Rogue Oracle

by Unknown

  Getting through the security checkpoint was at least as much an issue as it would be in the U.S. Tara clutched her Russian phrase book and handed the guards running the checkpoint an envelope labeled in Cyrillic script that the Pythia had included in the packet. A yellow sticky note had been attached to it that said: Give this to Customs in Kiev. The guard read through it, gave her package a perfunctory search. Tara assumed it explained she was there for a harmless purpose. Or perhaps it contained money.

  The guard with the envelope pointed to Tara’s Tyvek suit. He muttered a string of words in Russian. Tara flipped through her phrase book, struggling to keep up. One of the words meant “journalist.” Another guard rolled her eyes and waved dismissively.

  The female guard searching her purse set a pack of cigarettes aside. Tara held her breath. The pack contained her concealed Tarot cards. If the guard tried to keep them, Tara was well and truly screwed.

  The guard put all of Tara’s items back in the purse, except for the cigarettes. Tara reached for the packet, and the woman’s hand slammed down on hers. “Nyet,” the woman said.

  Tara swallowed. She had to get her cards back. If …

  The woman turned her back to Tara and flipped open the top of the pack. Tara assumed she wanted to share her good fortune with her colleagues. But when the guard turned over the pack to tap out some cigarettes, a single card fell out on the table, the Devil.

  It was easily the most fearsome card in the Tarot deck, depicting a horned devil, wreathed in fire, with a man and woman chained at his feet. People who were unfamiliar with the Tarot often panicked when they received this card in a reading, assuming it signified pure evil. In actuality, it rarely signified such pitch blackness. It usually drew the reader’s attention to self-imposed bondage or limitations. But the guard was unaware of those nuances.

  She dropped the pack of cards back down on the table, as if it was hot. Tara scooped up the card and the pack, jammed them back in her purse. The guard wouldn’t look at her, instead giving the sign of the Evil Eye at Tara’s retreating back.

  Tara was a bit startled at the cards’ behavior. She’d never had a deck before that seemed to exhibit any … volition. And this deck appeared to act in self-defense. She made a mental note to question the Pythia more fully about it, if she got the opportunity.

  Tara eventually worked through the security line, was thoroughly patted down. The guards even took the wallet that the Cowboy had given her to hide under her clothing. It felt a bit lighter when it was returned to her. Eventually, Tara was sent on her way. Tara wound through the crowded Boryspil airport, searching for a train terminal. She spent a frustratingly long time studying her phrase book before feeling competent enough to ask a man in a uniform where the train was by pointing to a picture of a train in her guidebook.

  He gestured to the far end of the terminal, and Tara nodded. Some of the signs contained a pictogram of a railway, and she was able to follow these to a ticket counter. She pulled another of the Pythia’s letters from her bag and gave it to the clerk at the window. Without comment, the clerk issued her a ticket and pointed to a platform down a flight of stairs.

  Tara slung her bag over her shoulder and trotted down to the sparsely populated train platform. She glanced at her watch. She had easily fifteen minutes until her train left. Nice planning on the Pythia’s part. She walked away from the main platform to a kiosk displaying a brightly colored map and began to study it. It was hard to make out all the lines and connections under the dim, flickering light overhead and bits of graffiti scrawled on the glass cover in Magic Marker.

  She was too absorbed in trying to figure out how the lettering corresponded to the words in her phrase book to notice a man beside her. He grabbed her wrist, turned her to face him. He said something in Russian. Tara shook her head, not understanding what he wanted.

  The man brushed open his jacket, displaying a gun. His intent was clear.

  She stomped on the instep of his foot as hard as she could, kneed him in the groin. She twisted her arm around to pull it away against his thumb, the weakest part of his grip. She tore herself away, but had not taken more than two steps before he caught the back of her shirt, hauled her back behind the kiosk, and slugged her in the jaw. He pulled the pistol out of his waistband, aimed it at her head, gesturing for her to hand him the purse holding her passport, cards, and train ticket.

  Tara clenched her fists, ready to fight. She couldn’t afford to give up any of the meager tools she needed on her mission. Not to the guard, and not to the mugger.

  “Hands off the lady.”

  Tara blinked. The command came in English. And in a familiar voice.

  The mugger turned, and a dark figure reared up behind him. The figure knocked the mugger’s gun arm wide and smashed his head into the kiosk. Tara lifted her arms to cover her face as the kiosk glass shattered. The mugger slumped into the maw of the kiosk, teeth of glass piercing his neck and shoulders.

  “Come on.” She was lifted to her feet by Harry, who was tucking the mugger’s gun into his jacket pocket. He steered her briskly away from the kiosk, toward the train that had rumbled into the station.

  Harry gave his ticket to the provodnitsa at the door to the car, a middle-aged woman in a navy-blue uniform. Tara had read about the provodniks and provodnitsas in her guidebook—they worked in pairs, and were in charge of the sleeper cars. Tara fished her ticket out of her purse and surrendered it to the woman, who returned a stub to her. Numbly, Tara took it and followed the provodnitsa and Harry into the car.

  The interior of the car was brightly painted, as one might find in a home, not the industrial colors and finishes Tara had encountered on the plane. The provodnitsa opened a squeaky sliding door to a small room barely larger than a hotel bathroom. Two narrow couches were piled high with pillows, a small table set between them. Fringed curtains bracketed the train window. This was a luxury cabin, a spalny vagon. The provodnitsa ushered them inside, and closed the door firmly.

  Harry thrust Tara’s hair away from her face. He touched the rising bruise on her cheek. “Are you hurt?”

  Tara winced. “No. It’s all right. What are you doing here?”

  “You mean, after you ditched me in Washington?” Harry’s mouth pressed into a hard slash.

  “Yeah. After that part.” Tara pressed her hand to Harry’s chest. “Look, I didn’t want to get you involved. The Pythia sent me.”

  “And she sent me after you.”

  Tara shook her head and sat down hard on the narrow couch. “She’s got you all wound up in her plans, now, Harry.” She didn’t want that for him.

  “Hey.” Harry sat down beside her, turned her swollen chin to face him. “Where you go, I go. That’s not negotiable.”

  That had never been the case before. She swallowed. “But Aquila—”

  “You don’t need to remind me about duty,” he said, tightly. “This is a duty of a different kind.”

  The train ground to a start, the wheeze of the engines reverberating through the floor. The train began to pick up speed, chugging away from the platform. Harry pulled the drapes that smelled like cigarette smoke, and Tara wondered how long it would take before the mugger was found embedded in the kiosk. She forcefully turned her thoughts away, hoping the man wouldn’t bleed out before someone found him.

  “I take it that your presence here also means you think the Chimera made it at least as far as Rome?” Tara asked.

  “Rome and beyond.” Harry shook his head. “On the Dulles surveillance tapes, I saw a guy that looked like Norman Lockley on the Rome flight. He wasn’t detained by anyone when the flight landed. He just vanished. Radiation sweeps in Rome showed some abnormal amounts of radiation in the interior of the airplane. He was there, but disappeared. Since you were right about that, I’ve gotta assume that you’re also right about where he’s going.”

  Harry shrugged out of his jacket. He was dressed as Tara was, in a T-shirt and nondescript pants. Jeans would have marked them as touris
ts. He checked the gun that he’d picked up from the mugger, frowned, popped out the magazine.

  “What’s wrong?” Tara asked.

  “This is a piece of shit. A knockoff of a cheap automatic pistol. Cheap Czech ammo. This thing is as likely to jam as it is to shoot.” He slammed the magazine back home, stuffed it into his jacket.

  “But it’s better than nothing at all,”

  Tara said. “It’s better than nothing,” Harry agreed. “I guess.”

  Tara rested her elbows on her knees, tried to ignore the tingling in her face. “I think I know what the Chimera is after.”

  “The reactor rods from Chernobyl,” Harry said.

  “How did you—?”

  “Veriss was on it. I dug through his research files, found that all the missing agents had been searching for them, at one time or another.” Harry shook his head. “Poor bastard should have stuck with what he was good at.”

  A knock sounded at the cabin door. Harry stood to open it, admitting the provodnitsa carrying a tea set.

  “Chai?” she asked.

  “Spa-see-ba,” Tara pronounced slowly, remembering the phrase for “thank you” from her guidebook.

  The provodnitsa set the tea service down on the small wooden table between the bunks. She glanced at the bruise blossoming on Tara’s face, then at the bloody scratches on Harry’s knuckles. She pulled a plastic bag of ice from her apron pocket and left it on Tara’s side of the table without saying a word. She gave Harry a dirty glare on her way out.

  Tara gratefully pressed the bag of ice to her cheek. “She thinks you’re a violent man.”

  Harry glanced at the drawn window curtains and stared at his scuffed hand. “She’s not wrong, lately.”

  Tara leaned forward and captured his hand. It felt very cold under hers. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  Harry stared back at her, levelly. Tara could see the thoughts churning behind his eyes, and he didn’t move to take her hand.

  “Like it or not, you’re stuck with me,” he said quietly.

  “WHERE ARE WE GOING?”

  Cassie lugged a cooler down the dock to the marina. Maggie trotted behind her, while Oscar squirmed in the backpack slung over her shoulder. The tabby succeeded in getting one leg free of the zipper and was slapping her on the shoulder with his paw.

  The Kahuna was walking beside her. A fishing pole was slung casually over his shoulder, but Cassie had seen him fill the pockets of his fishing vest with at least two pistols and several fistfuls of ammo. It made her nervous.

  Ahead, on the dock, the Cowboy was fiddling with some ropes tethering a medium-sized boat to the weathered dock. Cassie knew very little about boats, but this one seemed very ordinary. It had a cabin, a motor, and the words Starry Night painted on the side. Someone (the Kahuna, she imagined) had put up a Jolly Roger flag on the front railing.

  “We’re going on a little trip, down the Potomac,” the Kahuna said. She saw he was scanning the dawn horizon behind his plastic shades. At this early hour, there was only a handful of people at the marina: a couple of guys scraping the paint from a boat on the shore, a lady walking a dog, and a couple of drunk college students still stumbling around the closed tiki bar.

  The Cowboy whistled, and Maggie jumped into the boat. Her tail wagged, and Cassie could see that she was excited to be around new smells.

  Cassie wasn’t so sure. “I thought that the surplus shop was the safest place,” Cassie said reluctantly.

  “Your crazy aunt left a package for Tara last night.” Cassie’s heart lurched into her throat. “She knows where I am?” she squeaked.

  “Yeah. Tara says she promised not to hurt you, but … Steve and I are pretty cautious. Might be better to be on the move.”

  The Cowboy reached out from the side of the boat to offer her a hand in.

  Cassie swallowed. Tara’s cards said she could trust these guys. She trusted Tara, and the cards were an extension of her. Hesitantly, Cassie took his hand and swung into the boat. The cooler came in after her, and the Kahuna brought up the rear. The Cowboy finished unmooring the boat, while the Kahuna headed to the cabin. “C’mon. I’ll show you round the good ship Starry Night.”

  The boat’s interior was actually much nicer than it looked on the outside. Below deck was a living area with a bar and a bedroom and bathroom, while upstairs was the main control room. The décor—wood paneling and maize-colored shag carpet, a couple of curling travel agency posters of beaches with palm trees—hadn’t been updated since the 1970s. Cassie set her backpack down and unzipped it. Oscar squirmed out of the sack and zipped behind the bar.

  “It’s like a houseboat,” Cassie said.

  “Yeah. Steve lives here most of the year, until it gets cold. I think he’s taken it as far south as Mexico. It’s his retirement plan, heading to the Yucatan.”

  “Stars are real pretty out there,” the Cowboy offered. He stationed himself at the wheel, cranked the engine, and began to back the boat out of the slip.

  “You guys keep surprising me,” Cassie said.

  “You like to fish?” the Kahuna asked. He opened the cooler, which Cassie had assumed was full of beer. Instead, it was full of ice, sodas, and white plastic containers. The Kahuna ripped the top off one of the cartons. “Mmmm. Nightcrawlers.”

  Cassie peered in at the seething mass of dirt and wrinkled her nose. “Um. I’ve never been fishing.”

  “We’ll teach you. C’mon, this is the best time of day for it.” The Kahuna clomped to the deck. He paused to grasp the binoculars dangling around his neck, scanned the receding marina as the Starry Night tooled out of the harbor and into the river. By Cassie’s eye, they were heading south and east on the Potomac, toward the Chesapeake Bay. The Kahuna seemed to be checking to make sure they weren’t being followed, but Cassie didn’t ask.

  The Kahuna spent the next couple of hours teaching Cassie how to operate a fishing pole, choose lures, and attach bait to the hook. Cassie had a hard time learning how to cast, but the Kahuna was a patient teacher. His only warning was to remember to look behind her before she cast, because he’d accidentally hooked the Cowboy’s lip one time while inebriated. The Cowboy had not been pleased.

  Determined not to repeat the mistake, Cassie practiced casting until her arm ached and she could pretty much put the bobber where she wanted to in the water. It was a peaceful thing, she thought, feeling the sun hot against her skin and the motion of the waves lapping against the boat. Morning sun glistened on the waves, and it seemed like there was nothing on Earth but the water and blue sky.

  She clumsily jammed a squirming segment of worm on her hook and cast the line out. The Cowboy had set anchor, and was busy feeding Maggie and Oscar bits of lunch meat from the mini-fridge under the bar. Cassie closed her eyes and felt the warm breeze skimming across her face. For the first time in days, she was beginning to feel like herself again.

  But that illusion was shattered when the Kahuna spoke: “Why is your crazy aunt chasing you?”

  Cassie’s grip on the pole tightened, and she reeled the line in. She cast it out twice more before answering. “I did something pretty awful,” she said. “I didn’t intend to, but things went pretty wrong.”

  The Kahuna nodded. He didn’t look at her. He just waited, watching his line.

  “My crazy aunt wanted to toughen me up. She hired some guy to break into the house, to see what I would do. Problem was, I had a gun handy.”

  The Kahuna nodded again. He reeled his line back in and cast it out. “Mind if I tell you a story?”

  Cassie blew her breath out, relieved that he was no longer focusing on her. “Sure.”

  “First time I killed somebody was on my first assignment as a Marshal.” He said it as if he was talking about going to the store to pick up some milk. “I was supposed to be picking up a prisoner, Gordy Cohen. Sixty-five-year-old man with fake teeth. He lived out in the boonies, had been cooking up PCP for fun and profit for years. DEA had nailed him on federal racketeering charges.
He served time, got out, and violated the terms of his parole. They wanted him brought back in to prove a point.

  “So, I knocked on his door to serve his papers. He seemed like a perfectly harmless, if crazy, old motherfucker. I felt kinda sorry for him. His wife and kids were back in the kitchen, scared of me. I didn’t want to scare ’em any further, so I was trying to play things nice. Gordy asked if he could get his coat and shoes, since it was cold out.

  “I told him yes. That was my first mistake. Gordy disappears into the back of the house. I wait for him a good couple of minutes, yelled for him. No answer. Then I know I’ve been had.” The Kahuna paused to lick his lips. “I radioed for backup, charged through the kitchen at the back of the house to the garage. I figured he was getting his car ready to make an escape.

  “But Gordy wasn’t keeping his car in his garage. He had his shiny new PCP lab in there. I remember seeing glass and tubes, knew instantly what it was. But I didn’t know that Gordy had booby-trapped his lab. Soon as I opened that door, it blew up like a bomb.”

  The Kahuna scratched his beard. In the sunlight, Cassie could see pink scars underneath it. “I was lucky, though I would’ve sworn I was the unluckiest bastard who ever walked the face of the Earth for quite some time after. The explosion knocked me through the kitchen, out through a window. But the blast killed Gordy, his wife, and one of his kids. The other two were crispy critters.”

  Cassie closed her eyes. “Steve, I’m sorry.”

  “I thought about quitting after that.” The Kahuna’s gaze was distant, unfocused in memory. “But then I thought: if I quit, I’d never have the chance to make a positive change in the world. I would just have gone back to selling entertainment centers at my parents’ furniture store. I could do that every day for the rest of my life, or I could choose to keep on the path, to make a dent in the world, despite the obstacles. Took me years to get over it, though, to realize that things had to happen the way that they did. If it hadn’t been me, it would’ve been someone else who made a mistake. I really had no choice in it.”