But that was the life of a mage for you. The fact that I had Chase in my corner felt like more than I could ever ask for at times. It wasn’t the same as having a friend who fully understood what it meant to wield power on a daily basis, but at least I didn’t have to hide it from him. Lying to everyone around me has been a survival instinct for as long as I can remember. There was still so much I kept hidden even from Chase. If he knew some of the things I’d done in my past, I doubted he’d ever look at me the same way again.
So don’t let him find out, I told myself as I rounded the corner. The address Chase had given me was still two blocks away, so I gave myself two more blocks to wax philosophical on how much easier life was for normal people. Oh, I knew that most people were just as fucked up in their own ways, but a girl needs to allow herself certain delusions now and then.
Sometimes it’s the only way to make sense of the fact that your job description has grown to involve killing shadowy assassins and working in opposition to the direct orders of a dragon.
Chapter Eighteen
By the time I arrived at the address Chase had sent me, I’d squared away unnecessary thoughts and was mostly back on task. Since the bottom floor of the building was a Burger King, I doubted there was much risk of being spotted if I walked past the front door. There were no obvious wards visible when I scanned the area with my mage sight, but that didn’t rule out digital security like the tiny dome camera mounted just beneath a second floor window.
Luckily, there was a five level parking garage just across the street. I had to go around the block to find the entrance, but thanks to an entirely automated ticketing service, there was no attendant at the now unused payment kiosk to take note when I slipped inside. The bottom level was dark from a lack of windows, the dim overhead lighting making it difficult to find the stairwell. After a minute of searching, I found the bright green door and yanked it open only to be greeted by the smell of stale urine layered over a multitude of odors I didn’t care to identify. Deciding to take the long route instead, I backtracked and wound my way up the spiraling ramps until I was on the third floor.
The garage was packed. Most of the vehicles looked like they belonged to local office workers, so I guessed there wouldn’t be a lot of traffic mid-morning. One lone security camera sat mounted on the wall above each floor’s payment machine, the dirty lenses indicating they were more for show than anything else. It wasn’t the perfect place for a stakeout, but the view it afforded me of the offices above the Burger King across the street was too good to pass up.
Using a large white utility van as cover, I leaned my elbows on the concrete ledge and surveyed the scene. From this angle, I could see almost all the way back to the open-concept layout. Not that there was much to see. Even with the lights off, enough daylight streamed in through the large windows for me to see that the office was little more than an empty room with a large oval conference table in the middle. Generic office chairs bordered the table, but no other furniture was visible on the outskirts of the room. No desks, no computers, no printer or fax machine. There wasn’t a single piece of electronic equipment other than the intermittently flashing red light from a motion sensor mounted above the main entrance.
I dialed Chase and told him what I was looking at.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “The last GPS point I have is right in the middle of that building. The elevation data even points to a second floor location. Whoever had that phone was in that office up until thirty-four minutes ago when I lost the connection.”
“Anything you can tell me about who owns the building?”
“I’m pulling up city records right now.” There was a soft thunk on the other end of the line when Chase set the phone down on the table next to him. The clicking of his keys became louder, and his voice sounded echoey and far away after he put me on speakerphone. “Looks like it’s owned by some company called Enterprise Solutions Incorporated.”
“That’s a shell company if I’ve ever heard one.”
“Safe bet,” he replied. “There’s about as much info on the company as there is on Montgomery. Bland corporate website that doesn’t actually say anything about what they do. No contact info. They’re listed as leaseholder or owner of a quite a few properties around town. Nothing outwardly suspicious, but I can start running down the list to see if anything jumps out at me. Could take a while.”
I sat on the van’s bumper and put my feet up against the low cement wall.
“I’ve got nothing but time,” I said. “This is our best lead right now, so I’m going to hang out a while to see if anyone shows up.”
“Cool. I’ll message you if I find anything useful.”
I hung up and tried to find a comfortable position that let me keep an eye on the office. Thankfully, the driver of the van had backed in just far enough that I could fold one leg under my self to sit on my heel and get enough height to see over the edge. I cradled my arms on the ledge, and rested my chin on my wrist. It wasn’t the most comfortable I’d ever been on a stakeout, but it beat out spending an entire night perched in the branches of a tree while trying to catch whoever had been terrorizing homeowners in a new subdivision. What had begun as an attempt to get a few photos of the neighborhood kids I suspected, had ended with me trapped in the highest branches while a band of angry gnomes made me the central focus of their ire. Never mind that I’d had nothing to do with building a whole neighborhood on top of their summer festival grounds. Those little bastards had been out for revenge. It was only by promising to convince local residents to deliver two pigs and five chickens as compensation that I’d managed to escape.
By comparison, this was a regular picnic. The parking garage was pleasantly cool. The sun was high enough overhead to cast the front of the building in shadow, making it that much more difficult for a casual observer to see me sitting there. And I had any number of food options within a two block radius if I wanted to run down to get something to eat.
The only thing I was missing was a bathroom.
Between the coffee I’d had at the house before leaving, and the coffee I’d had during my meeting with Karyn, my bladder was decidedly less than happy. I jiggled my foot to distract myself, sat as upright as possible to avoid unnecessary pressure on my abdomen, and tried to think about anything but having to pee.
Of course, that just made the situation even worse.
“It’s not like I’ll be the first person to piss in the stairwell,” I muttered to myself as I abandoned my station.
The stairwell on this level wasn’t as bad as the bottom floor, but it was still nasty enough to make me cover my nose with my hand. I tiptoed over an unidentifiable wet spot that covered most of the landing, trying not to think about what kind of nastiness was already on the bottom of my shoes. The urgency of the situation overrode any further misgivings I had about using a stairwell as a toilet. I unbuttoned my shorts and had them halfway down my thighs when the bang of a door opening scared me so badly I almost lost control and soaked myself.
I pulled my shorts back up, not wasting time re-zipping and buttoning them. Peering over the edge of the railing, I saw a man making his way up from the bottom floor. For all I knew, he was only going to the second floor. I wasn’t going to stick around to find out though.
Going back out into the garage meant giving up my opportunity to pee, so I headed further up the stairwell. My moment of panic had given me temporary reprieve from the insistent signals my bladder was firing at my brain. Now that the shock of nearly being interrupted mid-stream had subsided, I knew I had to find a place to relieve myself. Since the top of the stairwell was even worse than the bottom, littered with old blankets and the clear blue saline packets that were a surefire sign that someone had recently used this as an injection site, I pushed open the door that led to the roof.
Only a handful of cars were parked on this topmost level, and the stairwell exit formed something of a concrete hut with a space behind it that was out of sigh
t of the rest of the parking spaces. I scrambled into the gap, dropped my shorts, and squatted to do my business. A trickle of pee raced towards my shoe, and I had to crab-shuffle awkwardly to find a better angle.
That taken care of, I straightened up and refastened my shorts as I sidled out of the makeshift toilet stall. There was a nice cool breeze up there, and I walked along the edge of the barrier, thinking it might be better to find another way down to my third floor perch rather than retracing my route through the stairwell. In no rush to get back to staring at an empty office, I peered down over the edge when I was in line with the building, hoping to catch a glimpse of the back alley to see if maybe I could sneak inside via a fire escape or neighboring building.
Instead, I looked down just in time to see two women and three men walk up to the office’s street level entrance. They each carried coffee cups from the bakery down the street. One of the guys had a pastry box in his hands. Another carried a large white paper bag like the kind a bakery might use to pack up bagels or donuts. The woman in the lead swiped a key card across the sensor next to the door, and they all filed inside as casually as a group of coworkers returning from a lunch run.
From this vantage point, I couldn’t see anything but a few feet of hardwood floor just inside the office window, so I jogged back down the parking structure ramp to get back to my spot by the van. Once there, I stood as far back from the edge as possible to keep from being spotted. I watched them open the box and paper bag, each reaching in to take their pick of pastries and muffins. Everyone settled into seats around the middle of the table, chatting and laughing animatedly while consuming their mid-morning snack.
With nothing better to do, I messaged Chase an update then leaned around the side of the van to make sure I was still alone. The last thing I needed was for the driver to come back and notice me leaning against his vehicle. As an afterthought, I spent ten minutes weaving a small magical tripwire of sorts across the only access point from the stairwell or the ramp. The thin thread of magic hung at shin height and was attached to a car on the other side of the lot from my spot at the window. I’d tried to work it so that only a human passing through the thread would set it the car’s alarm as a warning for me to get out of there, but that had proven too complicated. I just had to hope no one drove by in the next little while.
Back in the office, nothing much exciting had happened. The occupants seemed to have finished with snack time and were in the process of cleaning up. I watched them putter around the table, collecting napkins and crumpled muffin wrappers. They didn’t seem to be in any rush to get back to whatever it was they’d gathered to do, and I found myself checking the time on my phone every couple of minutes wondering if anything useful was going to happen.
After the table had been fully cleared, one of the women bent down and slid a large black duffel bag out from beneath the table. With obvious strain, she hefted the bag up onto the table top. She said something to the others that seemed to kick them into gear, and they all followed suit by retrieving their own duffels. Spread out so they each had room to unpack, they unzipped the bags and began removing the contents with military precision and efficiency. Each of the bags contained a set of black fatigues, combat boots, a semi-automatic handgun, several magazines, and a wide assortment of specialized gear a crew might have if they were planning a mid-night heist of, say, a warehouse full of valuable electronics.
Unlike Trey’s crew, these five were trained professionals. They stripped down to their underwear without an ounce of self-consciousness, quickly changing into their new clothing. Once dressed, they affixed lightweight face masks that could be pulled up over the nose to effectively conceal their identities. Once each of them had adjusted the straps on their masks and pulled them back down to hang beneath their chins, they set about outfitting themselves with everything from coiled black ropes to what looked suspiciously like tiny bricks of plastic explosives.
Once fully outfitted, they engaged in a series of partner checks to ensure that every strap was tucked away and that nothing they might require had been left behind. A weapons check followed that, and then to confuse matters, they all began stripping out of the gear they’d spent the last twenty minutes putting on.
I watched as they undressed and returned everything to the duffels. Once they were back in their street clothes, they shouldered the bags and filed out of the office.
“Shit,” I muttered to myself.
I considered running down to street level to intercept them, but there was no way I’d make it in time. Instead, I stayed where I was, watching the front entrance to mark which direction they went before attempting to chase after them. The crew appeared a few seconds later. My heart sank when I saw them pull open the doors to a sleek black utility van parked in the neighboring alley. I was just about to run for the stairwell when I realized they weren’t preparing to leave just yet. One of them hopped up into the back of the van to stow the bags beneath benches that had been built into the van’s cargo area. Once the van was loaded, they all returned to the second floor office.
Now that the bags were gone, I could see that one of them had left a ruggedized notebook computer on the table. The woman with the key card flipped the laptop open while one of the guys went to turn off the lights. I could just make out a beam of light from an out of sight overhead projector, but try as I might, I couldn’t see what was on her screen or on the larger version being projected onto the side wall of the office.
Abandoning my post, I unwound the tripwire spell and went down to the second floor. From this angle, I couldn’t make out anything below the shoulders of the team sitting around the conference table, nor could I see the projection any better. It was a safe bet they were going over plans for a break-in of some sort, but unless I could get into that building with them, there wasn’t any way I was going to learn about it unless I waited and followed them.
It was nearly lunch time by this point, so I retreated to the street and snagged a stool in the window of a greasy pizza joint a half block away. There didn’t seem to be any way in or out of the office aside from the door I’d watched them use already. I didn’t get the impression they’d be putting the gear in those duffel bags to use until well after darkness had fallen, so I ordered three slices of Hawaiian and settled in for what would likely be a long afternoon.
Chapter Nineteen
“Where do you even buy GPS tracking beacons?” I asked Chase when he slid back into the car.
He’d just finished placing one of the devices under the rear bumper of the black utility van. Not for the first time, I was caught off guard by how smoothly a guy as hefty as Chase could do something as awkward as placing a tracker at shin height on a crowded street without being noticed. His movements were so fluid and natural there was no doubting this wasn’t the first time he’d done it.
“You can get them from any of those goofy looking Spy Shops around town, but they’re way cheaper online,” he explained as he activated the tracking screen he’d mounted to his dash. “All this stuff is totally legal. And the gear that’s not exactly legal is just as easy to buy. Speaking of which, thanks for the binoculars. These are way better than my old ones.”
Figuring we’d need them later that night, I’d told Chase to fetch them from my closet. Better to put them to good use now than to let them sit hidden until I could forget to give them to Chase on his birthday.
“You deserve better, bud.” I told him. “I’m just never sure what to get you.”
Chase reached out and took my hand in his, staring directly into my eyes. Then, with utmost sincerity, and in the most saccharine tone imaginable said, “Your friendship is the only gift I ever need, Alex.”
“Weirdo.” I laughed as I flung his hand off. “Now you’re never getting another gift ever again.”
Chase put the binoculars up to his eyes and pointed them at me.
“What kind of face wash do you use?” he asked. “Your pores are flawless.”
Still laughing, I
reached out and nudged the binoculars so they pointed down the street and towards the building where the crew still sat going over their plans. Nothing exciting had happened all day. No one had come or gone aside from a few hours earlier when a delivery guy had dropped off several bags of food they must have ordered.
“Mind if I put on a podcast?” Chase asked, already plugging his phone into the stereo’s auxiliary cable.
The smooth voice of an NPR host wanna-be filled the car. Chase had put on an episode he’d already begun, and I couldn’t figure out exactly what it was we were listening to. The host jumped around from Sasquatch, to ancient Egyptian curses, to present-day government conspiracies, never making it quite clear whether the theories he covered were being presented as fact or fiction. After trying to follow an anecdote about the how the CIA had developed something called a heart attack gun that fired tiny ice pellets which had been brushed with a deadly shellfish toxin, I wandered off into my own thoughts about how hard it would be to keep ice bullets from melting before they could be used.
If anything, I mused as I stared out into the darkness, that gun sounded like a coverup for someone using magic to induce cardiac arrest. I had no idea whether or not the CIA knew magic was real, but if they did, I didn’t doubt for a second they had a few magic users working in the shadows alongside them.
“We’ve got movement,” Chase said, startling me from my thoughts some time later.
I checked the time and saw that it was twenty to eleven. Either they were calling it quits for the night, or it was go time.
Black Market (Black Records Book 2) Page 17
