and Dominick, her partner, had given Glenda a job in the kitchen.

  “No, not until later,” she said.

  “Have you had breakfast yet?”

  She said she had eaten earlier, but didn’t argue when I urged her to sit down with Nellie and me. Glenda spent most of her first fifteen years on the verge of starvation, and it seemed like you could never fill her up.

  We ordered, and then I asked, “So, how are your studies going?” Teaching her to read and write and do arithmetic was a project shared by Nellie and me along with just about everyone who worked for Mom.

  “I’m reading a book,” Glenda announced. The pride on her face brought tears to my eyes.

  “What’s it about?” Nellie asked.

  “It’s not about anything. It’s a made-up story.”

  “Oh? What’s the story about?” I asked.

  “A kid named Harry Potter. He’s a wizard.” Her face screwed up in concentration. “I think a wizard is a kind of mutant. But it’s just make believe.
You know? I seen a lotta mutants, and I never seen anyone wave a magic wand to make things happen. I have to look a lot of the words up in the dictionary, but it’s a lotta fun. Betsy gave it to me.”

  Betsy was Nellie’s younger sister.

  While we were eating, Mom came in and sat with us. It felt good to be with family. I hadn’t realized that I’d missed them so much.

  Wil’s contacts helped us track Reagan’s progress around the world. A Chamber operative managed to sneak onto the yacht in the Mediterranean, and reported that Reagan and Murphy were on board, but O’Bannon was not. I booked my ticket to Ireland the next day.

  “You don’t even know he’s in Ireland,” Wil protested as he watched me pack.

  “No, but I’ll bet Reagan shipped him out to a hospital, if not in Ireland, then in Switzerland or someplace else in Europe.”

  “If Reagan didn’t decide he was a liability and dump him in the ocean somewhere.”

  “Possible, but I doubt it. If he wanted to get rid of O’Bannon, the time to do it was when he first got shot. Dump the body in the Strait of Georgia and walk away.”

  I finished packing the second of the two boxes with equipment I couldn’t take on an airplane. My dad had set up shipping for them through an old friend of his at MegaTech, the company he worked for before he retired. Hauling my suitcases out, I began pulling clothes from my closet.

  “You’ll call me if you find O’Bannon, right?” Wil asked.

  Surprised, I turned to him. “Why?”

  “I can’t worry about you all the time,” he said, “it’s just too exhausting. But if you find O’Bannon, or Reagan gets to Ireland, I’ll know it’s time to start.”

  Walking over to him, I took his face in my hands and kissed him. “If it makes you happy, then I’ll call you.”

  “Promise? Or are you lying to me?”

  “Promise.”

  Chapter 18

  Stepping off the plane at Dublin Airport, I sniffed the air, expecting to smell the ocean. In spite of being only a few miles from the Irish Sea, my nose detected only verdant vegetation and jet fuel.

  Once the taxi took me beyond the airport, I could see why. Everything was so green. Not just the green of Toronto or Vancouver, but every shade of green I could imagine. Bushes and trees were trimmed away from the roadway, but hung over the top of us. It looked as if we drove through a green tunnel.

  Dublin had never built skyscrapers, so the churches had been the tallest buildings. It made me sad to see the spires of the old cathedrals poking up through the waters of the bay. Half-submerged buildings—houses, hotels, office buildings, and shops—lined both shores of the River Liffey and the bay.

  Much of old Dublin was gone. The city had escaped the nuclear destruction of so many of the world’s major metropolises, but the oceans’ rise drowned most of the major Irish cities. Scientists projected that in another two or three hundred years, if the rest of the Antarctic and Greenland ice melted, Ireland would be more of an archipelago than an island.

  I met the landlady at the home I rented online and got the key code. The end-of-group townhouse dated to the mid-twenty-first century, and though it needed some maintenance and updating, it otherwise met the advertisement, and it was clean. It was near bus and train lines, as well as downtown and the university. I paid three months’ rent in advance.

  After talking with Wil, I decided to skip renting a car. The Irish still maintained the antiquated habit of driving on the wrong side of the road. I figured it would be simpler and less stressful to rent a motorcycle. A bus line passed a block from the flat, so I took the bus to the motorcycle store.

  The balding guy with a beer belly I had to deal with didn’t seem to think women knew how to ride one of his precious machines.

  “Hi. I’m Jasmine Keller. I arranged to lease an ElectroRocket.”

  He eyed me, spending a little too long on my chest. “Well, now, that’s a very powerful motorcycle,” he said. “I think you’d probably find it easier to handle one of those TownScooters.”

  “Thank you for your concern, but I own an older model of the ElectroRocket, and that’s what I want.”

  He asked for a deposit equal to the sales price of the bike and smirked at me.

  I wanted to wipe the smirk off his face, but he had Jasmine’s identification, and I really wanted to keep that identity unspoiled. A bus ride to the suburbs south of the city took an hour and a half, but the shop there rented me a bike without giving me a hassle.

  Driving on the left wasn’t a problem on the motorway, but I figured out quickly that the Irish seemed to have missed the invention of the stop sign. They were absolutely in love with roundabouts.

  By the time I got back to the house, I needed a drink. Unfortunately, I hadn’t had time to visit any food or liquor stores. Luckily, there was some kind of law about always having a pub within walking distance.

  The next morning, I called my dad’s contact and arranged to have my equipment delivered. That happened around noon, and I spent the afternoon setting up the security system, file server, and network. With that taken care of, I started looking for O’Bannon.

  It had been almost two months since I shot the assassin. I didn’t know the extent of his injuries, but I figured that he was probably close to being healed. A search online showed that he owned a townhouse in Dublin and a country house near Cork. The other obvious places to look for him would be at Reagan’s Castletown House estate near Celbridge, or Reagan’s mansion in North Dublin. The Dublin house was Reagan’s main home. From what I could determine, Castletown was used primarily for entertaining.

  O’Bannon’s neighborhood in Dublin was several steps up from the neighborhood where I rented. Lots of hip pubs and restaurants, boutique shops, and a young, well-to-do crowd. It was easy to find his house, and I scouted it as much as I could during the day.

  My dad’s research said that O’Bannon liked fine foods—especially Italian and French—expensive wines, and women of a particular physical type. Adopting a form of a woman that matched his taste, I checked out a couple of wine bars, and then had dinner at a very expensive French restaurant only a block away from his house.

  Cruising the pubs in the neighborhood that night didn’t turn him up, so when the hour grew late and the crowds thinned, I slipped into an alley, blurred my form, and snuck up on his house.

  There didn’t appear to be anyone home, so I bypassed the security system and entered through the back door. It didn’t take long to learn that he wasn’t in residence, and hadn’t been for a while. Nothing in the refrigerator, no dirty laundry. The only thing of interest was the gun safe in the basement.

  The electronic lock took only a moment. The safe held two rifles and three pistols. One of the rifles was of a type used for competitive target shooting. The other was a fifty-caliber sniper rifle with a high-powered telescope. The kind of gun used for extremely long-range shots. I left everything where it was and closed the safe.

  As I let myself out, I reflected that if I were recuperating, I’d probably choose a house in the country rather than a noisy part of the city.

  The following day, I drove out to Celbridge, the town nearest to Reagan’s Castletown House. I acted like a completely clueless tourist, pretending I thought the manor was still accessible to the public. I soon learned that Reagan wasn’t on the best of terms with his neighbors. Basically, no one had anything good to say about anyone associated with Castletown.

  I rode out to the residential area that abutted the estate and found a place to park the bike. Slipping into the woods, I quickly reached the fence around the property. It was the kind of fence I hated—fifteen-foot wrought-iron bars topped with spikes. Brick pillars every twelve feet anchored the wrought iron, but the pillars were twelve feet tall with razor wire stretched between the wrought iron on either side. It was clear that Reagan wanted his visitors to use the gates.

  CCTV and motion sensors were installed at intervals on the house, but I didn’t see any motion sensors
around the horse stables or the servants’ quarters and the kitchen.

  It took a couple of hours to walk around the perimeter, but it turned out that Reagan used the same fencing even far away from the house. I couldn’t see any good ways to approach the place.

  I spent the next week staking out the house, watching through binoculars, hoping to catch a glimpse of O’Bannon. Neither he nor the nurse from the Vancouver compound made any appearances, though I saw a lot of other people. The landscape crew was extensive, as were men who I assumed were part of the security force. Plus, I counted at least twenty people who appeared to be household staff.

  After two days of rain and wind, I took advantage of the first nice day. The bike ride took five hours to reach O’Bannon’s country cottage west of Cork. The countryside was as beautiful and tranquil as all the pictures. Since The Fall and the global increase in temperatures, Ireland had warmed up, but the climate continued to be wetter and cooler than in Canada.

  I would never have found O’Bannon’s place without a GPS. It was two miles from the nearest village and a quarter-mile from a road barely wide enough for one car. I parked the bike in a copse of trees and followed a low stone wall to get within sight of his house.

  It didn’t look any different than the other farmhouses in the area. Two stories, and about the same size as his Dublin townhouse. A two-car garage and a ramshackle barn were the only other structures. Other than motion-triggered lights in the front and back, I couldn’t spot any evidence of a security system.

  On the other hand, a huge pasture of open lawn surrounding the house provided no cover to approach the place. From what I’d seen on my drive down from Dublin, a lot of Ireland’s land consisted of low, rolling hills, but O’Bannon’s house sat in a very flat part of the country. I ruled out finding a place to hide and stake out the house, or even to use as a sniper’s perch.