Witchblade: Talons

by John Dechancie

  Witchblade

  An ibooks, Inc. ebook

  ibooks, Inc.

  24 West 25th St.

  New York, NY 10010

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  http://www.ibooksinc.com

  Copyright © 2002 by Top Cow Productions, Inc.

  Witchblade ®, TM; © 2001, 2002 by Top Cow Productions, Inc.

  e-ISBN: 1-59176-023-2

  Print ISBN: 0-7434-3501-X

  TALONS

  JOHN DeCHANCIE is the author of two dozen books—both fiction and non-fiction—and his novels in the fantasy and science fiction genres have been attracting a wide readership for more than fifteen years. His humorous fantasy series, beginning with Castle Perilous, became a bestseller for Berkley/Ace. He has also written in the horror genre, and for publications as widely varied as Penthouse and Cult Movies. His short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and in numerous original anthologies, including Castle Fantastic (co-edited with Martin Greenberg) and his lat­est, Spell Fantastic. His most recent book, Other States of Being (published by Pulpless.com, Inc.), is a story col­lection.

  PROLOGUE

  VIENNA, AUSTRIA, 1986

  Demel's coffee-house was not crowded that afternoon. In a far corner, directly under a painting of the youthful Franz Josef, Horst Pfordmann sat sipping coffee with whipped cream, and drinking in the Gemutlichkeit. The German word does not translate easily: coziness, conge­niality, a feeling of belonging. However one defines it, Demel's had it. It had good coffee, too.

  And pastry. A table near the counter was piled with confections the like of which only Vienna could produce: vanilla crescents, Congress doughnuts, Sacher tortes, endless varieties of cookies, lady fingers, and more, most fattening in the extreme, all looking absolutely mouthwatering. But Horst wasn't hungry.

  He looked around at the customers: a bespectacled old Frau writing a letter; an elderly couple in the opposite corner drinking melange—half milk, half coffee; a pretty waitress in the back on break, sipping a soda; a man in a dark suit reading a paper. Horst wondered what would any of these people do if they knew what he knew. If what fell into his lap would fall into theirs, what would they do? That frump of a gnadige Frau, there, scribbling a newsy missive to her sister in Munich, what would she do? Who would she turn to? To whom would she divulge the secret?

  Whom do you trust? Good question. Horst reached inside his jacket and fingered the padded envelope again.

  In the envelope was a floppy disk, and on that disk was a file. The file had come in over an international bul­letin-board network, but the accompanying e-mail note had not been coded, and the note had let on what was contained in the encrypted file. Why Dr. Pastorius had done it that way, Horst did not know. Perhaps he did not fully understand the workings of computer networks, a fairly new phenomenon. Sometimes even Horst forgot that two people communicating on net was like shouting into bullhorns on opposite sides of a crowded public square. Anything one did on a public network could be monitored by anyone in the world. Every intelligence-gathering organization on the planet routinely patrolled cyberspace for anything that might be a threat . . . or an opportunity.

  But only Horst had the key to the encrypted file. It was in his pocket, on the disk with Dr. Pastorius's file. Only Pastorius could decipher Horst's files and messages. It was the same code, and it was unique. And that code could not be broken by any means known at present.

  The code was, in principle, unbreakable. Neither ordi­nary complexity nor subtlety was its guarantee of secrecy. A thousand supercomputers working in concert for a thousand years could not unscramble the data. Of course, Horst had no guarantee that Pastorius did not send the same file, under a different encryption, to someone else. If so, Pastorius had not let on. The possibility that someone else had the file comforted Horst a little, but not much.

  He got up. The gnadige Frau smiled at him toothily as he left the coffee-house.

  Walking through the elegant commercial clutter of the Kohlmarkt, Horst got a sudden urge to do something, to make a decision. He had to communicate with somebody. This thing was too big for him alone. He saw a mail kiosk, stepped up to it, took out the small padded enve­lope, and slipped it in the slot. He sighed. Done. Now it was out of his hands. But had he done the right thing? As he walked away from the kiosk, doubts arose. Was Pasto­rius simply the crank that most of his colleagues around the world thought him?

  Was he crazy? Was that file and its purported secret simply a delusion? Pastorius was eccentric; was he also stark staring mad?

  He wanted to forget about the whole thing. There was no way he could gain any professional recognition out of merely relaying Dr. Pastorius's findings to the proper experts.

  Then there was Kenneth Irons in New York. He was an amateur, of course, but he seemed to know more about the artifact than anyone. In fact, Irons sometimes sounded as if he already was in possession of the artifact, and was simply trawling the professional field to see what others knew about it. Curious. But how could he have it? No, he was just a well-informed amateur.

  Well, now I know possibly more about the ancient magical gauntlet than anyone else in the world, Horst thought.

  He turned into his apartment building and mounted the two flights to his floor. Stopping just short of the door to his flat, a mild depression came over him. The good thing about living alone was that when you came back home, your apartment was always the same way you left it. But that was also the bad thing. A loneliness welled up in him, a loneliness that had been with him throughout his adolescence and his young-adult life. He had never had a steady girlfriend. Women had never taken to him. It wasn't that Horst was bad-looking. He was just painfully shy and fearful of rejection.

  He was not a virgin, and, in fact, had had a few very brief affairs. But so far he had not managed to snare a steady mistress. He was lonely most of the time.

  He suddenly decided to take the underground to Rotenturmstrasse and pick up a girl.

  Or perhaps . . . he'd been told of a very good place on . . . now where had Franz said it was? He checked his wallet. Not enough money. He'd have to hit an automatic teller machine. But did he have his ATM card?

  No, he did not. For a second, a sinking feeling hit him as he wondered whether he might have left the plastic card in the slot the last time he used an ATM. But, no. He'd never done that; no reason he should have started.

  Wait. He remembered he'd done a housecleaning job on his wallet recently, generally slimming the thing down, throwing away old business cards and dozens of slips of paper with girls' telephone numbers on them (numbers he rarely had the courage to dial). He hated a bloated wallet; rather, one bloated with anything other than money. He might have left the ATM card in his desk drawer. Well, he'd have to go into the flat after all.

  He got out his key and opened the door, and walked into darkness. And stopped. He distinctly recalled leaving a light on. Bulb must have blown out. As he edged cau­tiously toward the alcove that stood for his study, a curi­ous feeling came over him, one he couldn't readily identify. Something was not right. He flicked on the light, and saw what was wrong. Two men were standing in op­posite corners of the alcove.

  They stepped forward. One was taller, and wore a black trench coat over a brown suit. The other had on an expensive-looking black leather jacket over a blue turtle-neck. He had an ugly face but a pleasant manner.

  “You're probably wondering,” the toad-like man said in a Prussian accent, “who the hell we are and what we're doing here.” He smiled.

  Horst had frozen. His only thought was police. He could only stutter, “Who . . . who . . . ?”

  “Relax,” said the taller one. He was fairly good-looking, with dark eyes
and a wide mouth. “First of all, you are Horst Pfordmann?”

  Horst nodded.

  “Graduate student, University of Vienna. Archaeol­ogy?”

  Horst nodded again.

  “Good, at least we have the right man. We're interested in the Witchblade code.”

  “The . . . the Witchblade—”

  “I said relax,” the man told him mildly. “Nothing's go­ing to happen to you if you cooperate. Recently you re­ceived data from a Dr. Helmut Pastorius in Egypt, concerning the Witchblade. It was encrypted. We need the de-encryption code.”

  Horst finally drew himself together. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Who do you think?” the taller man said, shrugging.

  He had a symmetrical face with movie-star good looks that Horst knew women really went for.

  “It's private information,” Horst said, trying not to sound as frightened to the core as he was.

  “Not any more. We need this data for our case files.”

  “Who are you?” Horst demanded. “What branch of the government?”

  “My name is Erwin Strauss,” said the toad. “We need the code. If we have to, we'll impound your computer and every floppy disk you have.”

  “I want to see some identification. I don't think either of you are Austrian.”

  “You won't give it up?”

  “I must refuse. You have no right . . . no . . .”

  Strauss reached into his jacket and drew out a .9mm pistol with a silencer.

  Horst saw his death coming, and in the few seconds of his life remaining, as the numbed shock of realization paralyzed him, his only thought, a wild shouting in his mind, was that it could not possibly end this way, so quickly, with so little warning. Things like this did not happen. There was no way it could happen to him. Not to him. Not like this.

  The small apartment resounded with a dull thud. Horst Pfordmann fell backward to the tile floor, a single, oozing hole in his forehead. The two intruders cocked their ears for any reaction outside the apartment.

  When nothing seemed forthcoming, the taller man sighed. “Nice shot, Strauss. Though I wish . . .”

  Strauss put the pistol-with-silencer back in his shoul­der holster. He scowled. “It's better, cleaner, this way. You have any objection?”

  “Forget it. It's just that the last time I was in Vienna, I got shot.”

  “I remember. You took a bullet in the chest. You didn't die.”

  “I lead a charmed life.”

  “Let's gather up this stuff.”

  The men made short work of it. In minutes they had cleared the apartment of every floppy disk, in all formats, that could be found in drawers and file cabinets, on shelves, and on the desk. In doing so, they methodically trashed the room, artfully littering the floor and misar­ranging furniture to make it look as though the place had been burgled. They accomplished these tasks making as little sound as possible.

  “Get his wallet and his watch,” the tall one ordered. Strauss obeyed.

  “Telephone-address book?”

  “Probably on his hard disk,” Strauss replied.

  “Check anyway.”

  “Right.” As the ugly one rummaged through the desk, his leather-jacketed colleague dumped all the floppies into a plastic shopping bag.

  “Got it,” Strauss said after a few moments. “Tele­phone-address book. Let me plant the cocaine, and we'll leave.”

  “Does it need that?”

  “Can't hurt. Drug deal goes bad, man's dead.”

  Strauss took out a small plastic bag filled with a white substance and lightly powdered the desk top with it. Af­ter sprinkling some on the floor, he folded up the bag again and pocketed it. “That ought to do it. Just traces.”

  The trenchcoated one stripped the computer's Central Processing Unit of its peripheral components: keyboard, printer, mouse, external modem, joystick. He unplugged the power cord, and after hefting the CPU, he picked it up. “We just walk out, right? No guilty looks, like we own the place.”

  “Like we're repossessing a computer.”

  The thin mouth over the strong jaw turned upward wryly. “No one repossesses a damned computer. Practi­cally no resale value.”

  “All right, you're the computer expert.”

  “Here we are in the age of science and technology, and we're running around chasing after ancient talismans.”

  “I wonder how long we'll have jobs at all, after glas­nost,” Strauss muttered. He groaned as the computer shifted in his arms. “This bastard is heavy.”

  The two men left the apartment. The tall one shut the door gently. It locked automatically.

  No one noticed them, much less challenged them, as they left the building.

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  NEW YORK CITY, PRESENT DAY

  Sara Pezzini came running around the corner of the alley and saw that the man she was chasing, a crackhead snitch who called himself “Kool Whip,” was far ahead. It was dark in the shadows behind these old warehouses, dirty-bricked old hulks that would probably be luxury apartments one day. I only wanted to ask you a few questions, is what she wanted to yell to the guy, but it sounded lame even to her. She’d no sooner got out of the plain-brown-wrapper police car than he’d bolted, athletic shoes chirping squeak squeak squeak against wet concrete. He was a streak before she got up to speed. The guy could run.

  As she followed, the strange bracelet on her left wrist began to throb. Just faintly, just edging over the threshold of tactile sensation.

  Faintly or not, the bracelet didn’t throb often.

  It was drizzling in New York. The sky was slate gray. It had been drizzling all day without ever adding up to real rain. Nevertheless, puddles had accumulated in gouges, potholes, and cracks, lay oily and glistening in plugged drains and odd depressions. Sara’s sneakered foot splashed into a deep one.

  “Damn it.”

  Then her squish-slap squish-slap went chasing after Kool Whip’s annoying squeak. This operation was already turning into a Keystone Cops scenario. It wasn’t much of an operation anyway, just routine questioning of an informer who was in the habit of supplying valuable info now and then, if it could be scared out of him. He was scared now, that was sure, but of what? He’d run at the very sight of Sara, and that could mean only one thing: Kool Whip was good for the clubbing death of a junkie down near East 29th Street and First Avenue last night.

  He hadn’t even been on Sara’s list of usual suspects. Whip was not the violent type, but he was a little hot headed, and anyone can get riled enough at someone to pick up a length of two-by-four and cave in a skull. Now and then.

  Slap-squish slap-squish . . .

  Squeak squeak squeak . . .

  That wet shoe was really vexing. And it was soaked, too, down to the sock.

  An incongruous thought flashed: she wondered if she had a dry pair in her desk drawer somewhere. No, why should she? Wait, in her locker. Didn’t she once come into work with a change of clothes to play racquetball, and wasn’t that last week? No, two . . . three weeks ago.

  Don’t worry about the damn sock. Catch the suspect.

  “Whip, wait up!”

  Tearing around another corner, Whip didn’t answer

  “I just wanna ask—” She slowed, more disgusted than winded. She’d been slow to react.

  Now he was lost in shadow. Gone.

  Her cell phone tweeted.

  “Rats.” She stopped and took it off the hook on her belt and hissed an exasperated “Yes?”

  “Well, excuse me all to hell.”

  “Jake?”

  “Right. Your partner. Your bosom buddy.”

  “I’m the one with the bosom, buddy.”

  “Don’t think I’m not aware.”

  “Sometimes I wonder if you’re conscious half the time. Whassup? How’s your flu?”

  “It’s not the blue kind,” Jake McCarthy said. “I’m really sick.”

  “So am I.”

  “What, you catch it, too
?”

  “No, sick of chasing geeks through back alleys.”

  “Who’re you chasing now?”

  “I was. Kool Whip, a.k.a. Charles Morton Bromley, the Second.”

  “Are you kidding me? That’s his real name?”

  “I just looked at his file. He comes from a well-to-do Boston family.”

  “Get out.”

  “Nope.”

  “You lose him?” Jake asked.

  “Yup.”

  “Excellent work, Detective Pezzini.”

  “Up yours. He ducked into a door. I’ll find him.”

  “Call backup.”

  “I can handle it.”

  Jake coughed away from the phone.

  “Hello?” Sara said.

  “Sorry. Yeah, I think you can. You think he brained Smokey?”

  “Why did he run?” Sara wanted to know.

  “ ‘Urban anxiety’ or whatever they call it. He’s afraid of cops, the poor little tyke.”

  “They hung out a lot. We know they sometimes didn’t get along. Whip has a short fuse. Ergo . . .”

  “Ergo. One question, though. Why’s he so stupid as to run?”

  “Whip can’t think straight when he’s strung out.”

  “Okay, Pez,” Jake said. “I’ll go along with it. Wish I was there.”

  “No, you don’t. Get rid of that bug. Wait a minute. Why did you call?”

  “Seltzer phoned me about you. He’s not what you call favorably disposed toward you, Pez.”

  “What other revelations do you have for me today?”

  “Says you haven’t returned his calls.”

  “I never return his calls.”

  “I know, and he knows. I guess he called the chief and asked about you, and the chief said to talk to her part­ner.”

  “What’d he want from you?”

  “Asked if you had any friends in organized crime.”

  “He asked you that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why the hell?”

  “Dunno, Pez. I think he’s got a new theory about you.”