by John Farris
Swish.
Some people were just born to win.
Cody walked back to her, limping a little to belie the easy confidence that was native to him: he’d stubbed a couple of toes on his left foot. Eden was nearly expressionless, hands on her waist. Trying not to laugh at either of them.
“You cheated a couple of steps,” she pointed out. “That wasn’t in the vig.”
“You’d break my heart for a couple of steps?” He exaggerated the limp and, feigning helplessness, dropped to his knees in front of her.
“I break hearts on Thursdays and Saturdays,” Eden said dispassionately. “I guess you’re safe. What time’s the game tonight?”
“Seven thirty,” he said, getting back on his feet and trying not to wince.
“Why don’t we eat afterwards, then? I like junk at a game—you know, nachos, popcorn. Couple of beers.”
“Where will I meet you, Eve?”
“I’m on bungalow row. The big one with the rain forest in the orangerie. There’ll be some guys parked out front in a van, but they won’t bother you if you wear that Gabby Hayes hat and talk cowpoke.”
Cody Olds gave her a look. Some guys parked out front in a van? He knew that Bahìa’s so-called bungalows were reserved for glam politicos, celebrity bling, kingly charlatans of commerce with their thirty-thousand-square-foot homes, art collections, transatlantic yachts, a stain of plague in their greed.
Eden politely ignored his speculation and said, “How about seven o’clock, Cody?”
7:10 A.M.
General Bronc Skarbeck looked around the lobby of the Lincoln Grayle Theatre and said, “Jesus Diddly Christ! You’re telling me some guys in SWAT gear came in here with an industrial forklift the size of a John Deere Harvester, lifted that hunk of glass off the floor, and carted it out to a, what? What kind of helicopter?”
“I don’t know for certain,” said one of the security guards. “Never got a real good look. But it was at least the size of one of the Chinooks the Hundred and First used for deployments behind the Iraqi lines during the Gulf War.”
Another guard said, “No, I think it was a Seahorse or whatever they call those boogers the Navy uses for minesweeping. Anyway, after they loaded up what they come for, big as she was that helo took on off out of here like a turpentined cat.”
“What direction?”
“South, southwest maybe.”
“And what were you doing while they were making their getaway?” Skarbeck asked.
“After you collect ten amps’ worth of voltage, General, you don’t feel like doing much of anything for a while. Gar-on-tee.”
Bronc shook his head, although not in disappointment. A well-planned and executed entry had taken place, and they’d known just what they were after. No deadly force had been required or, judging from their lack of armament, contemplated. He couldn’t make the least sense of it. They hadn’t taken, as far as he knew at this time, anything of real monetary value. He repressed a superstitious shudder, thinking of what lay in the heart of that big glass blister. Skarbeck, after a restless night of disturbing dreams, was half convinced that, in his fixation on Eden Waring, the mortal Magician had made himself a victim of an illusion even he couldn’t control.
Elizabeth Ann Perkins came over to Skarbeck with a cell phone, saying, “I’ve got Dr. Woolwine for you.”
“Thanks.” Before taking the call he sensed an absence and looked around again, scowling. Said to Perk, “Where’s Harlee?” She had insisted on coming with him in spite of the fright she’d received yesterday while looking at one of the surveillance tapes. Now she had wandered off. Perk didn’t know to where. Bathroom? “Find her,” Skarbeck said.
Harlee Nations had taken advantage of her first opportunity to slip away from the others in the theatre lobby. She went immediately to Lincoln Grayle’s dressing suite, where, to her quick appraising eye, everything seemed in perfect order. She was very much at home there. No sex with Grayle, ever, but that was okay. It allowed for adulation in its purest form.
Some of the Magician’s collection of antique posters and props of other master illusionists was nearly three hundred years old. In the vicinity of Harlee’s true age.
Harlee was something of an illusionist herself.
Upstairs, in the spectrochrome chamber of the duplex suite, she stripped to the skin and lay on the massage table, which was equipped with a keypad she could employ with the fingers of her right hand while flat on her back. Choosing from an array of colored lights projected through ordinary glass filters on an overhead grid, aligning them in combinations the length of her fine naiad’s body, unblemished as polished ivory. The movement and duration of each precise beam, some as narrow as piano wire, were controlled by a computer program designed for her physical needs, the contours of her body alone.
Ten to twelve minutes of colored-light therapy, two times a week. Along with a few good pharmacologically engineered naps to speed her through the duller decades, condensing years into dreamlike moments, Harlee had stayed vital and refreshed in the blood throughout her long history.
At the end of World War II Harlee had regressed to and remained in the physical state of a sixteen-year-old, finding it to be a useful age for her line of work, which was the subjugation, manipulation, and—at Mordaunt’s pleasure—total destruction of innocent or unwary souls coasting through life like so many mallards on a placid pond. She had a fully finished adult brain and was sexually mature, with the agility, stamina, and wiles of youth. Retaining everything she had learned during her extended stay but with enough mental capacity that she wasn’t in danger of memory suffocation.
Colored lights, principally indigo and hues of purple, applied to the hindbrain and several glands and other organs were all she required to maintain her dewy, delectable self. But which light, and how long it needed to be focused on the pineal gland, or the thalamus, or the soles of the feet—that was the biogenetic art of it. You had to be in the know.
Harlee’s deep knowledge, courtesy of the Great One—as his acolytes referred to Mordaunt—went back a few thousand years. Most of the ancient texts that contained techniques for achieving extraordinary life spans no longer existed. They had been burned or hammered to bits, condemned as sorcery in great libraries like those of Sumer, the Egyptian mystery schools, Pergamus, Carthage; and mighty Alexandria—seven hundred thousand scrolls up in flames thanks to Mordaunt, who had always felt that unenlightened souls should remain so as long as possible. The burning of the Library of Alexandria had represented the greatest loss of human wisdom and esoteric knowledge ever concentrated in one place.
By contrast, what the present generation knew—in spite of telescopes in space, supercomputers, models of DNA codes—about mankind’s origins, history, and potential would fit into a rural bookmobile. It was an age of enormous hubris and abysmal spiritual ignorance; of moral dilemma and blood hatreds and epic human conflicts. Pretty much business as usual, as it had been for millennia. Mordaunt liked things that way, and he was the consummate Arranger.
But his human persona the thaumaturgist was missing, trapped in an alternate, aberrant shape, and although she could feel the vibrational imprint of where Grayle had lain only thirty-six hours before, she took no reassurance from it. Harlee felt bereft, directionless, and a little scared.
How could she help him? What would he now expect of her, as leader of her own lay circle of Malterran souls? Another time, Mordaunt could have survived anything that the Avatar bitch so wrongly named “Eden” dished up to him, but with half of his unconquerable soul temporarily unavailable, he had been all too susceptible, anticipating the pleasure of fathering a hybrid entity of such evil and catastrophic power that the world would tremble at its birth.
Harlee weathered a spate of jealousy. She couldn’t bear children and she had no extrahuman powers; all that she’d ever had to offer Mordaunt was her devotion. And her skills as an assassin.
Get on with it, then? Harlee mused, as she concluded her spectrochro
me session and began to dress. When Mordaunt returned (she didn’t think if; there was no way to conceptualize such a dire thought) he surely would understand that, despite his fixation on the Avatar (really, she thought, reverting momentarily to her teen persona, it was like some pimply boy with a crush on a cheerleader), Eden Waring’s continued presence on earth only added insult to the injury she had done him.
But to act without the express consent of the Great One, Harlee knew, could be a grave miscalculation on her part. You didn’t fall out of favor with him and expect leniency. What you got was an exercise in bitter remorse, bodiless in darkness absolute and everlasting.
Harlee didn’t like the idea of being without a lovely body to pamper, clothe, flaunt on a dance floor. A shape to drive men half out of their gourds. And fucking was the greatest.
Mordaunt had left the building, but there might be a way of communicating with him.
Harlee slipped into her sandals, locked up the spectrochrome chamber, and went to the Magician’s walk-in wardrobe, two floors packed with costumes from past editions of his spectacular shows. Most of the stuff was behind glass on mannequins that mimicked the Magician’s form. Scarves, capes, superhero masks, Elvis-style jumpsuits. The mannequins had ovoid heads but no faces.
Harlee glanced around but kept her nostalgia in check. After all, wasn’t it just a little creepy?
There was a small elevator concealed in a back wall of the wardrobe. It operated by handprint only. She was identified and permitted to board. The elevator was large enough for two, or maybe a closely packed ménage à trois. The machinery hummed and Harlee slowly descended into a grotto beneath the dressing suite that was known only to a few trusted associates of the Magician.
Mineshaft rock walls. A constant temperature of fifty-seven degrees. She stepped out of the elevator and saw herself in the mirrorlike surface of a steel vault door. It took up half of one rough wall of the grotto. On the two other occasions she’d been down there Harlee had wondered how they had managed to get something so massive into such a small area. Lowered it, perhaps, through a deep shaft in the mountain that afterward had been filled in with concrete, a continuous day-and-night pour like they built Hoover Dam that time.
There in the steel vault, both a retinal and full-body scan were required, followed by a voiceprint ID as a triple security backup.
Harlee spoke her name, which unlocked a magnetic-stripe reader. Harlee swiped the key card that she carried in her wallet. After that, a turn of the wheel on the door—slender Harlee needed to put her shoulders into it, straining—and she was ready to enter a vault more fabulous than King Solomon’s mines.
The chrome walls inside had a golden sheen from two thousand years of legendary, looted treasures: Greek, Etruscan, Incan. Gold from the repository of the Knights Templar, once located at the end of a deep passage beneath the medieval castle of Gisors in France. Gold stolen from numerous Vicars of Rome who were as venal and acquisitive as Mordaunt himself. The long-missing trove of the Confederate States of America. The contents of the Lost Dutchman mine. And so on. Most of the gold, about nine and a half billion dollars’ worth at yesterday’s spot price, had been turned into uniform one-kilo bars that were neatly stacked as high as Harlee’s head on five-foot-square pallets.
She liked gold jewelry, but the metal in brick form didn’t seem very useful or whet her appetite. It was only another way of keeping score in that boring masculine game of world dominance.
Nevertheless, the Magician, showing off his hoard, had been almost childishly gleeful.
“Power corrupts,” he’d reminded Harlee. “But it’s gold that has always owned the wills of ambitious men. You’re looking at the reason human souls were created to be slaves to my will.”
There were other vaults around Vegas town, including a small one at the General’s house, and they also were filled with gold bars, kilo-size down to ten-ounce wafers. Mordaunt had accumulated bulk silver and platinum as well, filling many cavernous rooms of a salt mine he owned in Kansas. He possessed as much of the yellow metal as any two of the world’s central banks. When the complex deal that Bronc Skarbeck was in charge of rigging (it had something to do with fraudulent short positions on commodity exchanges and financial instruments called “derivatives”) brought about the collapse of the world’s currencies (only two of which were even partially backed by gold) and then an economic smash-up of unparalleled severity, Mordaunt would be in a position to name his price for whatever was worth salvaging.
But he was missing. And so was the red crystal skull usually kept in this vault.
The skull was Harlee’s reason for being there. She needed the resonance and magnetic induction of that occult instrument to help her clearly define her purpose in this crisis. If there was a way that Mordaunt could still communicate with Harlee, then it would be through the astral properties of the crystal skull.
The crisis had deepened. Harlee was distressed enough to let out a long wail of frustration.
ABOARD THE STELLA SALAMIS • SAN PEDRO BAY,
CALIFORNIA • 1415 HOURS ZULU
Tom Sherard watched from one of the bridge wings of the 480-foot container ship of Cypriot registry as the Long Beach Harbor pilot was dropped a half mile outside the breakwater and the ship’s captain ordered full ahead, course heading ninety degrees.
Below him on the long foredeck of the Stella Salamis, sixty-two sealed steel containers were closely lashed together, one container height from the deck of the freighter, with open space where the one and two hatches were located. Among a miscellany of goods bound for three Central and South American ports, the “said to contains” on cargo manifests were several tons of hair dryers, laptop computers, halogen light bulbs, two thousand cartons of breakfast cereal, six thousand pounds of John Grisham novels translated into Esperanto, and pharmaceuticals for sluggish bowels.
There was a 1,250-pound item unlisted on any manifest: a giant glass bead containing were-beast remains and bound for the deepest hole in the eastern Pacific Ocean, just off the continental shelf and almost due east of the Bay of Fonseca.
Only a mile out and Sherard was feeling queasy already in weak sunlight on a moderate sea. He had been given Transderm-V patches by the ship’s cook and medic while he was getting settled into a snug cabin off the boat deck, but the medic had cautioned that the patches, while calming his stomach, might cause hallucinations. Tom had decided it would be worthwhile trying to get his sea legs before resorting to the antinausea medication.
The wind was in his face at twelve to fifteen knots, and there were offshore clouds with tremors of lightning. Other freighter and Navy traffic was strung out in the road, north-and southbound. At full ahead the ship was rolling slightly.
The Stella Salamis had a polyglot but apparently sharp crew of eleven. Most of them understood or spoke enough English to get by: it was their universal shipboard language. The captain’s name was Riklis, nationality unknown to Sherard. He was a small trim man with alert black eyes, a half-inch-thick wedge of black eyebrows, and a squared-off beard with a comber of white in it. He spoke the best English. Tom, officially known as the Person in Addition to Crew, was the thirteenth man aboard. If that made anyone uneasy, he wasn’t aware.
Captain Riklis turned the ship over to the helmsman and came outside to keep Sherard company.
“You are not a sailor.”
“First ocean trip.”
“Ah. Well, we expect a routine voyage. The Pacific hurricane season is nearly over. There is a small disturbance out there”—he nodded to starboard—“two hundred miles, but no threat to us. The bad ones, you know, begin in the Gulf of Tehuantepec, and travel north with great speed along the coast. Treacherous. But this is a good ship. Would you like coffee?”
“Not right now. Thank you, Captain.”
“The good ship Salamis. Do you know about Salamis?”
“Greeks against the Persians, wasn’t it? About 500 BC.”
“Ah. That one. An epic sea battle. But this
ship is named for the old city and port on Cyprus. Where the apostle Paul began his missionary work.”
“Is that where the Crucis Aurea was founded?”
The captain looked away from Sherard.
“Sorry. I do not know that name.”
10:04 A.M.
Bronc Skarbeck left a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of Aston Martin on the wide cobbled parking apron of Lincoln Grayle’s digs halfway up a steep slope of Charleston Mountain, an architectural grand slam of a house with a pagan-palace feel to it—all those terraces and cantilevered decks, in form like an inverted pyramid securely anchored in bedrock. The thrust levels afforded vistas of mountains crackling with fall color, already snow-dusted across the highest peaks, and of bleached-bone desert way out there on the California side. There was a bite to the intoxicatingly pure air at this altitude. Hawks and kites were on high soar in the nearby blue, resembling totems of some hallucinatory, rain-dance religion.
Over speakers both inside and outside the house Skarbeck heard the Christmas music, much of it inane (“Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”) that Lincoln Grayle enjoyed listening to year round.
He took the elevator in the garage to an aerie deck to confer with Dr. Marcus Woolwine, a many-faceted genius with no taint of scruple in his makeup. Skarbeck had encountered Woolwine at times when their otherwise dissimilar careers converged during covert operations, most recently at the ill-fated Plenty Coups facility that the Multiphasic Operations and Research Group (MORG) had built a few years earlier, digging into tribal grasslands of the Crow nation in southern Montana like a huge open-pit mine. MORG was now defunct, but Skarbeck—blessed, for once, with an accurate sense of the inevitable—and Dr. Woolwine had skipped out of a deteriorating situation before the hue and cry, hearings on Capitol Hill, and subsequent criminal charges.
An accupuncturist was working on Dr. Woolwine in the bracing outdoors beneath two heat lamps.
