by Dan Willis
“Springfield, Illinois. I need you to do a record search when you get there, probably pull some business licenses, too. I’ll have all of that for you in the morning.”
“What do I do when the train gets in?”
“Just get a hotel room somewhere near the city offices,” Alex said. “I’ll have some cash for your expenses and I’m giving you a key to the back door.”
He waited for her to ask questions, but all he could hear over the line was the sound of scribbling as Sherry wrote his instructions down.
“Okay,” she said. “I should be over to the office in about half an hour. I’ll see you then.”
Sherry hung up and Alex pressed down the receiver hook, then let it up again. He waited for the operator, then had her connect him to Grand Central so he could purchase Sherry’s train ticket.
A few minutes later, he set down the phone and returned to the hotel room. This time he picked up the phone on the little desk and dialed the number for Tiffany Young.
“Didn’t Duke get you into my husband’s office?” she asked once Alex identified himself.
“Yes, but Senator Colins came along and threw us out,” he explained. “He didn’t seem too happy that we were there. Was there any bad blood between him and your husband?”
“No,” Tiffany said without hesitation. “They weren’t on any of the same committees, so they rarely worked together. As far as I know, he and Paul barely spoke.”
Alex brushed the thought aside. Senator Colins’ reaction to finding people in his office seemed a bit strange, but the man might just appreciate his privacy.
“Since we got kicked out, we didn’t get a chance to finish our investigation,” Alex said. “Do you think you could get me a copy of the federal highway bill that’s going up for a vote on Friday?”
“Of course,” she said, as if it would be the easiest thing in the world.
“Tonight if possible.”
Tiffany chuckled softly over the line.
“I could bring it over personally, if you’d like.”
“Just the bill will be fine,” Alex said, feeling himself actually blush. He was starting to understand why Tiffany and her husband made such a good team; the woman was practically a force of nature.
“All right,” she purred at him, being sure to add just a slight note of disappointment to her voice. “I’ll make a few calls and have a copy of the bill over to you within the hour.”
Alex thanked her and hung up. He still needed to get cash out of his hidden safe for Sherry, along with a sealed envelope and a special cigarette case he’d prepared for just such an occasion. Whistling as he set about his tasks, Alex felt confident that once he knew why Senator Young had been killed, the ‘who’ would become painfully obvious. Once he knew that, all he had to do was pass the information to Sorsha, let her catch the bad guy, and restore her reputation.
Easy.
19
Travel
The Pullman conductor knocked on Sherry’s door sometime after six in the morning. Groggily, she pulled her eyes open and tried to focus on the bedside clock she’d brought with her, but it was still too early.
“Coming in to Springfield,” he called. “Ten minutes to Springfield.”
“Thank you,” Sherry called, forcing herself to throw aside the blanket and expose herself to the frigid air of the train compartment. Shivering as she stood, she moved to the washbasin and ran water to splash on her face.
It was amazing to her how she could go to sleep in New York and wake up several states away. When she was born, the fastest way to travel was on a horse. To make the journey that had happened while she slept would have taken weeks. It was a strange and wonderful world she had awakened into.
She spent a few minutes fixing her face at the mirror as the train swayed gently from side to side. When she finished, she reapplied her lipstick and packed her makeup bag away in her suitcase. Just as she finished, she felt the train lurch slightly as the brakes engaged and it began to slow.
Five minutes later, Sherry stepped down from the train onto the platform in the capital of Illinois. She just stood for a moment, holding her suitcase, and took it in. Since she’d awakened in New York, she’d never even been off the Island of Manhattan, and now she stood on new ground and she could hardly suppress the grin that spread across her face.
It took Sherry almost an hour to locate a hotel near the state records office. It would have gone faster if she hadn’t asked the cabbie to take her all over town so she could see the city. When the bellhop of the Lincoln Hotel finally set her bag on the bed in her room and withdrew it was almost eight o’clock.
“Better get going,” she said to the empty room. “The boss is waiting.”
She locked the door and set the bolt to make sure she wouldn’t be disturbed. The room she’d rented was simple, just a bed, dresser, chair and an end table in a single room with a washroom attached. A large window occupied the outer wall with the curtains open to let in the pale morning light. Since the room faced a wide street, Sherry didn’t feel the need to close them for what came next.
When she picked up her tickets at the office the previous evening, Alex had given her cash for the job, and a cigarette case without any cigarettes in it. When she opened the case, it contained several items; an old-fashioned key, a folded piece of fragile flash paper, a book of matches, and a small stick of chalk. As she removed them, she laid each one out in a neat line on the hotel bed.
This was Alex’s latest experiment. He called it the back door and he’d given Sherry very specific instructions on how to use it. First she selected the stick of chalk, then moved to a bare patch of wall and carefully drew the outline of a door. She’d seen Alex do this before, and he never seemed to pay too much attention to it, but it was her first time, so she spent a minute or two going over the drawing to make sure there weren’t any gaps.
Satisfied, she returned to the bed and selected the next item, the folded rune paper. Alex told her she just needed to stick it to the wall inside the chalk outline, but Sherry couldn’t resist opening the paper. The rune inside was much more complex than most of the runes she worked with as Alex’s secretary. A little chill of fear swept through her as she remembered the last time she’d seen such complex and elegant designs.
In her former life.
The constructs the Rune Lord had made had this kind of complexity. Unlike the one she held, which was limited to a small sheet of paper, his runes covered walls and even entire buildings.
She shivered again at the comparison. When she’d awakened in this age, her magic had told her that there was a potential Rune Lord close to her. That knowledge had sent her into a fit of apoplexy that had lasted almost a day. Every Rune Lord she’d ever known or heard about had been tyrannical monsters, buoyed by near god-like power. They took what they wanted and crushed all who opposed them. The only thing that gave Sherry hope was the fact that Alex hadn’t ascended to his power yet. That gave her the courage to insinuate herself into Alex’s life, to become his secretary.
And, if necessary, to kill him before he became a threat.
Fortunately, against any odds she would have given, Alex turned out to be a good man.
Good men go bad, the voice in her head whispered.
“Shut up,” she told the voice. She believed in Alex. She had to. The alternative was too horrible to even contemplate.
You know I’m right.
Sherry squeezed her eyes shut tight and clutched the rune paper to her chest. Summoning her magic, she focused on the paper and its connection to the hand that had written it. Her gift wasn’t like Alex’s or Andrew Barton’s, it wasn’t hers to command, it came and went as it would. Sometimes she could compel it to reveal things, but it almost never worked.
This time she felt a tingling in her hand, and she saw a strange place. It looked different than New York or Springfield; the roads were narrow, and the buildings seemed older in their design. The image seemed perfectly ordinary, but then it fli
ckered and changed. The streets were broken up and the buildings were shattered with slumping walls and exposed innards. Bodies lay strewn throughout the scene, some burned and black, while others were covered in blood.
As she watched, the scene jumped forward to envelop her and she found herself standing on the broken road. An acrid stench of fire and decay assaulted Sherry and it was all she could do not to gag. She turned, taking in the destruction and the death until she saw what was behind her. A man stood on the road, not ten feet from her.
It was Alex.
“No,” she gasped, tears filling her eyes.
Her boss and friend stood wearing a business suit, though it was dirty as if he’d crawled on the ground. A smear of blood covered his right arm, but he didn’t seem to notice, or maybe he didn’t care.
Sherry avoided Alex’s eyes, dreading what she would see in their brown depths. Satisfaction for magic effectively used? Fear from losing control?
She took a breath and looked.
Anger.
White hot, burning anger.
Sherry sobbed and her legs gave out, driving her to her knees. Alex hadn’t done this. The scene filled him with rage for whoever had caused it. He hated them in the way only a good man could, with righteous anger in the face of evil.
“Thank you,” she gasped as the vision faded.
When Sherry came to herself, she was kneeling on the floor of her hotel room with tears ruining her makeup. She unclenched her hand and smoothed out the wrinkled rune paper.
“See,” she said to the voice. “He won’t fall.”
You thought that about another once. Have you forgotten what he did to you? The things he made you do? The blood that’s still on your hands?
“Rage all you want,” she sneered, getting to her feet. “I’m not that person anymore, and Alex isn’t him.”
The voice remained sullenly quiet, and Sherry snorted derisively at its silence. She set the crumpled rune on the bed and went to the bathroom to repair her makeup. It had been a while since she’d heard the voice. Alex’s rising skills as a runewright had dredged it up. The voice wasn’t part of her, or at least she hoped it wasn’t. It always seemed to be an outsider, looking in and observing her life but not able to see inside her heart. Somehow it was related to her gift, but how exactly remained a mystery.
Satisfied that all traces of her tears were gone, Sherry returned to the room and picked up the rune. Without ceremony, she touched the paper to her tongue as she’d seen Alex do a hundred times, and stuck it to the wall. That done, she picked up the book of matches, tore one out, and lit the rune. The paper vanished in a puff of heat and flame, leaving the rune behind, glowing with silver, purple, and orange lines.
Alex had warned her that the rune might not work. It was something Alex had thought up but hadn’t yet tested. Sherry held her breath as she watched the glowing rune pulse with light. After what seemed like half a minute, the rune vanished and a heavy steel door melted out of the wall.
With a wide grin, Sherry picked up the old-fashioned key and inserted it into the keyhole in the center of the door. Everyone knew that only a runewright could open the door to his vault, but Alex had managed to open multiple doors, so hopefully the key would work for Sherry. Alex assured her it would, but since it hadn’t been tested, the only way to know for sure was to try.
She took a deep breath and held it, then turned the key. A moment later there was a click, and the door began to open.
Alex sat, dozing in his reading chair in the library area of his vault’s great room. He’d been up late going through the copy of the federal highway bill that Tiffany Young had sent him, but he wanted to be up in time to meet Sherry.
Assuming the back door works, he reminded himself.
The rune was much more expensive to make than he’d counted on, requiring three different infused inks that used costly ingredients that were difficult to make. Even then, he only had enough of the ink to make two of the back door runes. That being the case, Alex wanted to wait for the right opportunity to try them out.
He was brought back from the edge of sleep by a deep thrumming sound that seemed to fill his entire vault. A moment later the wall just down from his regular door began to ripple, resolving into the inside of a steel vault door.
Alex swore and jumped to his feet.
“It worked!”
He hurried to the door, looking to see if there was any way to open the door from the inside. In all the times he’d opened a door into his vault, he’d never been on the inside. Unfortunately the back of the door was entirely smooth except for the handle that would allow the door to be closed from the inside.
I’ll have to work on that, he thought.
He wanted to grab the door and push, but until Sherry used the key on the other side of the door, nothing he could do would budge it.
“Assuming the key works,” he said out loud. He’d gotten the idea from the limelight-induced rune he’d created to get into the vault of the brother’s boom after their deaths. There wasn’t much of that rune he could understand once the limelight had worn off, but he’d figured out enough to make the back door key — a key that, hopefully, could be used by anyone.
Alex didn’t realize that he’d been holding his breath, but the moment the door clicked and began to open, he gasped.
“Hi’ya, boss,” Sherry said once Alex pushed the door all the way open. She stood in a plain hotel room that was hundreds of miles from the one where Alex had slept. When he had a chance to think about it, Alex was sure it would boggle his mind.
Before he could respond to Sherry, she stepped over the vault threshold and threw her arms around him in a tight hug.
“I saw you ten hours ago,” he said with a chuckle. “What’s this for?”
“Just for being you,” she said. “You’re the best.”
“It’s true,” Alex said with an air of magnanimity.
Sherry looked up at him with a look of exasperation and elbowed him in the ribs.
“So it all worked,” Alex said as she let him go and stepped back. “Did you have any trouble?”
A shadow of emotion passed quickly over Sherry’s face, but she smiled and shook her head.
“It went just like you said.”
Alex sighed and felt tension release across his shoulders. Apparently he was more worried about the back door than he’d admitted to himself.
“Do you have the research notes for me?” Sherry prodded when he didn’t answer.
“Right,” he said, turning back toward his reading chair. He’d left the notepad with the details of the highway bill on it sitting on the little table with the lamp.
Crossing the stone floor, he picked it up and returned.
“Here you go,” he said, handing it over. “There are two main things I need you to check. In the bill there are four construction companies suggested to get the work of building the new road.”
“Got ‘em,” Sherry said, running her finger along Alex’s notes.
“Then there’s two proposed routes that are being debated,” he went on. “I need you to find out who owns the land for both of them.”
“Okay,” Sherry said. “As long as the land office is organized it should only take a few hours, then a few more at the hall of records to get a look at the construction companies’ business licenses. I’ll check at the local paper to see if there are any scandals involving anyone involved.”
“Good,” Alex said.
“Did you read my notes on the Unger guy?” Sherry asked.
Alex had to focus on not blushing. He’d asked her to look into the man replacing Senator Young and he’d forgotten all about it.
“You left it on my desk, didn’t you?” he said, a bit sheepishly.
Sherry snickered but managed not to laugh out loud.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “There wasn’t that much on him, since up till recently he wasn’t involved in politics. He was a state senator for t
he last two years and a lawyer before that.”
“Anything else?”
Sherry shook her head.
“I couldn’t find anything on him before his election. Do you want me to go digging in the local papers now that I’m here?”
“Only if you have time,” Alex said. “I need the other stuff by tomorrow morning at the latest.”
“I should be done by this afternoon,” she said. “Can I just come home through the vault?”
Alex nodded.
“Once you shut the door, just leave the key in it,” he said. “Since you opened the door the first time, it won’t turn or come out for anyone else. When you’re done, just open the door again, take the key out, bring your bag inside and just shut the door behind you.”
“How do I get out of this vault?” she asked.
Alex hadn’t thought about that. His cover doors were magically locked from both sides, after all.
“See that hallway?” he said, pointing to the hall on the right side of the great room. “Down at the end there is the cover door to my apartment in Empire Tower. I’ll leave that door open for you, so just close it behind you when you leave.”
“Okay, boss,” she said, stepping back through the door. “Wish me luck.”
Alex did, then reminded her not to take the vault key out of the door as she pushed it shut. Since the door didn’t disappear immediately, he knew Sherry had followed his instructions.
With nothing else to do in the vault, Alex used his pocketwatch to open the cover door to his apartment and left it open about an inch. He hated the breach of security, but figured that since his apartment was on a secure floor, it was the least likely to be broken into. He could have sent Sherry to the brownstone, of course, but he hadn’t talked with Iggy all week and if his mentor was out for any reason, Sherry would just be trapped there.
Satisfied that his secretary would be able to get home on her own, Alex headed back to his suite in D.C. . It was almost ten in Washington, and Connie would be by any minute so they could continue checking shops.
