Rogue Oracle

by Unknown

  The Pythia took Cassie’s homework from her, scanned it with eyes dark as sloes. Her fingers sketched out the Midheaven and the conjuncts. “Interesting.”

  “I don’t understand what Pluto in retrograde means. Not that Pluto’s a real planet, anyway.”

  “Pluto is a real planet. Always has been.”

  “Not anymore.”

  The Pythia snorted, waved her hand dismissively. “Politics. It will be again.” She leaned over Cassie’s shoulder at the computer-generated chart. Cassie tried not to be smug when she showed the same outcome.

  “So … what does it mean?”

  The Pythia took a drag on her cigarette. She stared intently at the lit end, and Cassie wondered what she saw in the ember. The Pythia had forced Cassie to try pyromancy, once. Cassie had stared at a candle until she fell asleep, and had a dream about marshmallows. The Pythia decided she had no talent for that art, and moved on.

  “What do you see?” Cassie asked.

  The Pythia stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray beside the sink. Her hair fell over her face in a curtain, obscuring her expression. But when she spoke, her voice was dark: “Nothing good.” She gestured to Cassie’s computer. “Your machine … can it search for similar charts over time?”

  Cassie shrugged. “Yeah, sure. I can ask it to search for any other charts that might meet the same description … planets in those houses, fixed stars.”

  The Pythia nodded. “Please ask it to search for similar patterns.”

  “We won’t find an exact match … The outer planets move too slowly to make some configurations possible for hundreds of years.”

  “Just narrow it down to the last fifty years or so.”

  “No sweat.” Cassie punched a few keys, and the processor in her laptop began to whir. She kicked back, waiting for it to compile. The Pythia didn’t even like using the digital egg timer. She treated electronics as if they had a painful miasma to be avoided. On more than one occasion, Cassie had caught her trying to smudge the television with burning sage, or opening a window when someone was running a microwave. The woman had an unnatural dislike for magnetic fields.

  The computer kicked up a chart on the screen. “Found a chart similar to our transiting planets,” Cassie said triumphantly. “April 26, 1986, 9:23 Greenwich Mean Time. Latitude 51°17’N, longitude 30°15’E. Pluto was in Scorpio then, but still retrograde. And the moon was in Scorpio, the sun and Mars opposed it, and we have the same void from the Midheaven to the Descendent …” Cassie punched a few keys, and the current transiting map overlaid the historical mundane one. It was a nearly perfect match.

  The Pythia read over Cassie’s shoulder. She was very quiet, and Cassie looked back at her. The glow of the screen was reflected in her eyes.

  “Does that mean anything to you?”

  The Pythia’s frown deepened. “That was the date and time of the Chernobyl disaster.”

  Cassie bit back a curse. “I guess that counts as ‘nothing good.’”

  EX-SPYMASTERS SHOULDN’T OWN GARDEN GNOMES.

  Tara stared distractedly at the brightly colored creatures dotting the walkway to Norman Lockley’s house. They were spaced at regular intervals amid pink begonias, cheerfully standing guard over the walkway like orange traffic cones on a highway. Lockley lived in Virginia; perhaps all that time in DC had caused him to miss the long summer road construction season.

  “Weird,” Harry said. He hit the doorbell of the white-sided cottage house. A dog barked, and the door opened. Tara noticed that the screen door remained locked. The voice emanated just to the left of the door, out of direct firing line, forcing Tara to squint into the shade of the house. Old spy habits apparently died hard.

  “Norman Lockley?”

  “Yes,” a craggy voice answered. Somewhere behind the screen, the dog continued to bark. Tara jumped when a German shepherd slammed against the screen. She was instantly reminded of the dog depicted in the Moon card. The man behind the screen grabbed the dog’s collar, muttering: “Down, Diana. That’s not the postman.” Diana whined.

  “My name’s Harry Li, and this is Tara Sheridan,” Harry continued. “We’re from the Special Projects Division of DOJ. We were wondering if you had a moment to answer a few questions for us.”

  “Let me see your creds.”

  Harry opened his wallet with his ID and badge and pressed it against the screen. Tara did the same with her temporary ID.

  The man behind the screen snorted. “Ah. Zookeepers from the Little Shop of Horrors. Come on in.” Special Projects’ reputation had preceded them in spy world. He reached up to unlatch the screen door, motioned for them to come inside.

  Lockley’s house was cool shade compared to the summer heat outside. Tara could feel the wall of air conditioning striking her as soon as she stepped onto the parquet flooring.

  Lockley was not what she had expected. He was a small, balding man sitting in a wheelchair. A striped golf shirt stretched over a bit of a paunch, and khaki pants were covered in dog hair from the German shepherd straining in his grip. A pair of bifocals had wandered down his nose as he struggled with the dog.

  “Don’t worry. She doesn’t bite anyone but the postman. And she only does that because he’s an SOB.”

  Tara leaned down and let the dog smell her open palm. The dog vigorously snooted her hand, including the scar that crept out from under her jacket sleeve. Lockley bumped the door shut, ratcheted the deadbolt, and let go of Diana. The dog wagged her tail and turned her attention to Harry, sniffing his shoes.

  “What can I do for you folks?” Lockley crossed his arms across his chest.

  “We’re investigating the disappearances of some of your former colleagues. We were hoping you’d be able to provide us with some background information.”

  A bemused smile flitted across Lockley’s wrinkled face, and he shook his head.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “You have to understand,” Lockley said, “it was my business to make people disappear. So … these things generally don’t worry me much.”

  Harry looked him up and down, blurted: “You don’t strike me as a sniper. Or an assassin.”

  Lockley laughed and shook his head. “No. I wasn’t either of those. I was a disguise master.” He gestured to Harry and Tara. “C’mon. I’ll show you.”

  Lockley led them through a military-neat living room and a kitchen with a gleaming blank table. It was an ordinary bit of suburbia, befitting a lifelong bachelor: no frilly curtains, flower arrangements, or botanical chintz. Tara guessed that Lockley’s dog was his only roommate. A sliding glass door provided a view to a patio where birdfeeders were staged. Goldfinches crunched thistle seeds and perched on the screen. Tara figured that was primarily for the dog’s amusement, as Diana lay down on the tile in front of the door to watch the colorful show.

  Lockley opened a door to the garage, clicked on a light, wheeled his chair down a ramp. Tara and Harry followed him.

  “Welcome to my office.”

  What had once been a two-car garage had been converted into a laboratory for evil scientists. Faces hung, deflated, from hooks on pegboards. Jars held flesh-colored substances and paints. Workbenches were strewn with body parts: ears, fingers, noses. Pictures of faces, hands, and eyes were suspended by clothespins from a clothesline that ran along the walls. A dismembered leg lay on a tarp beside an airbrush machine, toes splayed. Eyeballs were held in egg cartons beside paintbrushes and molds. Tara reached out and touched an ear. Some kind of soft plastic, maybe latex.

  “What is all this stuff?” Harry asked.

  “My disguise shop. I’m retired, but I still take some contract work. Some for the Feds and private industry, but a lot of it for the movies. Keeps me out of trouble. This is what I’m working on.” Lockley wheeled to a table, picked up a hand. “It’s going to be part of a data security test.” He passed it to Tara.

  Tara ran her fingers over the rubbery material. The detail was amazing … Individual pores had been punche
d into the “skin,” with fine hairs added. Veins had been sketched below the surface. Even nails made from a semi-opaque plastic had been imbedded in the ersatz flesh. It was indistinguishable from the real thing, even up close. Upon close inspection, fingerprints had been engraved in it.

  “This is amazing work,” Tara said.

  “This is a prototype, modeled after a real hand. The fingerprints are real, too … We want to see whether it can fool a standard biometric scanner. If so, the client wants to work on developing scanners that can also rely on skin conductivity.”

  “Impressive.” It made sense to her, now, the Moon card: Lockley had used his talents for deception his whole career. Judging by the modest state of his house, Tara guessed that he wasn’t charging much. Or else, he was good at squirreling it away. She felt a little sad for Lockley, though … In his retirement, all he had was his work. The old man was clearly still proud of it, and eager to show it off to company.

  “Eh. Retirement bored me,” he said modestly.

  Harry squinted at a photo of Lockley strung up on the clothesline. Below the photo was a wigmaker’s dummy with a half-finished mask draped over it. Lockley’s features were shown in sleepy relief. “What are you working on here?”

  “Ah, that’s gonna be my Halloween costume.” Lock-ley’s chair squeaked beside Harry. “I play a starring role at my local haunted house. Took a cast of my face, but I’m going to make myself a zombie … add some fake teeth, blood, decomposing flesh. The kids like that kind of thing.” Lockley folded his hands in his lap. “But this isn’t what you came here for.”

  “Right,” Harry said, distracted by a cobalt-blue eyeball in an egg cup. “Four people who worked on Project Rogue Angel have disappeared.”

  Lockley’s eyes clouded. “Who?”

  “Gerald Frost, Carrie Kirkman, Carl Starkweather, and Lena Ivanova. Did you know them?”

  Lockley sighed. “I knew Gerald and Carl well. We kept in touch after retirement.” He took his glasses off and rubbed under his eyes. “What happened?”

  “We’re not sure. Frost vanished on a trip to Russia. He got on a train, and disappeared. Kirkman disappeared from her real estate office. Carl’s car was found at a Vegas casino, and we think Lena disappeared from her house.”

  “You got any theories?” Lockley was waiting to see what they had, before he tipped his hand.

  “Some intel has been sold. Information that only the Rogue Angel team had access to.” Harry didn’t elaborate.

  Lockley frowned. “Gerald and Carl were not the type of men who go rogue and sell secrets. I spoke to Gerald about six months ago. He was planning a trip to Ukraine, to Belarus, St. Petersburg. He never forgot that place. It grew on him too much. It wouldn’t have surprised me to hear that he took up with a Ukrainian girl, found himself a nice little dacha in the countryside … but Gerald would not have spilled any secrets. He’d put too much effort into trying to make sure that no one got hurt in the debris of the Soviet empire to sell out now. Gerald was a sentimental man.”

  Tara leaned forward. “How about Carl? Or Lena?”

  “Carl was assigned to offer cash to former Soviet scientists to keep them from defecting. He was trustworthy enough for the shop to trust him with millions of dollars. Not a cent of it ever went missing.

  “He and Lena …” Lockley paused, and started over. “He and Lena were star-crossed from the get-go. I was the one who helped recruit Lena, so I feel partly responsible. She was assigned to be his interpreter. But, if you knew her, you couldn’t help but fall for her. She was that luminous.” Lockley folded his hands in his lap. “Poor Carl didn’t have a chance.”

  “I thought Carl was married,” Harry said.

  “He is. But he’ll never have as much in common with his wife as he did with Lena. Once you’ve faced life and death together, traveled across the world to exotic places, well …” Lockley waved his hands at them. “You can imagine.”

  “But he went back to his wife and kids?”

  “Carl always took his duties pretty damn seriously. He had kids, and he wasn’t going to leave them without a father. And Lena was the impetuous sort—I don’t think she would have waited for him.”

  Tara thought back on the matryoshka on Lena’s dresser. Perhaps, in some way, on some level, she had still been waiting for him. “Our working theory is that these operatives were taken against their will … We haven’t worked out the how or why of it, yet. Can you suggest any enemies or groups that might have wanted to see this happen?”

  Lockley closed his eyes. “I don’t want to imagine my old cohorts abducted and tortured for their information. But I can’t see any other way that this could happen. Rogue Angel made enemies, to be certain. But I have to believe that most of those people are dead and gone.”

  “People like who?”

  “The remains of the KGB always believed that they could handle their own affairs, without our interference. I often felt they were one step ahead of us. God knows where they all are now.”

  Harry crossed his arms. “Mr. Lockley, we’d like to take you into protective custody until we figure out what’s going on, who’s behind this.”

  Lockley shook his head. “I’m not going anywhere. This is my home.”

  “But you’ll be safer with the Marshals.”

  “No. I’m staying here. You can put surveillance on me, all you want,” the old man replied, stubborn as if someone had suggested putting him in a nursing home. “But I’m not leaving home.”

  “Okay.” Harry sighed, resigned. “I’ll get a Marshal out here to watch the house.”

  “I’ll give ’em all the coffee they can stand and let ’em use the bathroom. But no one’s sleeping in my house.”

  Harry fished his cell phone out of his pocket, turned away to make the call. Tara watched him, wondering if all the rest of the operatives on the list were going to be this stubborn.

  Lockley leaned forward. Tara saw his gaze following the scars on the back of her hand and the ones peeking out from her collar. “Let me see your hand, kid.”

  Tara’s brows drew together. “Why?”

  “Professional interest.”

  Reluctantly, Tara extended her right hand to him. The old man gently turned her hand over, ran his fingers over the raised white scar.

  “Could you roll up your sleeve for me, please?”

  Tara decided to humor the old man. She rolled her jacket and blouse sleeve up to her elbow. Lockley invited her to sit on a stool, placed her arm on the table before him. He clicked on the fluorescent light, examining the frost-like patterns. “I’ve never seen anything like this before. Do you mind me asking?”

  “No.” Tara squirmed. “They’re from a Japanese spade, a Hori-Hori.”

  “Ah. I can see that, now … the curve and the skip of the cut.” He peered through his glasses. “May I ask how you got them?”

  She swallowed. She didn’t like talking about this, but she supposed the curiosity was natural. “I was the agent who found the Gardener.”

  “I’ve read about him. He was the killer who locked women in boxes, bled them out to feed his plants.” Admiration glinted in Lockley’s gaze. “And you were a survivor.”

  Tara nodded, unwilling to speak further on it.

  Lockley reached for a pot of flesh-colored powder. “May I?” he asked, poising his brush above the pot.

  “Um. Okay.”

  She felt the whisk of Lockley’s brush across her skin as he worked the pigment into the white scars. “You’re very much like them, you know.”

  “Who?”

  “Lena and Carl.” Lockley didn’t look up from his work. “But different.” Tara sat, flummoxed, as the soft brush continued working over her skin. He continued talking: “I’m not ordinarily a fatalist, but Carl and Lena were supposed to be together.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “People like us need other people like us. That’s why I never married.”

  He turned Tara’s hand over. “See w
hat you think.”

  She blinked, looking at her blank, scarless skin. She brushed the line of a scar that she knew was there, felt the numb, stiff ridge of it under her touch, but couldn’t see it. “You do excellent work, Mr. Lockley.”

  He dropped his brushes into a laundry sink and turned on the tap. “If you ever decide that you want to be well and truly rid of those scars, I know a plastic surgeon who works miracles, did a lot of shop work for us.”

  Tara stared down at her curiously blank flesh. It was tempting. But she’d grown accustomed to the tough feel of them lacing over her body, like the strings of a corset. Without them, she was afraid, on a visceral level, that her flesh would simply fall apart. She hesitated, but she was accustomed to them. No illusion cast by the disguise master or a surgeon would erase the past. She was learning to own it, own her roots: not as a victim, but as a survivor.

  “Thanks, Mr. Lockley.” She smiled at him. “But … I think I’m all right as I am.”

  It sounded strange to hear herself saying that, but it felt true, for the first time in years.

  Chapter Eight

  UNLIKE THE memories of his victims, Galen never wrote down his own memories. He could fill volumes detailing what he’d seen and heard, independent of the other voices in his head. But he had no desire to record them. Reliving them was almost too much to bear, and he sought to crowd out his own recollections with the memories of others.

  But the new memories faded too quickly, like weak perfume. He could already feel Lena’s jasmine scent leaving him. On some level, he hated her for leaving him. Everyone left, eventually.

  Galen lay on his bed, staring up at the fan turning on the ceiling, stirring hot breeze from the open window like a spoon in soup. Sweat prickled his skin, and he could feel it dripping between his shoulder blades. When he closed his eyes, he could imagine it trickling down his face, like a cold spring rain that tasted like metal. Rain always brought change to him, sometimes unwanted, but always powerful. He’d always loved the rain.

  He’d met Gerald Frost in a late spring rain, in Pripyat. No one lived in Pripyat anymore. The little Ukrainian town had been abandoned, fenced in, and forgotten. The chain-link fences and stout gates were intended to keep looters away, but they didn’t deter the owls nesting in the rusting Ferris wheel, the birds that had overtaken the apartment buildings, or the foxes that peered behind tall tassels of grass poking up from cracks in the pavement.