With a sigh, I reclined in my seat. There! Every computer file in the RV was deleted and in the process of being overwritten with the collected works of Oscar Wilde, my favorite author. Afterwards, the disks would be deleted again, melted, and then diced to pieces. Go ahead and try to reconstruct those records, ya bozos.
Brutally, our vehicle was pounded by a hail of armor-piercing bullets, most of which did not. Score another win for TechServ.
In less than a minute, the rest of the team had performed similar procedures to their own private records, burning papers, deleting Palm Pilots, and so forth. During this, Jessica had armed the self-destruct on the RV. With six hundred pounds of thermite packed into the hull, the werewolves might capture our dead bodies, but not in large enough pieces to even make a zombie hors d'oeuvre. The Scion was getting nothing from us. Period. End of discussion.
A rocket streaked by taking the side view mirror. Uh-oh, they were in trouble now. That's seven years bad luck.
"What next?” Father Donaher asked, crumbling a sheet of ashen paper into an unrecognizable mess.
More bullets ricocheted off our vehicle.
"We'll use the lasers,” I declared, holstering my Magnums.
Smiling, George fumbled at the vault in our arsenal and withdrew four sleek pistols. Top Secret weapons built for the Pentagon, the futuristic power pistols delivered the punch of an angry lightning bolt, but occasionally exploded on the user removing their hand and took a week to recharge. We saved them for dire emergencies only.
Dutifully, we switched the pistols’ setting from Flash, a disabling light burst that would temporarily blind anyone not wearing polarized goggles, to Beam, a polycyclic ray that cut steel. We didn't want the werewolves wounded, we wanted fried corpses. When we play, we play for keeps.
Crowding to the extreme right side of the van, Donaher, George, Mindy and I braced our pistols in our hands, while, on the other side, Raul and Katrina copied our position with their wands. They had a Deadly Light spell very similar to what our pistols could produce, and with the same limitations. Technology and magic, the only real difference was who held the patent: GE or God.
The motorcycles came closer. A LAW struck the highway just aft of us, clouding our view with flame and hunks of concrete. A chance chunk of shrapnel impacted off the rear Armorlite window and a small crack appeared. Horrified, I held my breath, but the crack did not penetrate all the way through.
"On my mark,” I commanded, with a dry mouth. “Ready ... aim ... fire!"
Straight through the clear glass rear windows of the Bureau RV there lanced out half a dozen scintillating energy beams. Only a fleeting touch of each beam was necessary for the werewolf rider to fall, minus a head or arm. Systematically, we cleared the road. But, as the charred bodies dropped lifeless to the highway surface and bounced away, the motorcycles leaped forward with renewed speed.
"Tricked!” Donaher roared, slamming a fist onto his knee. “The motorcycles are the attackers, not the drivers!"
Sweat running off her face, Mindy brushed away a strand of damp hair. The temperature of the RV must have risen twenty degrees from the secondary effect of the lasers. “Got to be demonically possessed,” she guessed intelligently.
"Ah, not necessarily,” Raul said, with pained expression.
Oh, what now? “Report,” I ordered, annoyed. The power level on my laser read 50% charged.
Trying to radiant innocence, Katrina started studying the ceiling and Raul cleared his throat. Twice. “Well, there is this theory. Only a theory, mind you—"
"Talk!” George yelled impatiently.
Raul sighed. “It is believed by some wizards, that if werewolves could ever become sentient, they would have the ability to decide what the curse would change the victim into."
Silence filled the van for a small eternity.
"Anything?” Mindy gulped, swallowing a small internal organ.
The mage gave a solemn nod.
"So those might not be from the Scion,” she started.
"But Scion members themselves,” Raul finished. “Correct."
Intelligent, hostile, paranormal were-motorcycles. Should we lodge a complaint with Consumer Reports or the ASPCA?
"Here they come!” Jess shouted in warning, veering the vehicle about from side to side.
In a whining roar, the motorcycles surged ahead and we fired again. But this time, the nimble bikes wheeled crazily about in a Gideon knot of confusion, making it impossible for us to get a clear sustained shot. Switching tactics, I ordered the highway destroyed in an effort to make the cycles crash. The lasers brutalized the highway before they winked out. But the sleek two-wheelers merely bounced over the buckled ridges of asphalt. Some of them wobbling badly and almost toppling to the rushing road surface, but then miraculously righted themselves.
Shocked expressions filled the van. The damn things must have gyroscope stabilizers. They couldn't fall over!
As the rest of the team heaped verbal abuse on the Scion, a dozen plans went through my mind, each critically flawed by the fact that we couldn't open the windows. Vestiges of the nerve gas still adhered to outside of the RV.
Painfully, I gnashed my teeth in frustration. Missiles gone. Out of bullets. Lasers drained. Low on magic. No help was coming. Yet, if we didn't do something fast, those kamikaze kooks would soon reduce us into covert Federal hamburger. Desperately, I tried to think of something clever, and succeeded.
"Katrina prepare to cast a Hook,” I commanded, drawing my Magnum. “Raul, get ready to do a mass Meld. Mindy, get me a stick from Storage. George grab a map, and everybody get ready to go EVA!"
Nobody bothered to reply. They just did it.
Handing the stick to Jess, she shoved it in between the gas pedal and the dashboard, holding the pedal to the floor. Using rope, she tied the steering wheel into position.
"Katrina? Raul?” I asked, filling my pockets with ammunition and grenades just in case this didn't work.
The wizards nodded.
"Hook!” I ordered.
Muttering words of power that visibly glowed in the air, Katrina gestured and from the side of the RV there shot a glowing green chain appended with a giant anchor. It hit the highway and embedded. On screeching tires, the van brutally arced about on the ethereal tether.
This had to be done perfectly. Timing was everything. “Ready and ... release!"
Poof. The chain was gone. Now facing in the wrong direction, the huge RV hurtled itself towards the enemy bikes.
"Meld!” I shouted.
Suddenly, we became insubstantial, and moved with ghostly rapidity through the physical mass of the Bureau vehicle. We found ourselves standing on the highway watching our twenty-four tons of armored Recreational Vehicle race straight at the oncoming array of motorcycles: a solid wall of Detroit metal moving at a relative velocity of 300-plus miles per hour. Without a doubt, ramming speed.
"Duck!” I cried, and the whole world seemed to shatter into pieces and then reform, so powerful was the mass detonation of the motorcycle's explosive cargo of plastique, aided and abetted by the six hundred kilos of thermite in our RV. Shrapnel and bits of concrete pounded all around us, while a brutal shock wave rattled the bones loose in our bodies, a single heart beat before a boiling thunderhead of flame extended hungrily for us.
"Berlin!” Katrina called, and we crouched low behind her magical Wall.
A wave of fire engulfed our position, but the licking flames spread out harmlessly as they rebounded from the resilient spell. However, killing heat seeped around the edges and our roasting seemed to last forever.
Eventually, the wall flickered into nothingness as Katrina ran dry of magic and we lay panting in the middle of the disfigured Ohio highway. Battered, broiled and bone-weary, the team grimly prepared what weapons we had and crossed fingers in a primitive luck ceremony. Failure? Success?
Then from the rumbling firestorm down the road, there appeared a smoking motorcycle tire that rolled aimlessly along for a f
ew meters then wandered off the road to collapse in the weeds.
We cheered until our throats got as sore as the rest of our bodies. When everybody else is dead, you win: Bureau 13 axiom number seven, I do believe.
Romping in from the fiery horizon, came Amigo. As he reached our group, the collar around his neck rippled with light and he was a tiny Gila lizard again. Picking up our pet, Raul scratched him under the neck and Amigo came as close to a purr as he could.
"Map,” I wheezed, loosening my smoking necktie.
Bleeding from both ears, George offered the charred piece of paper to me with a bow. I thanked him and managed to focus my vision long enough to see a milemarker and locate our position. Painfully, my team hobbled off the road and headed for the someplace named Zanesville, the nearest town with an airport. We had a lot of work to do and not much time to do it in. This made twice the Scion had forced us into a retreat.
There would be no third time.
[Back to Table of Contents]
CHAPTER SEVEN
As we stumbled into downtown Zanesville, our appearance frightened a small child. So the team stopped at the local mall and got shaved, showered, shampooed, haircuts, bought new clothes and wrapped ourselves around a reasonably priced meal at a nice restaurant.
While the team was devouring everything on the menu, I ambled over to a payphone and placed a discreet call to the Bureau. With the relay in our RV gone, our wristwatches probably couldn't reach wherever-the-heck our HQ was located. Which made a public phone was my sole option.
After being endlessly relayed through exchanges in Alamogordo, New Mexico to Trevose, Pennsylvania, I finally reached somebody in authority I could formally report to. The exchange of information was short and succinct.
Returning to the table, I gleefully informed the group that since we had been in direct telepathic communication with the Scion, no other Bureau team was going to interfere and chance exposure. We alone had been given the honor of stopping the Scion. Somehow, my friends were able to restrain themselves from doing the dance of joy at this news.
Appropriating a chair, I called for a group discussion. Katrina cast a small Dome of Silence over the table and everybody gathered in close.
"Okay, obviously we can't go to Hadleyville without some sort of psionic protection,” George noted, mopping the last vestiges of gravy from his plate with a buttermilk biscuit. “Raul? Katrina? How about some big juju magic?"
Conferring for a moment, the two wizards were glum.
"Nyet,” Katrina sighed so deeply, she almost burst out of her new blouse. “Spells for minds must be cast on each person and only last few minutes. Drain Raul and me in quick time."
"Raul and I,” Jessica corrected primly.
She nodded. “Da, both of us."
"Horta, old pal?” I asked hopefully.
Almost knocking over the condiment tray, Raul was madly flipping through his big book of spells, currently disguised as a menu. “Sadly, that seems to be the case,” he announced. “There are some alchemist potions which might work, but the side effects are rather unpleasant."
"Such as?” I asked curiously. Headaches? Stomach cramps? We could take those if it got the job done.
Scowling, Raul ran a finger down a page in his book. “Let's see, there is Lungfire, Demonic Cancer, Brain Spiders...."
"Enough!” Mindy called, holding up a palm. “We get the general idea."
"And we're eating,” George munched, his mouth stuffed full. There were priorities.
Her steel wand pulsating with flashes of hot power, Katrina barked a long phrase in Russian. It didn't sound very cheery.
"This is intolerable!” Father Donaher raged, snapping a bread stick in half easy as a baseball bat. “Just because the Bureau has no operating telepaths, we're supposed to sit on our butts while the Scion of the Silver Dagger does...” He gestured vaguely. “Who knows what! How many civilians have perished already? And how many more will die?"
It was a good point. Where the Scion went, death followed and lots of it.
Mindy struck the table a resounding blow with her fist rattling the silver. “God damn it! We discover a coven of sentient werewolves, the biggest threat to the world in recent memory, and we can't even investigate just because the bad guys can read our minds? I say we go back to Hadleyville anyway, and kick some butt!"
"Yeah!” Raul agreed. “If we move fast enough, or independently, even if they know what we're doing, they may not be able to stop us."
Katrina brandished her invisible wand. “We shall bury them!"
"Thank you, Mr. Khrushchev,” George chuckled.
The Russian glared in return, then smiled.
"No,” I stated in a tone that brooked no further discussion. “The danger is too great. Lord knows what important secrets those Swiftian yahoos have already learned about the Bureau! Jessica saved our hides before, and we're not going to muck up the mission now by charging in unprepared. We'll find a way to stop the Scion. A trick, a trap!"
Everybody looked at me expectantly.
"Something,” I mumbled lamely.
"We always do,” Jess added, trying to be helpful.
Reclining contentedly in his swivel chair, Raul crossed his arms. “Okay, then shoot us the straight poop, boss man."
Furrowing my brow, I revved my brain to overload and thought like a sonovabitch. No ... no ... nyah, that wouldn't work either ... ah ... er ... um....
Silent during the rhetoric, Father Donaher sat hunched over, doing his rosary at record speed and starting to break into a sweat. Then he stopped, crossed himself and wet his lip.
"Yes,” Mike said in a strained voice, as he stared at the spinning ceiling fan overhead. “If only we knew of something that could help us. But say, if some priest had heard of such a ... thing in, oh, the confessional, for example, then he couldn't tell anybody about it."
"Even if he really, really wanted to,” finished the big priest with a pained expression.
Smiles abounded. We have a bingo.
"Hey, Mike,” I grinned. “How about we go stretch our legs in the parking lot outside and maybe have a friendly game of darts?"
Tongue between teeth, Raul was already digging about in his spell book and extricated a giant map of North America. We had done this before. Many times.
Pulling a brass-trimmed, red leather box from a voluminous pocket of his cassock, Donaher eased open the top. Nestled inside on a cushion of gleaming white satin lay three darts. The needle tips were engraved with Donaher's full name, the shaft made of African ironwood, edged with mahogany, and the fletching was of the neatly trimmed feathers of an American bald Eagle.
Daintily lift a dart into view, Donaher flipped it into the air and on the way down caught the point between thumb and forefinger. Mike flipped it again, and caught the dart underhand with a snapping wrist motion. Mindy couldn't have done better.
"Gosh, Ed,” the big Catholic priest said. “I'll be glad to play a game, but I'm really not as good at darts as I would like to be."
Ooh, watching a professional like him skirt around the Ninth Commandant was always a thrill.
* * * *
The two of us played darts across four states, before we ‘needed’ a fresh map to replace the old one. Pretty soon, Mike and I were working on a street map of Kansas City, Missouri. With amazing accuracy, he laid a feathered pattern in the suburbs around a small estate owned by an old friend of ours. That is, if you use some new and twisted meaning of the word ‘friend'. Try arch-enemy instead.
Gathering the crew, we paid for dinner and took a cab from Zanesville to Columbus, sleeping the whole way. In Columbus, we purchased a brand new limousine using my disposal ID and fake American Express card listed under the name of Richard Tucholka. The credit card was good for any amount, but only for one purchase. Afterwards, the account would be paid in full by the Bureau and permanently closed.
Driving to Kansas City, sleeping the whole way, we traded the limo in on a used school bus, which was
the closet thing to an armored assault vehicle it was possible to obtain on such short notice. It also helped to muddy our trail in case the Scion was still after us. Not an unreasonable assumption. Those guys could give bloodhounds a bad name.
Hitting a theatrical supply company, and a local hangout for devious criminal types, we purchased the few additional supplies needed to do this assignment and then took off to find some secluded place where we could work in peace.
Pulling into the lot of the ‘Lazy Eight Motel', Jessica got us four adjoining rooms, and the team trundled inside with our new equipment. Most of it was weapons, ammunition, medical supplies, silver ingots and a special purchase by me, for me. I was the only member of the team trained to handle the stuff. I might have no idea what Donaher was sending us after, but I had a pretty good hunch what I would have to do to get It.
As this mission was incredibly dangerous, and slightly illegal, I was going alone. The more people involved, the bigger a chance of failure. It was not a unanimous choice, and, in fact, I had to pull executive privilege. Something I had not done since that nasty incident in Columbia with the New Gods. But we knew whom that suburban mansion belonged too.
Dr. Mathais Bolt was a medical doctor, licensed psychotherapist, millionaire, philanthropist, wizard, necromancer, murderer, litterbug and leader of the Brotherhood of Darkness, a lunatic cult dedicated to conquering the world. Probably so those losers could get dates for Saturday night, and avoid paying taxes. Who knew? They were as nuts as the Scion, only less efficient.
The Brotherhood of Darkness had never been a serious threat to the Bureau, or the world in general, even though Dr. Mathais Bolt was the best ... er, make that the most powerful, necromancer in the world. On the other hand, some of the members of the Brotherhood were smart. Too smart. So the only way to handle them was to give the loonies all the information they could handle, but make them positive it was totally false. Reverse psychology was what the gang in Strategy & Tactical called it. Field agents called the process ‘polishing the mirror'. With the help of my friends, I began the process.
Full Moonster [BUREAU 13 Book Three] Page 8
