by Nina D'Aleo
Rocco narrowed his eyes. “You’re a trained operative of the most covert organization in the world. You make a living from deception and manipulation. I’m sure you can manage to convince your family, now millionaires, to take a holiday. Perhaps pretend their lives depend on it.”
His words were harsh but grounding. I had to get them out by whatever means, and once they were out of Pope’s line of fire, I could figure out how to get them away from the Shaman as well. I didn’t trust Omen any more than I trusted whoever was trying to kill me—if it wasn’t Omen himself. I started thinking which of my overseas contacts I could call.
Rocco turned for the door and I said, “Are you leaving?”
“My people will stay surrounding the house. You’ll be safe at least for tonight while Pope regroups, rehires …”
“What was she doing at the shop just staring at us?” I asked.
“She’s trying to intimidate you, to get inside your head..” He straightened as though someone had pinched him. “I have to go.”
He opened the door and we saw a person standing right there on the doorstep. I reached automatically for my sidearm and grasped at the empty place where it should have been. Then I recognized the girl as one of the Shaman—the one who had moved super fast and hit me in the face. She and Rocco shared a fleeting glance, as he stepped past her and vanished almost immediately into the darkness. I heard his car start up. The girl stayed where she was staring at me. She had a beautiful face and unstable, angry eyes.
“Can I help you?” I finally said.
“My name is Morningstar,” she said.
“Congratulations.” I wasn’t in the mood for games.
The girl pursed her lips. “Do you know what a Morningstar is?” she asked.
I shrugged.
“It’s a deadly weapon, with a deceptively pretty name.” She stared directly into my eyes.
“Really? I thought Morningstar sounded more like a pony’s name,” I said.
“As opposed to Silver?” she spat back.
Fair point. “What do you want?” I asked.
“For you to remember your place—human.”
I thought for a second, then finally put two and two together. She and Rocco obviously had some kind of close relationship—he had been assigned to spend his time watching me—now she was here with the third degree—two and two equals—one jealous girlfriend. Her approach seemed a little extreme considering I’d just met Rocco, and not exactly under romantic circumstances. “Calm down, Black Beauty—no one’s after your man.” I told her.
She snorted, not helping herself with the whole horse theme. “I can see everything you try to hide.”
“I’m not hiding anything.” I opened my Kevlar jacket. “Just use your mind tricks and take a look for yourself.” I invited her into my brain then kicked myself for it—was inviting a Shaman into your mind like inviting a vampire into your house?
“I’m not permitted—yet. But if I was—it would be pathetically easy.” She sneered at me, then turned and stalked away.
I shut the door and leaned against it, thinking. I could hear my family still celebrating, laughing and dancing. I had to use the moment. I had to convince them to leave and I had to get it right. Then I had to crack open my safe and get out every weapon I could find and guard my family through the night.
I checked my watch. Time was ticking.
19
With Dad still jumping up and down waving like a three-hundred-pound Sicilian schoolgirl and Mom beside him hyperventilating into a seasick bag, the giant cruise ship pulled away from the dock. No surprises. Dad was a traveller at heart—planes, trains, boats, cars—whatever, whenever—whereas Mom was an agoraphobic, scared speechless of flying and nauseated at the mere suggestion of sailing. But in a show of solidarity, she’d medicated up and agreed to fulfill one of Dad’s dreams: taking a cruise together. An hour earlier we’d seen Benicio and Gemma off at the airport.
Dad had promised us all a cut of the money as soon as it cleared, so they’d taken leave from their jobs—with no intention of returning—and hopped a plane to my sister-in-law’s native New Zealand to spend some time there before the baby was born. They’d even been talking about starting their own photography business. I honestly thought it would be a major effort to get everyone gone so fast—but it hadn’t been. Some suggestions, some prompting, some light convincing—and within the space of fourteen hours my entire family were leaving the country. Money—it doesn’t buy happiness—physical objects can’t purchase subjective constructs—but it sure buys everything else. No one had wanted to leave me, but I’d promised I would join them as soon as I could. I’d told them I was going into work today to apply for leave—I’d even purchased a ticket to meet my parents in Hawaii just so they believed me. There was a possibility—a large one—that I wouldn’t live out the day, but I had to chance it. I’d never dreamed that my ambitions to right some wrongs in life would endanger my family like this. Naive—I could see that now.
I kept waving as the ship shrank into the distance. The further it sailed, the worse I felt inside. Bad feelings mutated and multiplied. My parents hadn’t left us much as kids, but I remembered one time we’d had to stay with relatives when they went to a funeral. I’d watched them drive off and I’d had the same feelings then as I did now—an empty ache in the pit of my stomach—a feeling that everything safe and right in my world was slowly vanishing. I’d run after their car on that day, and now I felt like jumping into the ocean. I wanted to tell them again that I loved them. How many times would be enough—if it were the last time you could say it?
I clenched my fists, channeling the bad feelings into anger. I wanted to know who had put the hit on me. There was a chance that Omen had hired Annrais himself to force me into this position, and if that was the case, I’d sent my family off “guarded” by people who could turn on them at any second. They were completely unarmed and unaware. During the night, I had called some international contacts and arranged for them to board the ship at the next port and to follow my brother and his wife from the airport in Auckland. Hopefully it wouldn’t be blaringly obvious to the Shaman what I’d done, but if Rocco could read my mind, there was nowhere to hide anyway. Like I said, I had to chance it.
I gave a final wave at the horizon and checked the time: ten past ten. My mother’s cousin should already be at the house picking up the animals. Like mom, this cousin was pet crazy—that and various other sorts of crazy ran in their family—and she’d agreed to care for the cats and others for a while. Mr Foofypants, Gypsy Rose, Frizzy, Sushi, Chirps-Bird and all the rest were part of the family too and I wasn’t going to leave them there at the mercy of Pope and her psychos. If they could kill people at a whim, I doubted small and fuzzy creatures would mean anything at all to them. Rocco had left one of his people at the house to make sure no one snatched the cousin while she was there. After that, the place would be empty and unguarded and I wouldn’t be returning. I’d taken enough clothes and supplies to last the week. If I survived longer than that, I’d figure something out.
I looked over my shoulder. Rocco stood leaning against the hood of his vehicle, his arms crossed over his chest, eyes hidden behind sunglasses—darkly handsome—except for his hair. The hair was tragic. It looked as if his grandmother had spit-gelled it to one side for him. Most people had a fatal flaw in life—I guessed morning hair was his.
I turned back to the water and took out the replacement cell phone I’d dug out of my home stash. I dialed the hospital. I’d rung them so many times in the last few days I knew their number better than I knew my own. The nurse who answered said Dark was awake, but that the doctor was with him. I’d spent a good part of the night thinking how to get him out and hidden. There were a few people unconnected to Chapter 11 who I could call—old buddies from our federal police days, among others—but if Annrais’s assassins couldn’t get to him past the Shaman, how would my contacts do it?
I wanted to talk to my partner so badly
. I realized I was standing there with the phone pressed to the side of my head, the vacant tone bleeping in my ear. I needed to get in gear. I needed to get focused. Trouble was I couldn’t remember a time when I didn’t feel sick with tiredness. I took off my sunglasses and massaged the pain rebuilding behind my eyes. Stress had amped up the migraines, and the pills were in my duty belt, now in the possession of a psychopathic murderer … My hands started to tremble and I clenched them into fists.
“Get it together,” I whispered. I replaced the sunglasses and turned around.
Rocco was standing right behind me. I took a quick step back.
“It’s time to go,” he said.
“Dark’s awake,” I told him. “Is there still someone on him—is he safe?”
“For now he’s covered,” Rocco gave his standard reply.
For now … at least he was honest about it.
“They’re coming—we have to go,” he told me.
I cursed under my breath. Pope was a hellhound. What would it take to send her back?
“I swear the next time she’s in range, I’m taking her out,” I told him as we strode back to the car. So much for my pacifistic ideals.
“Let us deal with her,” Rocco said. “You’ll draw too much attention if you start randomly shooting up buildings. You have to focus on the plan.”
“Which is what?” I asked.
We got into the car and he started the engine. “You go to work and start looking for the White List.”
He backed without looking. A few other cars were reversing at the same time and all of them stopped dead to let him go first. He drove to the exit, then took off, heading into Toran-R. I took his advice and started thinking about the task.
“I would have done what Omen did and started with the Conference.” I spoke my thoughts aloud. “They’re the ones who hold the reins. If they don’t have access to the information, then who the hell would?”
“They hold the reins, yes, but they don’t necessarily work at a functional level within the organization,” Rocco told me. “In my way of thinking—it’s the Head of Operational Services who assigns the field agents to their tasks—tells them which Shaman are about to break-thru.”
“Okay.” I processed what he was saying. “So you think maybe my boss, Twentyman, would have access?”
“Maybe not to the entire List, but possibly to individual names off it—and according to Marco individual portions of the List may have a digital location stamp, something to track it back to the originating system.”
“So someone sends him the names of the … individuals … who are about to break-thru copied off the List—and these copies may lead us to the actual list.”
“Maybe … ” he said.
I shook my head, my thoughts jumping ahead. “Even if I knew a hundred percent that Twentyman had stored the names on his computer, there’s no way I’ll be able to access his system—even under normal circumstances. And now they’re hunting Omen, everything is locked down super tight.”
“There’s always a way,” Rocco told me. “Use your knowledge, work your strengths and remember the people who trust you are your best asset.”
“Spoken like a true mercenary soldier,” I said.
Rocco glanced my way and said, “Yes and you’d better start thinking my way if you want to survive.”
“If Omen is so powerful and was still caught, what hope do I have?” I repeated my question from the night before.
“Omen’s position was compromised,” Rocco said and I detected a definite tension to his words. His body changed as well—he sat more rigidly in his seat, clenched the wheel tighter. It was the first sign of discomfort I’d seen from him.
There was definitely something there, but I doubted he was a man who could be pushed into conversation. I looked out the passenger window at the city, at its people—everything was the same and everything looked different. The city I thought I knew so well had grown yet another face—a non-human face.
“What did you mean about the Order of Shaman?” I asked him, coming back to something I’d been thinking about the night before. “Like a pecking order?”
“Yes—if we were chickens,” Rocco said, giving me a dark look.
“I didn’t mean that in a bad way,” I said, my words heavy with fatigue, and his expression softened slightly.
“It’s related to power,” he said. “As I was saying at the motel—the higher up the Order the more power. Worldwide—the Horseman is one, Omen is two.”
“And who is three?” I asked.
“Me,” Rocco said.
“And if you’re higher in the Order than another Shaman, it means you could block his or her power and abilities?”
“Under certain circumstances—if they were incapacitated like they are when C11 caps them—then yes—but mainly it has to with number of skills, strength in using those skills in combat and the ability to sense each other. If I’m higher than you and I don’t want you to know I’m a Shaman, I can block you from sensing it, but if you’re lower you can’t block me from seeing you—but—if you’re under the protection of a Shaman stronger than me, then he or she can shield you as well.”
“Sounds complicated,” I said.
“It’s really not,” Rocco said, making me feel dense.
“There seem to be more Shaman breaking-thru than ever before,” I said.
He nodded. “The more of us that wake, the more of us will wake. I can’t explain it, but that’s what’s happening. Seems to be a domino effect of sorts.”
“Everywhere?” I asked.
Rocco nodded. “The Horseman has his people in all the major C11 locations, all the capital cities around the world and many of the smaller facilities as well—and we have contacts everywhere too, but no one inside Headquarters as I said earlier.”
“Does the White List include all wal—I mean Shaman—everywhere or just here?”
“Worldwide,” he confirmed. “And the more people we have positioned across each continent and region the better chance we have. We don’t know exactly how the Horseman will strike, but we know that when he does it will be global. That much is clear.”
As he said that an idea came to me. “I know some countries have fewer resources for handling break-thrus. How are they dealing with the influx?”
“They’re not,” Rocco said. “The violence is escalating and maybe that’s part of the Horseman’s plan—we’re not sure yet.”
I jolted forward in my seat as he brought the big vehicle to a sudden stop right outside Headquarters, behind a car pulling into the only free parking space. The car’s owner, a random suit, climbed out. He started to stride away then stopped, looked around scratching his head, then went back to the car, got in and drove away. I didn’t doubt this strange behavior was the result of my new Shaman friend silently convincing the guy he was in the wrong place.
“There’s heavy surveillance all around the building,” I told him. “If they see us together, they’ll check up on you.”
“If anyone looks up my profile they’ll find a perfectly legitimate person,” he said. “Marco has made sure of it.”
“Is he really capable?” I asked.
“More than capable,” Rocco said. He glided into the space, then took a manila envelope out of his pocket and upturned it into his hand.
“Cell phone linked to my number—just press red.” He handed me the device. “It also has the blueprint of C11 headquarters and security-camera locations. PIN is 3888. Don’t get caught with it unlocked. Call me with updates.”
“Call you?” I asked. “Can’t you just see my thoughts?”
Rocco paused and I thought he wasn’t going to answer, but then he said, “It’s a lot more complicated than just seeing. There are many layers of thoughts and memories in a person’s mind. Some people are very complex. I have to use facial expression, body cues, scent even to understand the simplest idea.”
“Am I—complex?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
I must have looked disappointed because he frowned and said, “It’s not necessarily a good thing to be complex, and even if you’re not, there are ways to make it more difficult for a Shaman to read you. You can think of other things to blanket what you want to hide, even silent counting or reciting the alphabet works, and thinking about sex always distracts people … ”
“Don’t say that or I’ll start thinking about it and distract myself,” I muttered.
Rocco almost smiled.
I rubbed my temples. Pure stress pulsated through my veins. I felt it peak and then start to ebb down, down, down until I felt calm: completely, unnaturally calm.
“Don’t,” I said to the Shaman. “Don’t pheromone me or whatever it is you do. I have to feel what I feel; I have to be myself. I’m serious. Stop.”
The calm flowed out and the pain rushed in, compounded by fatigue, fear and hunger. My hands went shaky and my vision fuzzed. The headache felt like knives behind my eyes, and the place where Pope had smashed me in the face throbbed horribly. I realized Rocco must have been blocking the pain since he first saved me at the warehouse.
“Okay—maybe pheromone me a little.” I murmured. I couldn’t work like this. I couldn’t even walk.
The pain lifted to the point where I could see and steady myself.
“Time to go,” Rocco said. “Wait for me.” He opened his door and came around to my side, carefully positioning himself as cover while I climbed out. He hugged me close to his side as we walked to the entrance of the office. I could feel the tension in his body and scanned our surroundings, already knowing what I would see—who I would see. I looked back at the building across the street. It was a heritage-listed double-story structure with Romanesque balconies and stone gargoyle cats. Perched beside one of the statues, as still as a stone herself—Annrais Pope. She had a sniper rifle pointed at us.
“Psycho bitch,” I murmured. “Why doesn’t she just shoot?”
“She can’t get a clear shot,” Rocco said, weaving us in and out of the stampede of people crossing in front of Headquarters. We entered through the glass doors and Rocco relaxed his grip. All the transparent panels of the building were thick bulletproof glass. I glanced back to where Annrais had sat a few seconds ago and she was gone—like an illusion, a nightmare.
