Siren (Awakened Chronicles Book 1)

by Harley Austin

  She nodded but said nothing.

  “Mac, you’re needed on the bridge.”

  “Aye, Captain.” The XO left the cell.

  “Leave us,” Roberts order his guards. They left closing the door.

  “Very little happens on this boat that I don’t know all about, Miss Evenson. It’s a neat trick the way you’re enticing all of my men—keeping them on edge, frustrated.”

  “I can’t help who I am, Captain. The gods are attractive. It’s why we’ve kept our distance from Humanity.”

  “Rein it in then.”

  “I can’t be what I’m not!” she glared. “You brought a real-life goddess onboard your ship. You’re holding her prisoner. I’m not responsible for your Karma. Sorry.”

  “Maybe not. But if this continues, and I can’t control my men, trust me; I’ll put an end to both him and you.”

  “What do you want me to do? I am what I am.”

  “That include your dreamy interludes with my first officer?”

  She folded her arms. A scowl moved over her full lips.

  “I’ve known Mac since we were kids, Evenson. Served three tours of duty in godforsaken hellholes you couldn’t begin to imagine. Whatever you’re doing to him, it’s done. I won’t let you use him. I’ll toss you over the side as so much fish food. Do I make myself clear?”

  She just frowned at him.

  “Good.”

  She watched him leave. She could still feel Mac above decks. Roberts was onto her. Dammit. She’d have to be a lot more careful now. She was playing with fire. Her plan was working, but the powder keg’s fuse was still well away from where she needed it to be. Still, she had time; maybe she just needed to be a bit more subtle in her wiles.

  24

  3 3rd Thomas Street was the site of the building Liam had visited the day before. Built by AT&T in the mid 1970’s to house the company’s telephone switching equipment for its Long Lines Department, it was a windowless, secure, self-sustaining structure with its own water, power and natural gas utilities. The lead-lined structure was said to be nuclear resistant. Its floors were also unusually strong, designed to hold loads of up to three hundred pounds per square foot all the way to the top of its 550-foot height.

  “Holy shit—” Liam breathed reading about the structure in the public library’s online archives now.

  After the breakup of the company in the mid-1980’s, the building became the property of AT&T Communications. But the company gradually migrated the old, outdated switching equipment to other newer facilities downtown, and by the turn of the millennium, there wasn’t much the building was being used for outside of some highly secure datacenter tenants.

  Speculation also ran rampant that the building was the hub of the NSA’s mass-surveillance satellite intelligence systems due to its close proximity to the FBI’s offices downtown.

  “Well—” Liam scanned the articles, reading them in mere moments as he scrolled them quickly across the monitor. He’d not felt that many people in the building, at least not many for a building of its size.

  He didn’t know about the NSA. He’d have to be careful. That was a can a worms he didn’t really want opened.

  * * * * *

  “So what’s wrong with the cameras?” The young twenty-something man in a tailored Armani suit asked a workman in white overalls at the top of the tall ladder.

  “What do I look like, a prophet?” his New York Jewish accent came off as annoyed. “I’ve been up here five minutes.”

  “Alright. It just looks like it’s on to me.”

  “It is on. You got rats?”

  “Right. Not in this building.”

  “You’re in New York. Every building’s got rats.” He began descending his ladder.

  “Camera’s fine. You gotta bad feed.”

  “Five of them; with bad feeds. All at practically the same time—”

  “You got rats. This coax is close to twenty years old. Stuff gets old they start chewin’ on it. The separate lines probably feed into a manifold somewhere. If there’s a problem with the main feed cable they all go out at the same time.”

  “Can you fix it?”

  “Yea, I can fix it. Gotta run some new coax. Couple a days depending on where the break is.” The technician looked at the young man in the suit. He was staring at the floor. The man then looked down the rows of shelves. Where they were standing the aisle was wider for some reason. “What’s the matter?

  “Oh, nothing. It’s just, I thought all of these shelf aisles were uniform. But there’s no back row here,” he nodded down at the floor where the dust was lighter for some reason.

  The tech slapped the thick metal shelf supports with his hand. “These babies are solid as a rock; old union steel. They don’t make shelves like this anymore. Stuff’s probably been here for eons. Old relays and shit.” The tech wiped the dust from the front of one of the heavy boxes to look at what kind of part it was.

  “Don’t—touch those, please.”

  “Yea. Whatever. They used to have computers that ran on shit like this. Weighed tons. They had like 4K of RAM. I saw one of ‘em once, in a Hewlett Packard museum—”

  The man in the suit nodded, still looking at the dustless areas of the floor, following the tech back to the elevator.

  25

  L iam looked out over the harbor from the pier shore of Battery Park. It was dark now. With eyes more detailed than an eagle’s, he could see the ships with their lights still traveling up the harbor to the Hudson and East rivers, the Statue of Liberty shining her torch in the distance. He was suddenly gone from shore of the park and then just as suddenly standing in the tray of the statue’s uplifted torch, the bright light of her golden flame reflecting behind him. He looked out over the dark waters. Roberts’ ship and crew, and his Tori, were out there, somewhere. If he knew where they were right now, he’d send the whole vessel to the bottom of the harbor.

  Despite feeling nervous about Tori, he was also feeling rather pleased with himself over his latest heist. He’d moved more mass last night than he’d ever thought himself capable of doing. He’d forsaken one hoard of cash for another many times its value, and this time it was utterly untraceable. Still, he had a lot of work to do to finish the job. And then there was Tori. He was pretty sure Roberts would never allow them to leave once he had his gold. The easy part was done. Getting her back safe and sound, that just gave the young god all kinds of dread.

  * * * * *

  “I’m telling you, Mr. Baxter, they’re gone.”

  “Eight shelves.” The middle-aged executive looked askance at his young assistant.

  “There’s no back row in section 17. It looks like it was there, maybe a while ago, but now it’s gone.”

  “You’re seeing things.”

  “I’m not bullshitting, John, as God as my witness, that whole back row is missing.”

  “Where did it go?” the executive grinned widely.

  “How the hell should I know?”

  “You know those shelves weigh tons just by themselves. Not even loaded with ingots. There’s twenty-four-seven monitoring. We’ve seen nothing.”

  “You mean we’ve seen nothing since the cameras went on the fritz. That whole section of the room has been dark to us for three days.”

  “And someone moved tons of boxes, including tons of shelving, out the building in three days, with no one seeing them?”

  “Well, that whole section is dark.”

  “We’ve posted a couple of security guards in there now to keep an eye on things.”

  “And what if they start getting curious and opening boxes?”

  “We’re watching them too.”

  “I’ve been on the 4th floor a million times, Mr. Baxter, I would have noticed.”

  The older executive sighed watching his much younger colleague. “Alright, Jeremy. Tomorrow when the tech arrives to hook up the cables, take some pictures; we’ll compare them with our latest video feeds.”

  He nodded.
>
  * * * * *

  “You haven’t visited me in almost a week. What’s wrong?” Mac lay in his darkened stateroom half covered by the black satin sheet of his custom bunk. His rod was already hard, its outline visibly draped by the silky-fine material. He didn’t know how she did it, but he could feel her; they talked with their feelings, often.

  “He knows, Mac.”

  “It’s none of his business what we do. I need you, Tori.”

  “I need you too, Mac. But I can’t get you into trouble with the captain.”

  “I’ll be fine. He bugged my room, but I disabled it. We already had words about it.”

  “He said I was using you. I think he’s jealous of us making love.”

  “He’s been divorced three times. He doesn’t know what love is.”

  “Mac, I want to. But I can’t. I don’t know what he’ll do to me.”

  “Nothing, as long as I’m around.”

  “You have to be careful, Mac.”

  “It’s fine, Tori. Trust me. I’ll protect you.”

  He suddenly felt a warm sandy beach against his back. He was looking up into a clear night sky brightly lit with a full moon above them. God she looked beautiful in the moonlight straddling her thighs over the top of him.

  “I read the book you brought me.”

  “I read it before I gave it to you,” he smiled, moving his hands over her skin. “This beach; it’s just like I imagined in the story.”

  “It is what you imagined. Exactly, as you imagined—” She lowered her lips to his.

  26

  W ell?” Baxter watched Jeremy enter his Reserve Bank office, his nice black backpack slung over his suit shoulder. He still didn’t understand these Millennials and their infatuation with backpacks. In his day everyone used briefcases.

  “It was back.”

  “What was back?”

  “The row of shelves.”

  Baxter chuckled. “Did you take pictures?”

  “Why bother; they were back. Even the tech was scratching his head. He had to move his ladder to get up to the camera, the aisle was a lot narrower.”

  “Eight shelves; were suddenly—back. After being—gone?” He grinned.

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “I’m having a hard time here, Jeremy. Are you sure you were on the right floor?” he chuckled.

  “Well maybe you’ll believe this.” The twenty-something thumped his backpack onto the executive’s desk, unzipped it and brought out one of the old dusty relay boxes. With some effort he set it onto his desk in front of him. “Have a look—”

  Baxter lifted the thick cardstock lid to find a half-filled box—of rocks.

  “Is this some kind of joke?”

  “It’s not a joke, Mr. Baxter. Those eight shelves are back. And every single one of these boxes is filled, just like this one.”

  * * * * *

  “I’m sorry to bother you Mr. President, but—”

  “You’re interrupting my schedule here, Frank.” The President tossed a baseball into the air, his feet up on the desk, and wearing a logo ball cap. It was the bottom of the ninth, and the Mariners was kicking the snot out of the Tigers, which he felt pretty wonderful about that at the moment.

  “We have a problem.” Frank entered the Oval Office, closing the door.

  “I don’t have problems, Frank,” the president tossed the ball into the air. “Problems are your department. Remember?”

  “Sure. But someone’s discovered ‘Exodus’. They’ve robbed us blind—literally.”

  The president dropped his feet onto the floor along with the baseball. He muted the game on the TV. “That’s definitely my problem. Who is it?!” Concern was all over the President’s face.

  “We don’t know yet.”

  “Well you sure as hell better be finding out. I don’t need another Hydra popping up into the news cycle.”

  “We may already be there.”

  “Jesus—FRANK! What happened?”

  “Someone discovered what we’ve been moving into 33 Thomas Street.”

  “So find them and get rid of them!”

  “We don’t know who it is yet.”

  “How do you know they know?”

  “Oh they know. They made off with over fifty ton already.”

  “Fifty!? How in the hell—?” The president’s eyes drew wide. “How much did we lose?”

  “A little over three billion at today’s prices.”

  “Holy. Shit. How? How do you just ‘walk off’ with three billion in gold and no one sees you?”

  “We don’t know. Your high school buddy, Baxter, at the Federal Reserve is just as mystified as we are.”

  “That’s one helluva trick.”

  “It is. No one human could pull off a stunt like this.”

  “Human. You think a Ra did this? What does the Dominion care about gold? They’ve got more money than God already.”

  “I don’t think it was Dominion. Relations with them have been pretty quiet lately. It’s gotta be someone rogue.”

  “Jesus.” The president fumed. “A rogue enhanced—”

  “Harlan and I were thinking the same thing.”

  “Alright. What do we do?”

  “We have a few enhanced of our own now.”

  “Monica’s people?” the President raised his brow.

  “Exactly. I say we turn them loose on whomever hijacked our storage facility.”

  “Good idea. Take care of it, Frank. We need to keep this quiet. I don’t need news of this getting out beyond the handful on the Exodus team.”

  “It won’t. I’m handling it personally.”

  27

  I ‘m pretty sure I know where Sinclair ended up.” Harlan snuggled up right next to her in the booth, in another bar just outside the Beltway.

  “Oh?” Monica already had her drink waiting for him.

  “Manhattan.” Harlan ordered a drink from the waitress who stopped by their table.

  “He hit a bank in Manhattan?” she asked.

  “Not a bank, the bank—sort of. He’s in a lot of trouble, Monica. Brett’s about ready to call out the National Guard.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He robbed a gold storage vault.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Yea. They just finished an inventory. A little over three billion in bullion—gone. Poof.”

  “That’s Sinclair’s M.O. alright. Here today, gone tomorrow, without a trace.”

  “How does he do that?” Harlan fumed.

  “He’s a god, Mr. Harlan. How do they do anything?”

  “Yea, well, he’s in real trouble now. The president wants his head. He wants your team to go after him.”

  “Lovely. I’m trying to recruit him and now he’s the target. You’re not making this easy, Mr. Harlan.”

  “You’re the one with the five-hundred IQ, Sweetheart. I just work for Brett. We need to figure this out.”

  The waitress returned with his drink, while Harlan’s nose was sliding along Monica’s neck. “Did you change perfumes again? I liked the last one better.”

  “I wasn’t wearing perfume the last time.” She smirked.

  “Damn, you people smell nice.” He took a sip from his glass.

  “I can focus my search around New York then, but, Mr. Harlan, New York’s a big city. It’ll be like finding a needle in a haystack.”

  “Frank already has more people guarding the vault now.”

  “It won’t matter. Sinclair won’t be back. He never goes back. He’s probably long gone by now.”

  “I’m not so sure about that. He hit that vault for a reason—probably to ransom his girlfriend, our new agent goddess.”

  “So you think Roberts is in the area as well?” she asked.

  “I’d bet money on it.” Harlan sipped his cocktail. “These newbloods are more valuable than all the money in Manhattan, Monica.”

  She took a sip from her glass. “So you want me to find a notorious pirate who doesn’t
want to be found; rescue an agent he’s kidnapped and holding for ransom, and recruit a bank-robbing god the President of the United States wants dead. Anything else—?” She glared not holding back her incredulity.

  Harlan shook his head. “No. That about covers it.”

  * * * * *

  “You’re impressing me, Sinclair. Nearly two tons in the last drop.” Liam stood face to face with pirate in yet another alley on the outskirts of Harlem.

  “I want to see Tori.”

  “Not until you deliver all twenty.”

  “How do I even know she’s still alive?”

  Roberts mused the thought. The kid had a point. He might get these drops quicker if he was motivated. “I’ll get you a video conference with the next drop, tomorrow.”

  “I want to actually see her,” he insisted.

  “Not a chance.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you, Mr. Sinclair, are dangerous.”

  Liam frowned at him.

  “Anyone who can steal the gold you have, is way over the top—dangerous. You think I don’t know where these bars came from. Goddamned Federal Reserve’s own vaults. Each one is stamped, US Mint. That’s quite a feat. Even for a god.”

  “I want to talk to her.”

  “I’ll arrange it at tomorrow’s drop. You can even use my phone.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  28

  H is senses were tingling. Was it because he’d just talked with her on the phone and he really wanted to be with her, or was it something more? She’d left his feelings unsettled. But it was good to talk to her, even if had been for only a few minutes. She was safe. More or less. For now.

  He wished he could have actually felt her; said more to her. Their words were few with all of Roberts’ men standing around, ogling her body. Jeeze—he could have given her a swimsuit or some panties, something to wear. But he didn’t want her clothed; it was obvious; none of them did. The only thing keeping them from jumping her was her cell. It confined her, and thankfully kept Roberts’ animals at bay at the same time.