“And?” Harmony asked.
He punched a subroutine into action. Remote systems, turned into traitors, whirred to life at his command.
“I’m sending a ride.”
* * *
Wood splintered under Jessie’s shoulder and a door swung on a twisted hinge. The yawning doorway shed an oblong of light across a gloomy executive office.
On the far side of a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows, Kevin’s ride descended. An unmanned window-washing rig, the narrow platform dangling from steel cables.
“You’re kidding me,” Harmony said.
“Hey, if you’d like to head back to the party and take your chances with Nadine, go for it. As for me—”
Jessie crossed the room in three brisk steps, swept up the leather-backed chair, and rammed it casters-first against the closest window. The window buckled, shuddering in its frame. The second hit smashed a hole through its heart. The tempered glass, treated for safety and strength, shattered in chunks instead of shards. Rounded, lumpy fractures framed the gaping hole, and hot summer wind whistled in, sending loose files flying in a paper cyclone. A city-smoke stench rode on the current, carrying the tang of ozone and diesel fumes.
The metal grille rattled, wobbly under Harmony’s shoes as she stepped out onto the platform. Jessie was right behind her and the city was below, twenty-eight stories straight down to the gridlocked street. Distant sirens wailed up through the canyons of concrete and glass. Harmony’s hands curled on the safety rail, squeezing tight.
“All aboard,” Jessie said. “Kevin? Take us up.”
The platform groaned, steel cables squealing, and the rig lurched as it began to climb. Higher and higher, stretching the dizzying drop, and every gust of wind making the steel tremble like it could slip out from under their feet at any second. Tendrils of smog gusted past them, a yellow bank of fog that left a stinging residue in the back of Harmony’s throat.
The rig groaned to a stop and they faced a fresh wall of mirrored glass. Jessie tugged off one of her high-heeled shoes and slipped it over her right hand, wearing it like a climber’s spike.
“Hold tight,” she said.
Harmony gripped the rail while Jessie studied the glass like a sculptor with a fresh block of stone. Then she drew her hand back and struck. The spike of her heel slammed the middle of the glass, the pane shuddering but holding fast, and the platform swayed on its cable tether. She hit it again, and again, precision blows delivered with short, sharp hisses of breath while the platform jolted as if it was trying to buck them off.
One more time, and the window broke. The heel gouged a fist-sized hole and rained a shower of broken glass. Jessie worked her way around the break, aiming for the weakened spots, chiseling the tempered glass away one rounded chunk at a time until she’d carved a gap big enough to wriggle through.
They touched down on soft beige carpet, fallen glass glittering in the dark and the wind whistling at their backs. There wasn’t much to Hollywood Memories: just a couple of desks, a small reception area—and a tall black-iron safe, half Harmony’s height, standing beside a dusty display cabinet.
“Tear it up,” Harmony said. “We need to make it look like we ransacked the place.”
Jessie obliged, tugging out desk drawers and dumping a flurry of papers onto the carpet, while Harmony gravitated to the safe. She crouched down, studying the dial, the hinges. A file folder crumpled under Jessie’s heel as she stood behind her.
“Can we get it open?” she asked.
Harmony rubbed her chin. “No. But we don’t have to. We’re staging the scene as an attempted robbery; a failed heist is just as good as a successful one. If we were doing this for real and had the right equipment with us, how would you crack this thing?”
“Thermal lance?”
“My thought exactly. We don’t have one, but we can fake it. Stand back.”
Jessie eased away as Harmony rose. She clasped her hands before her, spreading her feet and squaring her footing, and took a deep breath.
Harmony’s mind went blank. Her one thought, her sole desire, was a freight train on a straight-arrow track. A pulse of glowing sigils spelling out words in a forgotten tongue. The track became a roller coaster and her impulses spiraled, dove, twisted into a cursive loop, and now the train of words spelled out other words, glyphs layered upon glyphs. They shimmered with inner light, deep under her skin. Her blood ignited.
Earth, air, water, fire, she thought. Her mental finger curled around the mnemonic trigger. Garb me in your raiment. Arm me with your weapons.
She pulled the trigger.
Blue fire bloomed from her clasped hands and streaked through the air, splashing across the face of the ironclad safe. Her body was a forge, a bellows, sucking in oxygen, converting it with alien alchemy, and spitting it back out as flame. She held the fire steady, searing, her skin breaking out in beads of clammy sweat as she channeled the inferno’s glory.
Her breath ran out and took her strength with it. The last of the fire sputtered, falling, hitting the carpet and setting it ablaze. Her knees buckled and she collapsed to the office floor. The magic wasn’t free. Payment came due with short, raspy breaths, a burning ache behind her eyes, and cramps that twisted her gut in knots.
Jessie’s arm was under her shoulder, helping her up, pulling her back from the spreading flames. The shrill whine of an alarm jolted her back to her senses.
“Whatever you guys just did,” Kevin said in her ear, “this whole place just went nuts. They’re herding everybody to the fire exits and locking the elevators down.”
“Good,” Harmony said, leaning on Jessie and fighting against the cramps. “Don’t blow your cover. Leave with the crowd, then evac just the way we rehearsed it.”
“What about you two?”
“We’ll be fine. Go. We’ll meet you back at HQ.”
Harmony had her second wind by the time they shoved through the emergency stairwell door. The alarm was squalling, a constant klaxon whine, and two floors down the exodus from the office party was an angry and confused stream of stumbling people. Harmony and Jessie hung back, watching the flow, until they saw Nadine’s blond bob in the heart of the crowd. They waited for a silent ten count, giving her time to get ahead of them.
Then they casually walked down the steps, joined the parade, and evacuated the building as two more anonymous faces in the crowd.
By the time they made it down to the lobby there was already a cordon of emergency vehicles out front, red and blue lights strobing across the mirrored tower, paramedics rushing to deliver triage and firefighters preparing for their ascent. Nobody noticed Harmony and Jessie or even looked their way as they slipped from the chaos, vanishing into the labyrinth of Los Angeles.
They ended up in a late-night diner out in Fairfax. It was a coffee, bacon, and eggs kind of midnight. Harmony checked her phone; it pinged as April forwarded her the first headline. “…news of a dramatic robbery gone bad, as thieves used an office party to commandeer a window washer’s rig, penetrating the offices of a Hollywood memorabilia collector two floors above. The theft was thwarted when a fire, presumably caused by an equipment malfunction…”
Jessie came back from the restroom and dropped into the blue vinyl booth across from her. “What’s the word?”
Harmony showed her the screen.
“They’re reporting it. The way we want them to report it.”
“They usually do,” Jessie said. “April’s probably in full spin-doctor mode right now.”
“No mention of the bodies. Either Nadine works faster than we do, or the cops are sitting on that detail.”
“Even odds.” The waitress came by, laying out two steaming cups of coffee. Jessie shook a pair of yellow sugar packets between her fingers. “The story should hold. Only thing that worries me is the fact that dead men do tell tales sometimes. Figure those two shooters’ souls are on an express elevator to hell as we speak. If Nadine catches up with them and asks what happened…”
Harmony raised her cup. She took her coffee straight, strong and rich, a bullet of clarity to keep her exhaustion at bay.
“Look at it this way. As far as we know, we’re the only humans to stand face-to-face with Nadine, blow her plans, and live to tell the tale. More than once. Do you think there’s anyone on this planet she hates more than the two of us?”
“Probably not,” Jessie said. “What about it?”
“Put yourself in their shoes. Would you tell Nadine that you had a chance to catch us, but you blew it and got killed?”
“I’d lie like a cheap rug,” Jessie said.
“Bingo. We might have to deal with demons and sorcerers and worse, but we’ve got one advantage. The one thing that never changes.” Harmony eyed Jessie over her mug. “Human nature. So. Ready to call it?”
Jessie held the slender jet-black USB stick between her fingertip and thumb. It caught the diner lights, glistening, keeping its digital treasure safe inside.
They had taken Vigilant Lock back from the forces that corrupted it, shedding sweat and blood—too much blood, too many good operatives lost in the fight—just to begin rebuilding from the rubble. Tonight meant more than a harvest of concrete intelligence, a win they could act on. Tonight meant something they’d needed for a long time. A spark of hope.
“Mission accomplished,” Jessie said. “Let’s go home. No time for celebrations, we’ve got a lot of work to do.”
4.
Kevin rendezvoused on an airstrip with April and rode home on the company plane. Harmony and Jessie had to fly coach. They staggered their departure times for safety. Harmony was the last to leave, flying out of Los Angeles on a red-eye bound for Washington.
Morning found her in the back of a cab in Bethesda, Maryland. The heart of town had become a hub of high-rises, corporate towers mingling with shopping promenades. Her destination was a little south of the action, an unassuming one-story brick of beige on Arlington Road at the tail of a shady parking lot. The sign out front, professional and bland, read Delaware Mutual Insurance.
The receptionist in the lobby greeted her with a nod. Her hands stayed under the desk, out of sight. The door behind her clicked softly at Harmony’s approach, unlocked by remote as she passed under the watchful eye of a security camera.
Down a linoleum hallway, past an open office floor lined with cloth cubicle walls, she took a left and ended up in the file-storage room. Tall beige metal racks on automatic tracks rumbled as they circulated at the press of a button, rotating shelves packed with numbered folders and three-ring binders. One shelf stayed motionless, frozen on its chain-driven track. Harmony stepped into its shadow, out of sight, and reached for one particular binder. Five rows up, three to the right, with a sticky-tape label marked “93/93.”
She yanked the binder down, then shoved it back into place. There was a mechanical rumble, and the floor shuddered beneath her feet.
With a soft click, a panel of buttery wooden wall at her back cracked open. She pushed it the rest of the way, stepping into the cage of an elevator, then closed the concealed door behind her. She stood at the heart of the cage, hands clasped behind her back and chin high, catching her blurry reflection in the stainless-steel walls.
“Identify,” a voice commanded, the word carried on a crackle of electronic distortion.
“Special Agent Harmony Black. This week’s recognition code is Oscar. Romeo. Vendetta. The color of the day is saffron.”
A scarlet iris opened above the elevator door. She held still as a slice of blood-red light swept over her, shimmering from head to toe, pausing on her eyes for a retinal scan. The light winked out.
“Thank you, Agent Black.”
With an unsteady jolt, the elevator lurched into motion, grumbling its way downward.
Liberating Vigilant Lock meant saying goodbye to the past. Their safe houses, their secure caches, everything down to basic methods and passwords had been so thoroughly compromised by the courts of hell that none of it was safe anymore. None of it ever had been. Upon taking formal command, Jessie’s first order of business was finding a new base of operations. They’d bought up a vacant office building on the cheap through a shell company, recruited a skeleton crew of trustworthy engineers and contractors, and started carving out their new home turf. It was an intelligence hub nestled like a spider beneath the streets of Bethesda; Harmony wasn’t sure who first called it the Basement, but the name had stuck.
At the bottom of the shaft, a grille of steel barred the way ahead. The elevator stopped with a chime and the grille rumbled aside to let her through.
The Basement was a labyrinth of drywall and dangling work lights strung along on bright orange extension cord. The smell of sawdust and industrial antiseptic hung in the air. Harmony skirted a pallet bearing dusty fifty-pound sacks of Quikrete and held back while a pair of workmen eased a stack of two-by-fours through a narrow doorway.
It was a work in progress. Under the circumstances, security had to come first, utility second, and comfort was not even an afterthought. But it’s ours, Harmony thought. This belongs to us.
Kevin poked his head from an archway up ahead. He’d traded his catering uniform for ratty jeans and a World of Warcraft T-shirt. He looked her up and down. “You’re still wearing that?”
“I just landed,” Harmony said. She kept walking and he fell into step at her side. “Some of us didn’t get to ride home in a C-130. I flew Delta. Change of clothes can wait; is everybody here?”
“Here, and the briefing’s already started.”
She shot him a sidelong glance. “Without me?”
“Jessie wanted to wait. Our Commercial Sponsors are getting restless.”
Understandable. The cabal of law-enforcement executives, military operators, and members of Congress who kept Vigilant funded and functional had been running scared for months. They’d been just as deceived as the rank and file, tricked into throwing their weight behind an infernal false-flag operation. Then they witnessed the purge from within, kicked off by the execution of a Kentucky senator at point-blank range. Over the course of three blood-soaked weeks, Vigilant’s numbers were decimated as every last traitor and demonic loyalist found their reward in a shallow grave.
Jessie had done most of the killing herself. She was making a point.
Harmony heard April’s voice drift from a doorway ahead. “…just beginning our forensic examination, but initial results are promising. The files are intact, and the details that line up with what we already know confirm the truth: we have Nadine’s financial files. All of them. Disbursements, payroll for her human servants, investments across the Midwest.”
A gruff voice echoed over a speaker. “So we can move on them. What are we waiting for?”
April turned in her wheelchair, spotting Harmony, beckoning her over. Jessie was at her side, standing at parade rest, and she’d changed from her party dress into a dark, professional pantsuit. She bathed in the glow of a bank of wall-mounted screens. Twelve in all, but four, scattered across the grid, were dark and silent. The other eight screens offered high-definition webcam views of the attendees, reporting in from across the country. Some sat in high-backed chairs in plush and sunlit offices; others were drenched in deliberate shadow, nothing but their hazy outlines to betray their identity.
“We move when the time is right,” Jessie said. “Nadine is a high-value target with considerable reach and influence. I’m not authorizing any follow-up operations until we’ve studied and dissected every scrap of those records.”
“Records which could be going stale by the second,” said the woman on the top left corner screen. The distant spire of the Washington Monument rose up through a window at her shoulder. “Nadine has covered her tracks before.”
“Which is why we covered ours, too, and left her accountant in play. She doesn’t know she’s been compromised.”
Harmony cleared her throat, stepping up to stand at Jessie’s side.
“When the Bureau trained me in close-qu
arters combat,” Harmony said, “I was taught a very important saying: ‘Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.’”
One of the shadowed figures, brass glinting on his lapel in the dark, gave her a nod and a faint grunt of agreement. The spindly man on the screen beside him frowned, brow furrowing.
“And that means what, exactly?”
“Charging into a fight gets people killed, sir. Operators and innocent bystanders. When you’re going through doors, the right way is to move with intelligence on your side and a solid, methodical plan. Tactical movement may look slow to an outsider, but it’s a deliberate and steady pace driven by purpose. And that’s exactly how we’ll deal with this data. We will study, we will plan…and we will execute.”
Jessie flashed her a smile. She’d taken her contact lenses off, showing her natural turquoise eyes, too blue to be real. Or human. In the darkened room, they took on a soft, radioactive glow. She always made the Sponsors look her in the eye during these meetings. She wanted them to remember who they were dealing with.
“Let’s table the discussion and go high-level for a minute,” said another shadow, her voice modulated with a layer of electronic distortion. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but given…recent events, I would appreciate an up-to-date threat assessment.”
“Can do,” Jessie said. “In addition to the usual assortment of stray monsters, renegade sorcerers, and psychic anomalies stirring up trouble—”
“And psychotic ghost clowns,” Kevin muttered. “It was only that one time, but still.”
“—the United States faces occult attacks from three primary vectors. First, obviously, are the courts of hell. A handful of demonic princes have laid claim to territory here: the biggest claims are on the West Coast and in the Midwest, while a scattering of much smaller, quasi-allied courts—and Vigilant Lock’s secret creators—are scattered along the eastern seaboard. Seizing control of Vigilant and exposing the truth has left the eastern courts severely embarrassed. They’re hot for payback.”
Right to the Kill (Harmony Black Book 5) Page 3
