“That’s not the only thing. I don’t know a lot about this magic stuff. What I’ve got, I was born with it. It’s just…innate, you know? Like flexing a muscle. You’re my only client who does the magic stuff.”
“And?”
“And you’re…changing,” he said. “At first I got tired after we got together. Last time, I was sick for two days. Like you’re pulling something out of me. Siphoning it out.”
“Not on purpose.”
“No. I’m just saying, it doesn’t seem healthy.”
Harmony took off her jacket. She opened the wardrobe. A pair of mismatched plastic hangers dangled on a dented brass rod.
“If it’s any consolation, I had a word with Caitlin. Prince Sitri’s right hand, out in Vegas.”
Romeo’s eyebrows lifted. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” She hung her jacket up. “She says if I don’t stop doing this, feeding on demonic energy, it’s going to kill me.”
He took a step back.
“Wait. What?”
“Yeah.” She let out a bitter little chuckle. “But here’s the thing. If I don’t feed, the hunger comes back. And when the hunger gets bad enough, I can’t do magic anymore. And if I can’t do magic anymore, I’m worthless in the field and innocent people get hurt. And innocent people die. So that’s my choice. I can keep feeding my habit and save lives out there, or I can save myself and let the monsters win.”
She gestured to the envelope of cash.
“So are we going to do this or not?”
* * *
Color erupted in the darkness. A tiny orange glow just above her face, winking on and off in a metronome strobe.
Harmony pushed back the lid of the sensory-deprivation tank and squinted as electric light flooded her eyes. She sat up, the salty brine roiling around her body. It didn’t feel like she’d been floating for anywhere near an hour, but then again, a sense of time was one of the first things the tank took away.
A soft rapping echoed at the door.
“Harmony?” Pattie called out from the other side. “I’m so sorry to pull you out early, but Dr. Cassidy just called me. She said there’s an emergency at your office, and she needs you to call your partner right away.”
Harmony’s salt-encrusted feet touched down on a tangerine bathmat. She padded carefully across the warm ivory tiles, grabbing a towel to dry her hands, and scooped up her phone from the bench beside the shower.
“I’m here,” she said when Jessie picked up. “Sorry, I was doing that—that therapy thing I was telling you about.”
“We’ve got a situation. You know how we left Agent Cooper embedded at Diehl Innovations?”
“Sure.”
Cooper had been their prime conduit into Bobby Diehl’s operations. She’d worked her way into his confidence, becoming his administrative assistant and a firsthand witness to the dark underbelly of his empire. They’d jumped through hoops—even arresting her at one point—to keep her cover intact. With Diehl ousted from his own company and on the run, it looked like her mission was over, but Jessie decided to keep her in place a little longer. Just in case.
“Bobby did just what I hoped he would,” Jessie said. “He reached out for help.”
Harmony’s damp fingers curled tight around her phone. “Do we have a location?”
“No. He sent her on an errand down in Florida. Picking up some kind of package for him. She brought a minder with her to provide overwatch, and they were supposed to report in as soon as they got the goods.”
“And?”
“They’ve gone dark,” Jessie said. “We didn’t just lose Bobby’s trail. We lost two agents.”
“We’re going after them,” Harmony said. It wasn’t a question.
“Meet us at the hangar. Kevin’s grabbing our gear, and Linder’s going to brief us in the air. We go wheels-up in one hour.”
The hot pulse of the shower drove Harmony’s mind into gear. It sluiced the salt from her glistening skin, crystals glittering like diamonds around her feet. She felt the first pangs of hunger, distant, gnawing, but she could hold it at bay. She could hold it together long enough to get the job done.
The last of the water trickled down. She toweled off and tugged the plastic dry-cleaner wrapper away from her new outfit, freshly laundered and pressed. Black slacks. A crisp white button-down dress shirt. A shoulder holster. A man’s double-breasted jacket. She slipped on a pair of black leather shoes, polished to a shine.
April was wrong. She didn’t need time off, or to rest. This was the only time Harmony truly felt alive: when she was on a mission.
She reached for the final piece. A salmon-pink necktie, coiling around her throat with motions ingrained in her muscle memory. A loop, a twist, a knot. She drew the tie tight and flipped her collar down. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, on her way out the door, and nodded. There she was.
Ready for battle.
6.
While the Basement was Vigilant Lock’s fortress beneath the city streets, the Imperator was their eye in the sky. It was a C-130 Hercules, a four-engine turboprop built for moving troops and military cargo in and out of hostile territory. The plane was a workhorse made for rough weather and rougher landings, making it the perfect mobile command center. One side of the cavernous cargo bay, big enough to stack three armored vehicles from end to end and still have space left over, was given to a bank of video screens and a master console. The screens brought in real-time telemetry, news feeds, and status updates from teams in the field.
The bare metal deck shuddered under Harmony’s feet. She stood at April’s shoulder, Jessie at her side, as the central screen flickered to life. The man on the screen had a placid, almost painfully anonymous face, the kind of look that slid off peoples’ eyes and out of their memory five seconds after they saw him.
Linder was the last of the old guard. The former commander of Vigilant Lock, with the consent of his demonic masters. He’d been fully aware of the true nature of the agency, but he’d stayed the course—and tried to minimize casualties, slipping subtle warnings to his people whenever he could risk it—with the conviction that America was safer that way. He’d landed in the top slot on Jessie’s hit list when the truth came to light, but then he’d earned a stay of execution.
Linder was a covert-operations veteran, a man who’d spent his entire life moving between the alphabet agencies, cultivating contacts and racking up favors owed. He argued that they needed him if they were going to go rogue and take command of Vigilant, and in the end, they had to agree.
For the time being, at least. He was on thin ice and he knew it, but they gave him a better deal than his former employers in the courts of hell ever would. Defection was a one-way trip.
“Talk to us,” Jessie said.
“At eleven hundred hours yesterday, I received an encrypted burst communication from Agent Cooper. I think it speaks for itself. Patching it through to your feed now.”
Linder’s image shrank to a picture inside a picture, gliding to the far corner of the screen. Now they were looking at a frozen image of Agent Cooper. Brunette, a long face, hard steel-blue eyes. The image lurched to life, wavering like it was being recorded on a camera phone.
“Cooper here. Tell Agent Temple I owe her twenty bucks; she was right about keeping me embedded. Bobby just pinged me on Skype. Couldn’t trace the connection—didn’t expect I’d be able to, but I gave it a shot—but we’ve finally got a lead on the bastard. Check this out.”
The image shifted to an eggshell-white wall, no art, no windows, nothing to give a clue as to where it was shot. Bobby was pacing. Back and forth in front of a stationary camera, and the angle made Harmony think he was being filmed by a laptop on a desk. He looked worse than the last time they’d seen him, when they dropped the boom and took him from a billionaire to a bankrupt fugitive in a single afternoon. His normally immaculate hair was fraying, the French cuffs of his dress shirt dangled undone, and the baggage under his eyes showed how little sleep
he was getting. He faced the camera and gave a desperate smile, a shadow of his old car-salesman act.
“Cooper. Cooper. Who’s my number-one girl? You are.”
“Mr. Diehl?” Cooper’s voice echoed over the recording. “Where are you? They’re saying you fled the country—”
“And I should have taken you with me. I know. I know, I must look so disloyal. World’s worst boss, am I right?” He let out an off-kilter giggle. “Here’s the thing. I had a suspicion I might need a little outside help. And I was right.”
He hauled over an office chair, an ergonomic model with a chrome frame, and dropped into it. He ran an awkward hand through his mussy hair.
“The cavalry isn’t coming,” he said.
“Sir?” Cooper asked.
“The Network. The goddamn Network. After all I’ve done for them. I was supposed to be their golden boy, Cooper. I was supposed to be the herald of a new age. They were going to fix this. They were going to fix everything.” He raised his open palm, snatched at the air, and curled it into a fist. “They aren’t answering my phone calls. Adam is gone. I have no idea what’s going on over there, but they aren’t holding up their end of the bargain and it is unacceptable.”
“Sir,” Cooper said, “I don’t—I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m having a cash-flow problem, okay? And considering I hired a team of hard-core killers to watch my back, one of whom eats people, I really can’t be having a cash-flow problem right now. So. Plan B. That’s you. I already made the deal. I just need you to be the human interface. Get on a plane. You’re headed for the Florida coast. Tampa.”
“And I’ll be meeting you there?”
Bobby wiped his nose on the sleeve of his five-hundred-dollar shirt, leaving a glistening trail, and snorted like he was coked to the gills.
“You’ll be meeting my contact. Go to a dive bar called the Rusty Nail. Eleven, that’s p.m., that’s tonight, so you need to move fast. The contact is going to give you a briefcase. Do not, under any circumstances, open it. Treat it like it’s full of nitroglycerin. Treat it like if you even look at it cross-eyed, it’s going to explode and kill you and your family and anyone you’ve ever loved.”
“Mr. Diehl,” Cooper said, “you’re…scaring me a little.”
He went manic, leaning into the camera as his bloodshot eyes bulged.
“We’re all a little fucking scared right now, Cooper!” He flopped back in his chair and took a deep breath. “Sorry. Sorry. No, look, it’s okay. Everything is going to be great. I’m texting you a contact number. Once you have the case, call it, and the Concierge will arrange transport for you. You, and the case, will be brought to me at Xanadu. I’ll do a little razzle-dazzle, a little song and dance, turn that case into solid gold, and then we are all leaving.”
“Leaving?” Cooper asked.
“Leaving.” Bobby made a walking motion with his fingers. “Going away. Starting fresh, in a place with no extradition treaties. I built an empire once. I can do it again.”
Harmony tilted her head, studying the disheveled man as she sifted through his words. That didn’t make sense. Plenty of countries didn’t have an extradition treaty with the United States—Libya, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Mozambique—and a few might even welcome him with open arms if he managed to unfreeze some of his cash somehow, but that would only protect him from the FBI. Changing his address, even if he cozied up with some hostile government, wouldn’t erase him from Vigilant Lock’s kill list. He knew that.
“Trust the plan.” Bobby stared into the camera, suddenly calm and collected. Looking at Cooper, but now it seemed like he was locked eye to eye with Harmony. Daring her to come after him. “Understand this. This…situation…is nothing but a temporary setback. When all is said and done, when the dust settles and the smoke clears, I’m going to be the last man standing.”
“I’ll head for the airport,” Cooper said.
He flashed his pearly smile. “You’re my number one, Cooper. My absolute number one.”
The image went dark. The corner window blossomed, bringing Linder back onto the screen.
“Of course,” Linder said, “I wasn’t sending her alone.”
A smaller window opened at his side. Static photographs, front and profile, of an olive-skinned man with a sharp chin, a thin black mustache, and a soul patch.
“Agent Ramon Dominguez, one of our newer recruits.”
“Approved him myself.” Jessie rubbed her chin. “Solid profile. Former Ranger, background in surveillance and long-range recon, good hand with a rifle. Popped his cherry when his element ran into a demon out in Afghanistan. He was the only survivor. Little drinking problem, but let’s be honest, ninety percent of Vigilant field operatives have a drinking problem and the other ten are probably in denial or hooked on something worse. He was a solid choice for backup.”
“My thought as well,” Linder said. “He was instructed to shadow and protect her from a distance. Separate flights, and at no point were they to make direct contact, in case Cooper was being watched upon her arrival. He would only intervene if she was in immediate danger.”
“And did he?” Harmony asked.
“I wish I knew. Cooper was instructed to make the rendezvous at the bar, acquire the case and find a safe location to inspect its contents, then notify me at once so we could decide on our next move. She never made contact. Neither did Agent Dominguez. They’ve both gone completely dark. It’s been over twenty-four hours since last contact, so we have to assume the mission went wrong.”
“We don’t even know if Dominguez made it to Florida,” Jessie said. “If the op was compromised somehow, he could have gotten jacked before he even got on the plane.”
“Or upon his arrival. In any case, my primary concern—” He caught himself. “Besides the safety of our agents, of course—”
“Of course,” April murmured under her breath.
“—is the package that Agent Cooper was supposed to acquire. It sounds like Diehl cashed in a favor. And unfortunately, given his past history, we know that he had friends in both occult-underground circles and among certain…hostile foreign actors.”
“And it’s something he can turn into a quick and dirty bundle of cash, a big enough bundle to let him disappear for good.” Jessie glanced sidelong at Harmony. “You’re thinking what I’m thinking.”
Harmony was back on Main Street in Talbot Cove, watching the gas bombs go off. Seeing people she’d known her entire life fall to the street, choking, dying, changing, as the mutagen turned their bones to rubber and melted their skin like candle wax.
“It’s a weapon,” she said.
“Could be biological, chemical, supernatural…” Jessie looked back to the screen. “But we know Bobby would set off a nuke if he thought it’d get him what he wanted. No question he’d sell one.”
This used to be the part where Linder would give them their marching orders. Instead, he held his silence, deferring to Jessie. It was her call now. She stepped back, addressing Harmony and April.
“Okay. We land, we follow Cooper’s trail, we find out what kind of trouble she and Dominguez got into, and we pull them out. Then we get our hands on that mystery briefcase before any bad guys run off with it.”
Harmony looked to the screen. “That number Bobby said he was going to text her. Do we have it?”
Linder nodded. “It goes to a gas-station pay phone a few miles outside of Tucson, Arizona. It’s either under constant surveillance or some kind of routing system’s been installed on the line.”
Either was possible. The Concierge was an underworld legend, a professional smuggler who worked through a network of cutouts and intermediaries, moving people and contraband like ghosts through the nation’s arteries. Nobody had ever seen their face—not knowingly, at least.
“We’ve got one more objective,” Harmony said. “If Bobby isn’t responsible for whatever went wrong down there, he may not even know about it yet. Which means the Concierge is sti
ll waiting for Cooper to call for a pickup.”
Jessie smiled. “And waiting to take her and the case straight to Bobby’s doorstep. Think we can hitch a ride?”
7.
Aselia Boulanger drifted out of the cockpit. The Creole woman stifled a yawn behind her hand, then gestured over her shoulder with her thumb.
“Linder’s got me shuttlin’ y’all down to retirement country. Now, here’s the thing. I got us a hangar; the Imperator is registered as a Ulysses Shipping cargo transport, usual cover, and the hangar rental’s good for two days. I already made arrangements for ground transport, gonna have a car waiting when we land. Civilian sedan, but I can’t guarantee the make and model, that okay?”
Aselia was their own Concierge, a survivor of Vigilant Lock’s last incarnation. When she’d had to go underground, she turned from a pilot to a smuggler, mostly running weed across the Louisiana bayou. She’d boasted there wasn’t a vehicle—land, water, or air—she couldn’t pilot, and Harmony believed her. Just as importantly, she’d been rebuilding her old network of contacts since Jessie recruited her, giving Vigilant’s teams the power to move right under their hunters’ noses.
“If it has four wheels and doesn’t die on us, that’s just fine,” Jessie said. “Wait. Aselia? Who’s flying the plane?”
“Marco.”
Jessie shot a glance at the cockpit door.
“Is he…allowed to do that?”
“Marco’s a good pilot. I mean, maybe not takeoffs and landings, but he can keep her level. And it’s not like he’s going to try and disassemble the plane while we’re airborne.” Aselia paused. “Anymore. It was just the one time, and we had a discussion about it.”
Kevin had been standing at the tail end of the cargo bay, rummaging through a jumble of lashed-down crates. Now a loose wheel squeaked on one corner of a rolling cart as he pushed it over to the command console. White linen draped the lumpy bottom shelves, concealing their bounty.
“I was still prepping up until a minute before takeoff,” he said, “but it’s amazing what you can do with an actual, functional organization backing you up.”
Right to the Kill (Harmony Black Book 5) Page 5
