An apartment complex like this meant security, and it meant cameras: lots of cameras. It didn’t make the job impossible, but it definitely made it harder. I could take out cameras easily enough - electronics don’t really like magical resonance - but not a whole building’s worth. There’d be a trail of fuzzy video. Talented mediums working with forensic videographers would possibly be able to extract the ghostly images of my passing. Besides that, if Maslak could afford a five thousand dollar-a-month apartment, what kind of magical security was he able to contract? And where was he getting the money?
“What are you thinking, Alexi?” Vassily said. “My guess is we pretend to be contractors or pizza boys or something, and go up there and beat the piss out of him.”
“No, no.” I shook my head, drumming my fingers on the steering wheel and staring at the dash as I thought. “No, Rodion wants something more dramatic than that. I’m going to have to do it alone, and I’m going to have to do it tonight… but I have an idea.”
Chapter 7
You had a choice when it came to enforcement work: you could do it fast, or you could do it slow. Slow meant days of surveillance, building up patterns and routines so you could pick the best moment to act. Fast meant more risk during the actual job, but you had the advantages of surprise and spontaneity. I usually preferred slow. This particular job called for fast.
Much later that night, I returned to Gateway Plaza in a different rented car, which I parked down the road and forgot about. I had a duffel bag with everything I was likely to need, including a siphon tube, a bucket of children’s chalk, a can of mace and a telescoping baton, no gun. I was also disguised. One of the advantages of being a short man is that it’s far easier to look taller than it is to appear shorter. Shoe lifts and a padded-out ski cap over a good wig could add a full four inches of height. With coveralls and boots, anyone seeing me would report a well-built man, around six feet tall, brown eyes and brown hair - assuming they even remembered.
The underground lot had an entry boom and a manned attendant booth. The guard was in there, reading a tabloid and smoking out the window. We were going to have to engage… there was no route to sneak past him, and my gift for magic did not extend to invisibility.
As I strode toward the gate, he looked up and frowned. I made a beeline for the window, hands in my pockets.
“Hey, uh, Sir.” The man folded his paper and pushed his cigarette to the corner of his mouth, puffing on it. “Sorry, but this isn’t a public access garage.”
“Hey, buddy. I’m here to work on a car,” I said. “What’s it take for a man to get a guest pass?”
To my surprise, his eyes narrowed. “A guest pass? Hang on… wait. Did you just try to bribe me to let you in here?”
“Yes, sir.” I nodded, pulled out my keychain canister of bear spray, and maced him in the face.
He threw his hands up, but the mace got in his eyes and caught the cigarette with a small fireball that set his carefully teased and moussed hair alight. The shout of alarm turned to a scream. As he thrashed back and forth in the confines of the booth, eyes streaming and hair burning, I leaned in, grabbed him by the collar and shoulders, and hauled him through the window. He wasn’t too big, so he didn’t get stuck. Instead, he slithered to the ground in a sobbing, smoking heap, his Maglite clattering to the ground.
“Your job cannot be worth this much trouble, puttanta.” I grasped him by the collar and hauled him up. I frisked him, searching for a gun and cuffs, and then doubled over as he landed his fist in my gut.
Besides dogs, the greatest impediment to a good night’s work was competent security. I kneed him in the face, sending him sprawling back against the security booth. He went for his gun and radio; I went for the Maglite and a word of power. “Tzain!”
The radio squealed and popped with a bang and a puff of smoke, surged well beyond capacity. The guard dropped it with a startled sound, his gun half out of his holster. I slung the Maglite like a club, bringing it down on his wrist, and then up across his jaw on the backhand. He pitched to the road like a ragdoll.
“Honestly… You could have just read your magazine and had your five hundred bucks.” I grumbled, picking him up by the armpits and dragging him around the back of the booth. We were guaranteed to be on camera. Whether or not the camera center guy was as motivated as Captain America here remained to be seen.
I tore the guard’s shirt up and used it to tie him hand and foot to the railing behind the booth, blind and gagged. Then, I finished my frisk, took his keys, and left him to stew. Today was not his day to die, but he was going to have one hell of a headache when he woke up.
That taken care of, I jogged down the ramp, getting my bearings among the forest of color-coded concrete pylons. I knew Maslak’s apartment number thanks to some strategic phone calls made earlier in the evening, but the blood was pounding in my temples and my gut was cramping, and I had to pause to search for cameras as I zoned in on the bay I needed. Eventually, I found the gleaming black Renault, parked between a Landcruiser and a motorbike. The garage was blessedly still and silent. Now it was time for the fun part: rigging the car with enough explosives to wreck the car and cause a big bang, but not enough to kill anyone.
First things first. I dropped down, and using my well-earned Maglite, had a look under the chassis to rule out exotic anti-theft features. Most nouveau riche had someone do up wards on their cars, and this one was no exception. On the floor just under the driver’s seat was a circle drawn in white paint. It had three concentric rings formed by the body of a snake that twisted around and held its tail in its mouth. An arrow outside the circle pointed to the right of the car. There was a six-pointed star in the center of the circle, and the planetary symbol of Mercury inside that.
Wards are essentially small magic circles that are pre-charged with energy. They are almost always protective magic, and the energy only discharges under certain programmed circumstances. White was the color of the Moon, which made perfect sense to me: The Moon and Mercury are planets associated with thieves and the protection of items against theft. If this ward had been consecrated with those two planetary symbols in mind, then the ward was fueled by emotion and concentration, the Moon and Mercury respectively.
I rolled out, had a look around, and then went back under to pull my glove off and hold my hand out near the design. It ‘fizzed’, and with some concentration, I felt myself connect with the cycle of energy. There was a silver and mercury talisman under the driver’s seat, the material anchor of the ward. It was charged by the focus, anxiety and day-to-day emotions of the driver. The talisman almost certainly contained a hair or a drop of Maslak’s blood. It was quite a nice little piece of magic… any thief who tried to steal the car would be unconsciously fueling the ward with their feelings and focus, making the magic more powerful. The same was true of anyone who tried to banish the magic, such as myself. By concentrating on it, I would make it more powerful and more resistant to deletion.
Wardbreaking was typically a case of opposites: black for white, Sun for Moon, Saturn for Mercury. I got out my travel kit of magical tools and dusted a few ingredients onto the oily concrete: gold filings, white lead base powder, charcoal and ground red pepper. I mixed them together, spat on it, and mixed it some more. It turned into a dark grayish paste that I daubed around the ward, encircling the magic with my own. The underside of the car hummed like a wasp’s nest, and as it did, I was able to search for the gap in its armor, the weakness that was always present in every static ward where the mark of the mage’s finger or brush ended the circle. The more I concentrated, the angrier the ward became… it was soon too close to triggering for me to continue, so I kicked the ground and focused on the sensation of my foot banging against the inside of my shoe to calm it down. When the heat laid off, I got my knife and made a small, moderately deep cut on the inside of my arm. Then I squirted mace on it.
The pain took my breath away, but it certainly drew my attention away from what I was doing. Writhin
g, cursing, eyes watering, I jammed my fingers into the remaining paste, felt out for the break in the circle, and swiped my gloved fingers across it. There was a small pop, more felt than seen, then the muffled sound of bursting glass from overhead. Ward broken.
The mechanical act of breaking into the car was considerably less exhausting than dealing with the magical part. I pressed my sleeve against my bleeding arm and used a rag to mop up my remaining poultice, then rolled back out and picked myself up. I was still alone.
Satisfied, I got a screwdriver and used that to pop the hood, then cut the car alarm cable with a pair of shears. I closed the hood hard, bracing in case an alarm went off. There was only the heaviness of still air. That meant that I could let myself into the cabin with a shoelace and get busy on wiring up the ignition. The keyless entry system he’d used was something new to me. After some poking around, I found a set of wires I wasn’t accustomed to finding, and got busy with tin snips, electrical tape, wire and a small tube of shake-and-bake explosive, the kind you mixed together from a powder and a liquid.
My next job was to siphon out some of the gas and use it to flood the car seats. After that, all that remained was to affect the appearance of magic, which I did by scribing the same Sun wheel sigil that had been burned into Vyacheslav’s chest on one of the pylons beside the car. The police wouldn’t know what it meant, but Maslak would.
The last step was the most dangerous. I hooked up the detonator to the radio box, locked up, and beat a hasty retreat, watching over my shoulder the entire time. The security guard was already awake, howling behind his gag at me. It wasn’t going to be any good to leave him there, so I pulled him off the rail – still bound, and dragged him to the basement entry door, unlocked it with his keys after some trial and error, and rolled him into the dark room beyond. I left the keys on the door handle. The police would find him easily enough after the fact, and he would be able to give a rousing account of his heroism against the six-foot, brown-on-brown Long Island goon who had, for some mysterious reason, let him live to see another day.
Chapter 8
Naturally, I desired to see the results of my handiwork.
I spent the rest of the night disposing of my equipment, one piece at a time. I filed the security guard’s pistol, pulled it apart and drove a big circle across the Brooklyn Bridge and back to throw bits and pieces out the window and into the water. Gowanus was always a good place to dump things; so was East Williamsburg. Everything went overboard: shoes, gloves, coveralls, wig. It was coming up on dawn by the time I was done. I used the last of the gas to drive to a friendly scrapyard, where I filled in a form under a fake name and sent my temporary ride to the shredder. Back to my blond, short, white-eyed self, I took the subway back to Gateway Apartments, set up in front of the office across the road with a newspaper and a cup of coffee, and waited for the fireworks.
At a quarter to eight, there was a dull crumpling sound. The road vibrated briefly under my feet in the split second before a dozen car alarms went off all at once down in the depths of the parking garage. I jumped up as people stopped, cars slowed, and the parking garage spewed a cloud of black smoke around the people fleeing the fire.
Another advantage of being short is being able to blend into crowds, but it wasn’t much good when you were trying to see what was happening at the front. As escapees gathered by the entry to the apartments and sirens wailed, I stood up on tiptoes and anxiously searched for my mark. When he stumbled out up from the ramp – crispy around the edges, but very much alive – I let out a tense breath, turned, and pushed my way back through the knot of gawkers, heading toward the World Trade Center and Cortlandt Street train station beneath. The subway was packed, the crowd swirling enough to make me nauseous. I was sick with fatigue and thirst, and well overdue for sleep.
I got off at Brighton Beach station and walked several blocks to my apartment, stumbling into a wall on the way up. I exited the stairwell onto my floor, yawning, and was hit with the pungent smell of male urine and trash. It bought me up cold.
“Oh for God’s sake…” My fears were confirmed when I reached my door and found it streaked with and wet with urine. My trashbag was torn open on the welcome mat. Grigori had pissed over that, too. There were gouge marks around my lock, but he’d been too intoxicated to finish whatever he’d planned to do.
Flushed with anger, I checked around the corner to make sure he wasn’t still lurking in the building with his sledgehammer, then set my workbag down with a sigh and started to pick everything up. There was more than one reason I always wore gloves, and most of those reasons related back to Grigori fucking Sokolsky.
* * *
A huge storm broke in the late evening, waking me before my alarm. The rumble of thunder, loud as gunshot, started me out of a dream that had been rolling me down and under a wave of dark, hot anger. I scrambled upright in the sheets, flailing across for my knife. Lighting flashed beyond my window, briefly illuminating the room, and alarm turned to awe as I relaxed and listened to the rain drumming against the window. Then, I remembered Slava’s amulet, still sitting on the roof. In between the rush to do Rodion’s job as quickly as possible and cleaning my father’s piss of my front door with a bucket of bleach water and a squeegee, I’d forgotten all about it.
I called Sirens and arranged the meet with Nic, got ready, and let Sir Purrs-A-Lot inside for the night. The cat, as usual, wanted nothing to do with me, so I let him into Vassily’s room and then set out for the drive to Queens.
The club was busier on a Thursday, though nowhere near weekend capacity. One woman gyrated around and arched against the tall pole on the center stage, dancing for a thin crowd of diehard perverts and wannabe pimps. She was not nearly as good as Crina.
My brat’ye were at their regular table, belting out songs as a unit and banging their glasses on the counters in a vague approximation of tempo. I searched the room for Grigori before I joined them, doing my best to swell in size on my approach. He was not there, to my great relief.
“Haha, look who’s here! Alexi, my man!” Rodion stood to greet me, hands spread. I went to him, kissed cheeks, and then did the same with the others.
“Have you seen the papers yet, you ballsy son-of-a-bitch?” Vassily said. He was still mostly sober. Of all of our ‘brothers’, he was inevitably the most temperate.
“No time,” I replied. I pulled the amulet from my breast pocket, and handed it out to Vyacheslav. “Slava, here.”
“Thanks.” He didn’t look especially thankful, and fiddled with it before slipping it into his breast pocket instead of over his head.
“You’re supposed to wear it.” I stared at him, speaking slowly.
He did at least have the courtesy to look embarrassed. “Oh.”
While he fiddled with the pendant, I turned my attention back to Vassily. “Was the explosion in the news?”
“You bet it was in the fucking news.” Vassily motioned to the seat beside him. I sat down, and Lev took up the paper and slid it down to us.
“Page three,” he said.
My lips quirked as I picked it up and flipped it open, scanning the headline and text. “A car exploded in a Battery Park community Tuesday morning in what appears to be a random act of arson, injuring several people and causing hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of damage to the Gateway Apartments complex. The owner of the vehicle, Jacob Maslak, says that the car exploded and then caught on fire when he went to unlock the vehicle for his usual morning commute.”
“Wait wait,” Rodion said. “Read the part about the people that did it.”
“Hmm...” I searched the columns. “Ah, here we are. When asked whether or not the bombing appeared to be an act of terrorism, New York Police Department spokesman Garry Koln said: “This crime has some hallmarks of a terrorist attack. Fortunately, the explosion was only small, and it only resulted in minor injuries to those surrounding the car. We believe it may be related to Italian organized criminal activities.”
�
��The best professional is the one who tricks everyone into thinking someone else is a fool.” Vassily put his arm around my shoulder, and I felt the skin of my back lift with gooseflesh under the weight.
Everyone laughed, so I arched my eyebrows and continued. “In their efforts to catch the arsonist, the NYPD is working with the newly formed Vigiles Magicarum, an FBI agency dealing with crimes of an unusual nature, due to several exotic elements found at the crime scene. Police report they are looking for a well-built white male - possibly of Italian or Mediterranean ethnicity - in his early thirties, six-foot tall, brown haired and dark brown or blue eyes.”
That earned another round of laughter. Down the row, Slava pulled his collar out and began to fan himself with another one of the newspapers.
“How the fuck did you manage to grow five inches, Alexi?” Petro said. “You’re the shortest motherfucking man in New York.”
“I am not,” I replied, throwing the paper down onto the table. “Danny DeVito is. As for your question… no comment.”
“Everyone knows Danny DeVito is actually three babies in a trenchcoat, Lexi,” Vassily said, and handed me a glass that had been waiting beside his. “What’s your excuse?”
“I’ll never tell.” I accepted the drink without hesitation, and threw half of it back in a long swallow. It was water, not vodka… though no one but Vassily and I would know that.
“So now, Lev, Nic and Grisha just have to go visit Maslak tomorrow.” Rodion lifted his glass and drank as well, followed promptly by everyone else. “Make sure the little worm knows it’s business as usual. What’s the timeline for the sell-off, Lev?”
“The stocks are rising precipitously in value, thanks to Vasya.” Lev looked alongside at Vassily. “He’s the one to ask.”
“We’ve already doubled. I’m expecting at least another hundred-and-fifty percent rise,” Vassily said. “We might even double it over again. People are going nuts for this anti-aging stuff… I’ve got Yegor Gavrilyuk on it on one side. He’s farmed out the speculation to guys in Miami, Texas and LA, three big cities with lots of old people that wish they were young again. Me and Semyon are working together in the office with the brokers to make sure that the stocks get snapped up by prospectors. The point you decide to cash out depends on your tolerance for risk, Avtoritet.”
Burn Artist Page 5
