Phoebe Harkness Omnibus

by James Fahy

“Stop!” I yelled. I don’t know why. Not once in the history of people being chased has anyone ever stopped when commanded. Fuck. My vision swam alarmingly, and I fell against the wall, steadying myself with my hand.

  “He’ll be fine in a few hours,” the man called back without looking. “Even I’m not stupid enough to kill a Scott in this town. Not without proof, that is.”

  “There’s nowhere to go,” I yelled back, still following him along the corridor. He had reached the elevator doors. “That only goes back up to the Lens. Who are you?”

  “You can call me Chase, if you must. Chase Pargate. It’s better than Jonathan or Baverstock any day.” He winked at me over his shoulder. “Oh and I’m not going up, Doctor.” Producing a slim bar from his jacket, he wedged it in the doors and prised them open, the darkness of the lift shaft before him, and a thirty five floor drop beneath.

  Wedging the metal bar between the doors, he fished deftly again in his jacket and pulled out a thin wire, which he clipped to its centre. The other end he looped into his belt with a casual air of much practise.

  “Maybe you should have given me that interview,” he said lightly. “I knew I was right about you and him though. Try to stay alive will you?”

  “You’re the car-bomber, aren’t you?” I shouted. “What have you taken?!” It was hard to run in these heels but I was giving it a damn good try.

  He gave me a withering, disappointed look over his shoulder. “Don’t be dense, sweetheart,” he said as he tugged experimentally on his makeshift harness. “You have literally no idea who is trying to kill you. Trouble is, you don’t stay quiet. I was almost killed too. And that would have been a great shame.”

  I stared, shocked, realising that this man had been there when the bomb went off. Hidden under a wool cap, a red parka and thick glasses. It was the reporter who had harassed me.

  “Wait!” I grabbed for him as he leapt, suicidal, into the open lift shaft. My fingers caught the front of his shirt and buttons popped as the fabric tore. I grabbed the side of the door as he tumbled off the edge into darkness, almost falling in myself. As he zip-wired away, blonde hair whipping about his still-smiling face, his shirt billowed, exposing his collarbone. There, no bigger than my thumbnail, was an intricate tattoo.

  I had seen similar ones before. Cloves had one. So did Coldwater. It was a Cabal mark.

  As I watched him disappear into the black lift shaft, darkness crept in at the corners of my own vision. He had hit me harder than I’d thought. My legs suddenly felt a million miles away, and my last thought was to tell myself to fall backwards onto the carpet, not forwards. I was fairly certain Chase Pargate would not have caught me.

  15.

  Regaining consciousness is always disorienting for me. It’s bad enough when I’m waking up normally after a night at home, bleary eyed and yawning.

  Coming around, only to find myself on a gurney in a bright white medical room, with Veronica Cloves looming over me like the angel of death, was frankly alarming. The effect was even more unnerving as she was wearing what looked like very fashionable tailored soft-green surgical scrubs. She glared down at me with what I can only describe as murderous concern.

  “She’s awake,” Cloves snapped at someone over her shoulder. I tried to sit up, which was a bad idea. My head spun like a hyper goldfish and my arms were as useful as wet spaghetti.

  “Where am I?” I asked, with a woolly, dry mouth. I felt terrible. “Where’s Oscar?”

  Cloves peered back down at me with her arms folded. She was wearing elbow-length black PVC gloves over her fashion-scrubs. I had to be hallucinating. “You’re back in Kansas, Dorothy,” she said. “Blue Lab specifically. And no longer raving like a madwoman, thank God. At least that’s something…Jesus.”

  Raving like a madwoman?

  Griff appeared in my field of vision, looking concerned as he leaned over me. He shone a pen light into each of my eyes, sending blinding stabs of agony into my brain, which I bore by stoically whimpering. “Good to have to back with us, Doc,” he said quietly, his face composed in a sad smile.

  Cloves pushed him aside, flapping him away like a bothersome fly. “Whatever it was you shot her up with seems to have calmed her down at least.” She peered at me closely. Her eyeshadow was the exact shade of green as her scrubs. She looked, as usual, as though she were only containing rage through extreme self-control. “Is this your idea of a subtle diplomatic investigation?” she spat. “Do you want to hear tomorrow’s headlines?” She stood up straight before I could reply. “‘Deadly doctor seduces young billionaire’? ‘Cabal in private-suite-scandal at party heist’?”

  “Oh…Fuck,” I said quietly, rubbing my eyes with the heels of my hands. It flooded back to me. Oscar, the abseiling thief, the gun-butt to the head. That wouldn’t account for me feeling this groggy though. If I understood Cloves correctly, Griff had needed to sedate me with something. I could still feel it rolling sluggishly through my system.

  “At least, that’s what the headlines would say, given half the bloody chance,” Cloves sniped. “Luckily for you, I have very good ties with the media, Harkness, or this could be a big bloody mess. Once again, I find myself pulling your ass out of the fire.”

  I wasn’t overly concerned. Cloves didn’t have ‘ties’ with the media, she had them in a merciless headlock. “I can, and I have, leaned on this scandal, and leaned on it heavily,” she told me. “There won’t be anything in the papers tomorrow. Except the usual hoo-hah about the power shortage and whatever anti-GO gibbering the press can think up. Nothing about your little adventures.” She huffed air down her nose. “But seriously, Harkness, I’m getting tired of suppressing every bloody incident you are involved in. First the car-bomb and then the deaths at the University. The last thing Cabal needs right now is more bad press. Coldwater is already keeping a very close eye on our every move. We don’t want her thinking we’re not up to the task. Trust me, you don’t realise how much heat I protect you from.”

  I had no illusions about whom Veronica Cloves was interested in protecting. She was my supervisor. My mistakes were her mistakes, as far as the high-ups were concerned. I’ve never met a woman with a more finely-honed sense of self-preservation.

  She seemed, for a moment, to have run out of vehement steam. She sat down on the edge of the gurney, rubbing lightly at the bridge of her nose, her fingers squeaking in her PVC gloves. “Now that you’re awake, if you don’t mind terribly enlightening me. What the holy flaming fuck happened in there? Why on earth did you attack the security guards?”

  I was at this point beyond confused. “Attack…?” I forced myself up into a sitting position, glancing around groggily. Through the glass wall of this white bright room, usually reserved for clinical dissection I noted unhappily, I could see Lucy tapping away busily at a datascreen. She was still dressed in her green and black flapper gown from the party. It didn’t help dispel the surreality.

  If she was still in her party clothes, then it followed that it couldn’t have been that long since I passed out in Oscar Scott’s private corridors. The same evening, I thought. At least I hadn’t been out for the count too long. “What precisely do you mean, raving like a madwoman?” I asked, with a small, dry cough, rolling bloodshot eyes between Griff and Cloves.

  Griff leaned forward and steadied me, using the gesture of medical concern to form a wall between me and my furious supervisor, and taking the opportunity to give me a pointed and significant look that she couldn’t see.

  “You and Oscar were both hit with blow-darts,” he said to me. “You probably don’t remember much. Short term memory loss is not unusual, so don’t worry.”

  I hadn’t been shot with any blow dart. I knew that, and I could see from Griff’s expression that he knew it too. It was clear however, that this was the line we were feeding to Cloves.

  “We’re not certain precisely what was in them, but you had a…very bad reaction…Doc. When the security guards found you at the party, out cold on the floor in O
scar’s love nest, you were…well, let’s just say you were not yourself. They managed to bring you round, but you were confused, and by all accounts, more than a little…violent.” He gave me an apologetic half-smile.

  “Luckily, your little moll sidekick through there had my direct number,” Cloves said, flicking a hand in Lucy’s direction. “And very strict instructions to call me straight away if anything went tits up.” She looked at me witheringly. “Call it a hunch, but I’ve yet to see you attend a social gathering where it didn’t.” She glanced out of the room through the glass wall at Lucy briefly. “It would perhaps have been more useful if she hadn’t been quite so tipsy when calling me. I think she drank about five bottles of Marlin Scott’s good champagne.” She shook her head in disbelief. “Honestly, you people.”

  She looked back to me, cracking her knuckles in her lap in a fidgeting manner.

  “Other than you, Harkness, I had four Cabal agents at that party. Ghosts, an extraction team, just in case.” Of course she had. Cloves covers all bases. “Even so, you have no idea the lengths I still had to go to in order to spirit you out of that place. Getting in and out of Scott Towers is no simple matter when you’re trying to avoid causing a scene. It didn’t help that you tried to attack anyone and everyone who helped.”

  I looked from her to Griff, frowning. I hadn’t been hit with any blow-dart. The thief had just hit me with the butt of his gun. My head was finally beginning to clear properly.

  “We had to strap you down initially when we got you back here,” Griff said. “For your own protection. And ours, sorry. I managed to isolate the substance, my guess is some kind of psychotropic hallucinogen, and gave you an antidote.” He indicated my arm, and I noticed for the first time that I was hooked up to an IV. “I had to give you a pretty big dose, Doc. Sorry.”

  I suddenly understood completely. I had passed out in the corridor at Scott Towers. God knows how long I’d been out cold, lay there in all my collapsed finery on that expensive carpeting, before someone found us, but however long it had been, clearly, I’d missed my meds.

  Not injecting Epsilon at my self-prescribed time, I’d begun to…well to devolve. The Pale virus rearing up inside me like a demon.

  I swallowed hard, feeling sick at the thought. Good God, I must have been feral by the time they found me.

  Griff had clearly realised what had happened when they brought me in. He was no idiot, and as my confidante, he would have known what needed to be done. I had no doubt that the fluid I was hooked up to right now was not a psychotropic antidote but my own Pale-virus-suppressing Epsilon. Clearly he hadn’t told Cloves that. He’d covered for me.

  Thank God for this man. I squeezed his hand, hoping he’d understand my silent gratitude. I wasn’t used to anyone having my back. I would repay him later, when Cloves wasn’t here breathing down our necks. He gave me a small smile, and a nod of understanding. “You need to get some rest,” he said, pushing his glasses up onto the bridge of his nose with his forefinger.

  “To hell with that!” Cloves spat. “You’re awake, and no longer foaming at the mouth. That’s good enough for me. I want to know what the hell went on. Right this second, or I swear to God I will offer you up to Coldwater myself with a goddamn apple in your mouth. You might be her star-pupil diplomat to the GO world right now, Harkness, but I will hang you out to dry if I need to. What happened?”

  I glared at her. I was hurting and groggy, and had zero tolerance for her bluster right this second.

  “First, you tell me something,” I snapped. “Who, in the actual hell, is Chase Pargate?”

  I’d never seen Cloves speechless before. I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but from her confused, wide-eyed stare, she looked like she’d seen a ghost. Griff fiddled with my IV cables a little, stealing furtive looks as Cloves. He was clearly equally surprised by her sudden ashen face.

  She recovered quickly, or attempted to. One hand smoothing the front of her dress absently.

  “What…the hell are you talking about?” Her hand flicked absently to her jet choker. “Where on earth did you hear that name?”

  “Chase Pargate,” I repeated slowly, through gritted teeth. “Or at least that’s what he called himself. Although to be honest, I seem to have met him in three or four different guises recently.” I glared at Cloves. “He’s the guy who robbed Oscar, the charming son of a bitch who attacked us both tonight. Now, who is he?”

  Cloves shook her head decisively. “Impossible,” she said. “Pargate is dead. He’s been dead for ten years.”

  I admit I was a little surprised to hear that he was a real person.

  “Dead ten years, you say?” I mused. “Well, let me tell you, Veronica, he seemed pretty sodding lively when he was leaping down a lift shaft earlier, making off with whatever the hell information he took from Oscar’s datascreen. And Oscar and I got coshed in the process.”

  She was staring at me. Her red lips very tight. “He’s Cabal,” I said blankly, challenging her to deny it. I stared Cloves down for several seconds. “I saw his mark, Cloves. I want to know what the hell is going on here. I’m sick of being kept in the dark all the time.”

  “Chase Pargate is dead,” Cloves repeated firmly. “Ancient history, Harkness. I should know. I shot him myself. There’s no way he could be the person who assaulted you and Scott tonight.”

  “Cabal killing their own?” I said. Part of me wishes I was more surprised.

  “Ex-Cabal,” Cloves stressed, standing from the bed and folding her arms. She glared at Griff pointedly. Clearly she didn’t think he ranked highly enough to be privy to whatever she was disclosing, but Griff ignored her hints completely. She sighed. “Servant Pargate went rogue years ago. He was…unhinged. It took a while for the extent of his neuroses to develop and surface. A lot of people who lived through the Pale Wars suffered PTSD to one degree or another. Pargate thought there were enemies in the ranks. By the end, he didn’t trust anyone, GOs, humans, even his Cabal counterparts. He took up moonlighting as a hired killer. Styled himself a ‘hunter’, a ‘GO assassin’. He was one of our best once, but he couldn’t be trusted.” She swallowed, looking uncomfortable. “End of story. Whoever this thief of yours was, it wasn’t him. Now…” She narrowed her eyes, glowering at me. “…I want to know exactly what happened tonight, Harkness. Everything, right down to which goddamn canapés you ate, got it?”

  Sighing, I fell back on my pillow and relented, giving Cloves my full report. I explained about the party, Marlin Scott’s physical absence, and his rather energetic light show. Most importantly, I told her how my cunning plan to glean info from Oscar’s DataStream was scuppered by this apparently dead, ex-Cabal agent.

  “You say the guy, Pargate, is dead, this ex-Cabal psycho. I don’t know who he is,” I said. “But I can tell you this. He was there at the car-bombing posing as that reporter, and apparently he also worked his way into Oscar’s inner circle, pretending to be a Helsing, presumably to get access to the party. Oscar says he met him a few weeks back, so he’s been planning this for a while.” I had to hand it to him, the guy was good at what he did. “He’s been busy, our mystery thief.” I pictured his open, smiling face. “You say you shot him ten years ago,” I said to Cloves. “By my reckoning he would have been around fifteen years old then. I didn’t know Cabal recruited so young.”

  “Pargate was my age when he died,” Cloves insisted with a frown.

  That made even less sense.

  “Well then, he’s had some mighty fine cosmetic work done,” I said with raised eyebrows. “Because the guy I’m talking about couldn’t have been more than twenty five.”

  “Then it’s not him,” she said simply, seeming oddly relieved. “That settles it. This idiot has given you so many fake names and identities so far, what’s one more thrown in the mix? He may have picked up Pargate’s name from some Cabal file somewhere and decided he liked the ring of it. Whoever this joker is, he’s trying to confuse us, throw us off his scent. Anyone can get a tatto
o. It proves nothing.” She nodded grimly to herself, back in business. “We need to know what he was after, and what it was he took. My people are talking to Scott’s, but the old coot has closed ranks. It’s bad enough that his only son was attacked…again. God knows how we’re going to get any information now. We’d have more chance of prising open his as…..”

  “Water, please!” Griff was busy disconnecting my IV. “You’re good to go, Doc,” he said, handing me a glass. “But you might want to make sure you stay on your meds from now on.” He gave me a pointed look over the top of his glasses. I considered my wrists well and truly slapped. Silly me, getting coshed between my pills. Careless rookie mistake.

  “I need to speak to Oscar,” I said.

  “That’s not going to happen any time soon.” Cloves snorted down her nose. “Golden balls has been cooped up in his ivory tower. I don’t think dear old daddy is ever going to let his precious son see light of day again. He’s in private medical care, beyond even my reach. Trust me, I’ve spent years working my way into Marlin Scott’s confidence. It’s always useful to be on good terms with powerful people, but recently he’s become even more secretive than ever. Besides,” She raised her eyebrows at me. “Do you honestly think Oscar is going to want to see you, considering every time the two of you are together he gets either tranqued or tasered?” She flapped her arms frustratedly. “You’re hardly his lucky charm, Harkness. What would it be on the third date I wonder, tear gas to the face?”

  “What Doctor Harkness needs right now is to rest, Servant Cloves,” Griff said sternly. I was quietly impressed at his standing up to her.

  “Tosh,” she replied dispassionately. “In other news, our faceless corpse? Your lackeys have identified the virus it’s carrying, after a fashion.”

  With everything else going on, I had forgotten about out mystery guest. It said a lot about your lifestyle when something that weird could slip your mind. It had been a busy couple of days though.