Zero Sum: An Alexi Sokolsky Supernatural Thriller (Alexi Sokolsky: Hound of Eden Book 3)

by James Osiris Baldwin

  “Oy, what a crisis. What a tragedy. For God’s sake, Binah… there’s still food in there.” I spoke over her air-raid siren wail, and shuffled the bowl so that the empty space was covered up. “See?”

  Binah sat down on the kitchen floor and primly wrapped her tail around her feet, the very tip twitching over her toes. She glared at me with clear affront.

  “There are starving cats in Rome that would fight you to the death for this kibble, Binah.” I made a sound of disgust and bent down to pick up the dish. Bad idea: when I stood back up, the world swayed. My head was pounding, and my vision pulsed.

  The meowing resumed, pitched high with excitement as I pulled the kibble box from the pantry and made a volcano of food in the middle of the bowl. Binah was throwing herself bodily at my legs by the time I set it on the floor, wincing as my thighs cramped and my back seized. When I stood back up, I had to wipe my forehead clean of sweat. My muscles were shuddering, like I'd run a marathon. I’d overdone it, and needed to take care of myself. Food, water, coffee… and the seed packet I'd found, the one with 'Zealot' written on the label. The dream had reminded me of it, and I knew better than to ignore those kinds of dreams.

  I ended up getting most of the way through making an open-faced sandwich when curiosity overpowered me. I poured myself a cup of coffee, went to the bedroom to get the seeds, then took both outside to the weedy, hard-scrabble yard that passed as our garden. There were a number of cracked pots with old potting soil in them, so I dragged one inside and took it to the kitchen sink, dug around in it, and planted the seeds in the dampened soil.

  Then I waited, not entirely sure what to expect. Marijuana? A magical beanstalk? Nothing?

  The pot sat there, dirty and mossy, the soil undisturbed. It seemed ‘nothing’ was the answer.

  “Huh.” I drained my coffee, which tasted just as bad as the cup I’d gotten while I was out, then washed the cup and my hands before getting back to my sandwich. I’d found a Ukrainian deli where I was unlikely to see any of my old cronies and had gotten myself some salo[6], one of my few guilty pleasures: pork fat cured with salt and garlic, eaten raw on heavy rye bread. It was a Ukrainian stereotype and I knew it, but salo was at least part of why I’d never been motivated to take up my mother’s faith. I liked mine with sharp pickle, horseradish, thin slices of fresh raw garlic and parsley. I was most of the way through restoring some calories when a sweet, narcotic smell pushed through the strong savory odor of garlic and forced me to look back toward the sink.

  Flowers that resembled foxgloves nodded from long green stems, growing and stretching so fast that they changed position as I blinked. The smell grew stronger with every passing moment, clouding my head. The sandwich fell from my fingers to the counter. In the back of my mind, I was sure I should have been worried about what was happening, but after my next breath, couldn’t bring myself to be concerned.

  The walls swam as I stumbled to the table, groped toward a chair, and slithered down into it. My eyes grew heavy. I closed them, lulled by the smell, and on the backs of my eyelids, an image began to form. The outline of a woman, her body made of sparkling motes of colored light. She was plain but confident; petite, with a bob of brown hair and a strong Southern accent. Georgian, maybe.

  “Norgay? GOD, I hope the Phitonic coding Zealot taught me works. Anyway, it’s worse than what we thought. They have the MahTree, AND they found someone who knows where to find the Shard. Her name is Lee—Lee Harrison. She’s a cenote diver and archaeologist, which means you were right and the Shard is probably south of the border.”

  “I don’t know much about Harrison, but I know she’s not as strong-willed as the other Keepers. She’s a plain-Jane human with no special training other than being tough as old leather, and Bishop WILL find the Shard if he has the chance to interrogate her. She was captured, then escaped, and was caught by the Templum Voctus Sol—because of course, they’re looking for the Shard as well—then recaptured from them. Her last known location was the holding cell at McKinnon Funerals, 115 Sutphin Boulevard, in South Jamaica. If you can get Zealot and RUBICON or the Irregulars in before the 20th, you might still find her there, but be careful. Bishop’s serious about finding this Shard. He’s sent Men in Black… Gen 2 and 3, possibly some Gen 4 Silencers.”

  I watched in awe, confused, but fascinated. The hallucination had solidified. I was watching—and hearing—Agent Kristen Cross speak earnestly and urgently, as if toward a video camera.

  “I haven’t heard anything about the other Keeper, but I suspect he’s been taken to Delta Site. I’m still trying to get a location for you, but it seems like no one below PK-RATCHET clearance knows anything about the Icebox other than it’s somewhere cold.”

  “Bishop is gunning hard for the America-Korea link. The current theory is the Templum Voctus Sol and Odaeyang are both connected to the Church of the Voice. The meeting in Quantico was almost all about how to bring them in or erase them. He doesn’t want to meet the Deacon—he just wants him dead, along with this ‘Soldier 557’ lieutenant of his. It’s honestly terrifying, sir. I don’t have any firm evidence, but the way that things have been around here recently, it feels like command is preparing for something. Something big.”

  “I’m going to do my best to learn more about Delta Site and see about getting those plans you asked for in my last brief. Information to come, assuming something hasn’t happened to me. If you’ve got this report in hand, then the meeting with Zealot on the 25th went smoothly. I’ll keep you updated as I can—it’ll be easier once Bishop has left town. Keep GOD underfoot, sir.”

  The smell abruptly faded, and the vision faded into a hazy, ghostly negative as the plants drooped. The color drained from them, and their leaves curled and browned. I blinked rapidly, squinting against the sudden glare as I rose to my feet and stumbled off to find a notebook to jot everything down in before I forgot any of it.

  I was still furiously scribing when Talya appeared in the doorway, hand resting on the frame. I was muttering to myself, a hand twisted up through my hair as I frantically wrote a list of bullet-points.

  “Rex?”

  “Shh.” I didn’t risk glancing away. Lee is a ‘Keeper’, knows something about a ‘Shard’. Link between American TVS and Korea Odaeyang with Church of the Voice and Deacon? Vigiles (?) held meeting on this, want to bring down Deacon (?).

  Talya wandered across in silence, curious as any cat. She sat down, and Binah leaped from the floor to the table to greet her.

  “Meeting with ‘Zealot’ was supposed to be on the 25th... same day as the blood rain.” I looked up, setting the pen down, and found the girl looking back at me. “Incredible.”

  “What?” She was jiggling in her seat with barely-controlled curiosity.

  “I just saw something. In the pots, over there.” I said in Russian, and waved irritably toward the sink. “Something I don’t think I was supposed to see. Now I have to find my sandwich.”

  She blinked as I rose and shuffled off, still a little woozy from whatever cocktail of drugs and pheromones had been used to pass along Agent Cross’s report.

  “Rex? Are you alright...?”

  “Zealot,” I said, getting my plate and taking it back to the table. “Someone named Zealot. Someone else named Norgay. The FBI agent that was murdered, the one the Vigiles are threatening me over... I don’t think she was murdered by the Templum Voctus Sol. She was spying for someone, Talya. I think she was killed by her own people.”

  “Uhhh...”

  I waved my hands, frustrated by my inability to get my point across. “I can’t explain. What did you want to ask me?”

  “Uh, nothing. I came to tell you something.” The gears were turning in Talya’s head. She was young, naive, but she was smart and logically-minded. “I think it might have something to do with what you’re rambl- uh, talking about, actually. It’s about MinTex.”

  I chased the mouthful of sandwich down with cold coffee. “Go.”

  “Okay, so, get this.�
� She leaned forward conspiratorially. “MinTex is a shell company registered in the Bahamas. Pretty standard corporate tax haven stuff, right? But from there, it gets really weird. The company is registered to ‘Max Sterling’ who is apparently the CEO of the ‘Spartan Trading Group’.”

  “‘Max Sterling’? Slightly better than ‘Fayk E. Nayme’, but not by much.” I narrowed my eyes, thinking back. “There is no Spartan Trading Group in the Organizatsiya, or that I’ve ever heard of associated with it.”

  “Right. Well, Max doesn’t exist, obviously, and Spartan’s address is in Delaware. There’s this one address these kind of companies all use, 1209 North Orange Street. There’s like... hundreds of thousands of companies registered there.”

  “LLCs don’t have to disclose their directors or board if they’re registered in Delaware. We used to use privacy services there all the time. So it’s a dead end?”

  “Well, hold on. I did some digging on the Max Sterling alias and Spartan.” Talya held up a finger. “Spartan is itself a shell. Their PR presence consists of an automated phone service. They’re apparently an oil and gas consultancy, whatever that means, but they don’t have any employees.”

  “A holding company for a holding company for the Organizatsiya.”

  “Right.” Talya’s uranium-gold eyes were shining with the thrill of the chase. “Now, get this. I went looking for anything that might be owned by Spartan or Max Sterling. Spartan is indexed on Wall Street, even though they don’t actually produce anything. Their shares go up and down based on pure speculation, and I guess some dodgy brokering so that they look like they’re actually doing something.”

  “That one was one of Yegor’s primary duties for the Organizatsiya,” I said. “Managing dodgy brokers.”

  “Yeah. So, me and one of my friends, we, uh, paid a virtual visit to the brokerage that manages Spartan’s stocks. It gets a bit speculative here, but the brokerage only has one agent, and he also happens to manage funds for this super-conservative Catholic PAC, ‘The Future of America’. My friend told me that TFA is basically the re-election machine for the President of the North Carolina Senate, Sebastian Hart, and HE is-”

  “Gearing up for a presidential run next year,” I finished. “Well, well.”

  Talya nodded, bouncing nervously in her seat.

  I thought over that while I eased back, wincing. “So MinTex might not belong to the Organizatsiya at all. It could be the child of a more established corporate-government alias, and used to launder the money gained by trafficking children. But… that’s incredibly risky, from a cold, hard business perspective. Sergei couldn’t have been doing this for long.”

  “Why?” Talya cocked her head.

  “Because Lily and Dru were disciples of the Deacon,” I said. “And I’m fairly sure now that the Deacon is at war with the Vigiles Magicarum. Like I said, I saw something I wasn’t supposed to see. A report, coded into those dead plants by an FBI agent who was working for someone called ‘Norgay’. There’s two opposing sides involved here: the Vigiles, led by someone named ‘Bishop’, and the TVS, led by the Deacon.”

  “Deacon and Bishop?” Talya rolled her eyes. “But I guess that makes sense. MinTex was only registered a bit over a month ago.”

  “So Sergei—or Sergei’s proxy, Vanya—was working for the Deacon, but he turned on him and began working for the Government instead,” I said. “That must have happened while we were still searching for the children. Fascinating.”

  Talya nodded, eyes wide and serious.

  I took a bite of sandwich, and shook my head. “If your theory bears out, I believe we’ve stumbled on the proverbial can of worms.”

  “If you want to pursue this, I need more information,” Talya said. “I need to know who the major donors of the PAC are, so I can look into them. If I could get bank information, then we could confirm that money’s being exchanged between the PAC, Spartan, and MinTex…”

  I grunted. “Can you and your friend ‘virtually visit’ these records?”

  “They don’t have any records on the Internet. I’d have to get on a LAN, a local network inside of their office. Or, you know, a filing cabinet.” She wrinkled her nose.

  “Then the next goal is to locate the premises of the PAC, and hope it’s local,” I said. “A list of donors would be useful kompromat to have against the Vigiles, Sergei, and possibly Hart as well.”

  “I already know where it is,” Talya said. “It’s weird, though. The PAC’s HQ is actually a funeral home, so it might not be the right address...”

  I frowned. “115 Sutphin Boulevard?”

  Talya paused, hands fluttering. “Uhh... yeah. How’d you know?”

  “Same address as the place I heard about in that report just now. The Vigiles are keeping someone there. A woman, name of Lee Harrison” I said. “So you’re right, and if I’m hearing you correctly, all roads lead to the Vigiles Magicarum.”

  She picked her nail with her teeth, brow furrowed. “So if the MinTex-Spartan-TFA trail and the Lee Harrison trail lead to the same place, and the Vigiles are involved with your old Organizatsiya… then they must have known about the abuse of the children?”

  “You hired me because the police weren’t turning anything up. Seems like there was a reason for that.”

  Talya paled. “But the Deacon’s name and the people on that computer that you found…”

  “A name is easily faked,” I said. “Someone interested in framing the Deacon could readily just use the name or title in text messages. And remember… Soldier 557 killed Lily and Dru Ross, correct?”

  “And we never… oh.” Talya’s eyes widened. “You think they betrayed the Deacon? And he had them, you know, whacked?”

  I snorted. “Yes. That also explains why Soldier took out Falkovich. I’d wondered about that.”

  “The Vigiles. Wow. Ayashe’s going to love that.” Talya shook her head in disbelief, picking at her lip. “You… you don’t think she knew, do you?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “But I doubt it. Ayashe fancies herself to be a white knight battling the forces of eldritch chaos. Kristen’s report implied that most Vigiles agents are in the dark about the higher-level activities of the organization. That makes perfect sense to me—it’s how we used Sixers.”

  “Sixers?”

  “Mafiya associates,” I answered. “They usually thought they were doing one thing when they were actually doing another.”

  “Maybe we should get Lee and try and explain all this to Ayashe, then?”

  Lee was a ‘Keeper’, whatever that was. I frowned. “I doubt Ayashe will listen. If Lee’s still in that funeral home, then the place will be under lockdown. We can try to pull her out, see if she can corroborate, but our focus should be gathering more information and obtaining evidence. My bet is that the TVS were running children down to Texas for years, and the Government made a deal with Sergei to take over the business. Sergei decided that trafficking the kids wasn’t bringing him enough profit… so he sanctioned some of them to be killed for the organ trade.”

  “Ugh.” Talya rubbed the bridge of her nose, screwing her eyes shut. “Well, I’ll try to find something I can hack into from the Net first. I just... People can be so awful, Alexi. I don’t know why anyone would do this.”

  “Because they believe you’re either a winner or a loser. Men like Vanya and Sergei look at other people in black and white. Weak or strong. Success or failure. They think they’re playing a great big chess game, and everyone is just a piece on the board. They frame everything through a lens of lack. Zero sum. If I win, you lose.”

  “Is that how you think?” Talya cocked her head.

  It was a question asked in innocence, but the answer was not an easy one. I glanced down at my nearly untouched cup of coffee. It smelled bitter and muddy.

  “I grew up being taught that this is the way of the world,” I said, framing my words carefully. “But after learning a lot about myself and what I care for, I made the decision to leave. For
a while, I didn’t know how, but fate caught up with me. You have to understand… when you’re ‘in’—especially when you’re born into it—you grow up thinking life is a zero-sum game. So I suppose that I do still think that way, sometimes, but it used to be all the time. It’s not anymore.”

  “That makes you a good person, you know.”

  I snorted. “Don’t count on it.”

  The girl’s expression was troubled now, her features sharply drawn. “You know… I worry about becoming that way. Like, by joining the Club. Jenner’s a wonderful person, I mean, you know that... but now that I’m looking to be patched in, I’m seeing the other side of it. She’s really ruthless. I think she’s killed people, like... not because they were bad people, but because they were in her way. Do you think so?”

  I knew so, but I wasn’t about to tell Talya that. I leaned forward a little. “It doesn’t matter. You can’t ask questions about it in the open like this, though, and you sure as hell shouldn’t talk about it with me. I’m not part of the Club. That’s part of being involved in a gang—the business of the gang is no one else’s business. If you mine for information like that, they’ll think you’re a snitch.”

  “Well, I’m not-” she stammered.

  “I know you’re not. But that’s the definition of respect in this kind of place,” I said. “You don’t ask about people. You judge them by what they do, and keep your thoughts about them to yourself.”

  She frowned, rolling one of her lip rings around and around. Talya had worked for the Smithsonian as an I.T. Coordinator before this. She’d been part of the Four Fires, the ‘legal’ Weeder community group that had turned out to be rotten to the core. ‘Street hardened’ was not a phrase I’d ever associate with Talya, no matter how many tattoos or piercings she got.

  “I guess I expected it to be more honest here, you know?” She said, shrugging. “More open than the Four Fires.”

  “It is more honest overall. And you’re right: Jenner’s good people. But don’t talk about her business, ever. Not even with people you trust.” I had a sip of coffee and nearly spat it out. I’d made my coffee the same way every morning for twenty years—strong black drip that could melt a copper penny, no sugar—but ever since the alcohol cravings had started, it tasted like swill. I wanted it anyway. Fucking Yen. I set it aside and concentrated on the food, pausing as I heard the roar of motorcycles coming up the drive from outside.