As for the Vors, looking for their Oracle, Vega had explained why California had been one of their highest priority hunting grounds. China and India had greater populations, but the US, and especially California, had one of the broadest swaths of wealthy individuals in the world.
And where would a gifted intuitive be most likely to end up? Where they could most take advantage of their gifts. In Tokyo, Hong Kong, London, or New York. Or in California, which is where Vega had assigned himself, as the ranking Vor on the planet.
These cities were the best places for clairvoyants to succeed, and the best places for the Vors to identify them. The wealthier the country and the greater the meritocracy, the greater chance of an intuitive making it big. And also leaving an enormous footprint on the internet.
The more records that were computerized, the easier the search. Which is how Vega had found the detective in the first place, by rooting out her article on intuition and the subconscious with just a few keystrokes.
And when he had arrived in LA to continue researching her, two days before their meeting, the Tarts must have picked him up on sensors, which would have had limited range. They had known for thousands of years that the Vors had been on Earth, but the Vors hadn’t known the reverse. So in the interim, while the Vors were perfecting stealthier light-amplifying lenses, the Tarts were probably developing sensors to detect Vors on Earth. Sensors that could be constructed from materials likely to be found here.
So the Tarts had identified Vega in LA, and had followed him.
At the same time, Anna had become a thorn in their side. In Vega’s mind, this was anything but a surprise. She was an intuitive and a detective in the city they were trying to poison. And she was special, even among the run-of-the-mill, one-chance-in-five-million intuitives.
So Frey had pulled out all the stops to make sure she was killed and discredited. Having no idea the Vors were on Earth, until they had detected Tom Vega, or that she had been identified as an Oracle. Knowing simply that she was too clever by half, and was giving them a migraine headache.
So both sides had converged around the same young detective. The timing of the intersection had been a coincidence, but not the intersection itself.
In retrospect, it had almost been inevitable.
32
Anna eyed one of the wooden pallets nearby, stacked with eight-foot-high walls of canvas bags, and shook her head in disbelief. She was trapped inside a warehouse, filled with many millions of dollars of cocaine, waiting for a war to break out—and this was the least bizarre experience she had had lately.
“So now you know everything,” said Vega after they had sorted out how events had likely unfolded. He blew out a long breath. “Well . . . almost. There are a few details I’ve left out,” he added guiltily. “I would have liked to give you more time before I hit you with bad news, but we don’t have this luxury. The situation is deteriorating, and it’s more urgent than ever that we get you to Utah.”
“Deteriorating how?” asked Anna, not sure she really wanted to know.
“I told you sixty-four of us had come through the portal. What I didn’t tell you is that only fifty-nine remain. Over the past six months, five have been systematically eliminated.”
“By the Tarts?” said Anna.
“I don’t think so,” replied the alien. “I didn’t even know they were here until last night, but I see it as very unlikely. Who or what is behind this isn’t clear, but they’re able to somehow locate our people anywhere in the world with great precision. If the Tarts had this capability, they’d have destroyed us all months ago, even if they had to pay humans to help. It would have become their highest priority.”
“Who else could it be?”
“Good question. Whoever it is, they’ve been able to breach security that should have been impenetrable.”
“Anything these five Vors have in common?” asked Anna.
“They were the best among us at finding humans that fit our prescription. Intuitives who might also be clairvoyants.”
“So there’s a hostile out there who doesn’t want you to find what you’re looking for.”
“Again, this is possible, but uncertain. Most of us have been engaged in hunting for the right candidate. While these five were having the most success, all the candidates who have looked promising have ended up disappointing, for various reasons. Which is why I can be so certain that you’re the ideal candidate. Because I’ve studied and interviewed so many who are not ideal. None have scientifically and systematically developed their intuition like you have. And those whose intuition is sharp have most often used it for selfish reasons. Apparently, the intuitive group of humans is enriched for megalomania, narcissism, and sociopathy.”
He paused. “In any case, the disappearance of my five colleagues is very troubling. We’ve never found any of them, so it wasn’t accidental death or natural causes.”
“Earlier you told me you weren’t looking for a detective,” said Anna. “You were looking for a fleet admiral, instead.” She shrugged. “Looks like you could use both.”
Vega nodded grimly. “I also have news that’s even more troubling,” he continued. “The records of my ancestors made it clear that the Tartarian portal opened in an isolated mesa in the foothills of the Balkan mountains in what is now Bulgaria. Thousands of years ago. Not all that far from our portal in Albania. Or from Greece, the preeminent civilization at the time.
“After our people arrived here three years ago, we had a lot to get done. We had to understand the current state of your civilization. Learn languages that had become important since we were last here. Determine how to convert gold into spendable currency.
“Once we were established and had our Earth-legs under us, and the wherewithal to do it, we installed a system of video monitors to surveil the last known location of the Tart portal in Bulgaria—just to be sure it didn’t appear again. But it took us six months, and we were apparently too late to see Shane Frey and his fellow . . . demons come through.”
“Unless their portal appeared in a different location this time.”
“Also a possibility,” said Vega, “although less likely. In any event,” he continued, “by the time we managed to set up surveillance the portal wasn’t there. This has been true for the past two and a half years. But this changed recently, when their portal suddenly reappeared again.”
“How recently?”
Vega hesitated. “While you and I were driving to the Rest Easy Motel last night,” he replied finally. “And it was massive. Orders of magnitude larger than the one here before. It only stayed active for a few hours before disappearing, but the Tarts managed to get more than six hundred of their people through. And more females than males, to increase the reproductive potential of the group.”
Anna swallowed hard. As if the smaller number of Tarts already here weren’t a big enough threat. “I thought the Gatekeepers liked parity.”
“Apparently not this time. Or perhaps our portal will reopen soon as well. But we can’t count on it. So we don’t have a second to waste in getting your abilities enhanced.”
“You never did tell me the science behind clairvoyance,” said Anna, “or how you plan to sharpen mine in Utah. Not to spoil your plans, but what if I don’t like what I hear? What if I refuse your enhancement procedure?”
“We can’t coerce you,” said Vega. “If you’re going to lead our fleet, you have to do it of your own free will. So if you don’t like what you hear, there isn’t anything we can do about it. But I’m not concerned about that. When I have the time to lay it out for you, I’m confident you’ll agree.”
Anna’s eyes widened. “Wait a minute,” she said. “Let’s back up. You found out last night that the Tart portal in Bulgaria had opened up?”
“That’s right.”
“How?”
Vega hesitated, but only for a moment. “One of my Vorian underlings contacted me to tell me the bad news.”
“Contacted you?” repeated A
nna in dismay.
And then it all became clear. Vega had told her that the Vors and Tarts both had comm systems implanted in their ears and throats, and that this and their light-amplifying technologies had made it through the portals. She had assumed that the comms only worked over relatively short distances. But apparently this wasn’t the case.
Anna didn’t like the implications of this at all. “How many of your people are assigned to California?” she asked. “How many are in the region we’re in now?”
“It’s a high-priority state, so eight, including me.”
“And you could have called them at any time?” she said in dismay. “You could have asked them to meet us, send reinforcements, or help in other ways? And you didn’t?”
Vega sighed. “No, I didn’t. I chose not to.”
“Why not?” she demanded. “We’ve been fighting for our lives. If you really believe that I’m the most important human who ever lived, why didn’t you pull out all the stops to protect me?”
“Because you wouldn’t be the most important human who ever lived if you needed me to. Since I’m in the same boat as you, I’ve been betting my life that you can get us through this on your own.”
“But you’ve been betting my life too,” she hissed through clenched teeth.
“It couldn’t be helped. We both needed to see what you could do. And my hope was that once I made it clear that your subconscious could tap into the future, this knowledge, along with life-and-death adversity, would awaken your abilities. Our computer models predicted that this might be the case.”
“You son of a bitch! You callous, manipulative bastard!”
“I’m sorry,” said Vega. “I truly am. But your clairvoyance has been awakened. It worked! And the Vorians close enough to reach us were unlikely to have made a difference anyway. Even if they had rushed to our side, the Tarts can bring more than enough force to bear to kill us all. It’s possible that these reinforcements could have saved us. But it’s more likely that their presence would have done nothing but give you a false sense of security, and ensure that you remained unaware of your clairvoyance.”
“Not your call to make!” snapped Anna.
“I am truly sorry,” said the alien. “But I had every confidence that you could get us through this on your own. The risk I took with both of our lives was very small. But the reward is potentially staggering. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that triggering your awareness of your precognitive abilities can have a dramatic impact on the fate of the entire galaxy, and, in the end, save many billions of intelligent lives.”
Anna didn’t reply. Vega may have been right about her clairvoyance, but he overestimated her value in this war of his by many orders of magnitude.
“I hope that you can bring yourself to understand my motivations,” added the alien. “And to forgive me.”
Anna glared at him, but didn’t reply.
“And one last point,” said Vega softly. “You know that I can’t put anything over on you. As I’ve said before, if I could, you wouldn’t be who I was looking for. You knew that we Vors had internal comms to communicate. So how is it that both your brilliant conscious mind, and your even more brilliant subconscious mind, both failed to consider that I might be able to call for Vor reinforcements? How could your intuition fail to see something this obvious?”
He paused to let this sink in.
“If you’re being honest with yourself,” he continued finally, “isn’t it likely that your subconscious mind was aware of this? But it purposely kept it from you. Maybe even found a way to distract your conscious mind from this truth. Perhaps your hidden mind guessed that life-and-death adversity could spark it to greater heights, also—and was fully in favor.”
Anna suddenly felt ill. Could the alien be right about this? Had her subconscious mind actively worked to keep her in the dark? This was a wrinkle she had never even considered.
Could she and her hidden mind work at cross purposes? As though they really were two different entities? Or did her subconscious purposely keep some of its grandmasterly chess moves hidden from her for her own good, fearing that she would fail to understand their depth and override them?
Either way, this just meant that things had gotten even more complicated. And given everything that had come before, Anna wouldn’t have thought that this was possible.
33
Abel “Wolfy” Medina stood outside an impenetrable steel door holding a machine gun in the dim pre-dawn morning and stroked his wild beard. He continued to feel like an idiot. A pissed-off idiot. The goddamned Hulk couldn’t get through this door, so why the hell was he guarding it?
He was a loyal soldier who had been with Neil Marshall from the beginning, and he deserved better. Better than being lent out to Shane Frey, who insulted their competence by insisting they treat Anna Abbott like she was twenty times the threat she really was. And better than having a relative newcomer like DeShawn Young placed in command of the team above him.
As he thought about Young, he wondered once again what their esteemed leader was doing inside the warehouse after all this time. Wolfy was certain that the girl was bluffing and didn’t have any information worth knowing. But even if she had, there was no way it would take this long to spit it out.
Was Young thinking with his dick? Was he trying to force himself on the young detective? Was this the reason for the delay?
Wolfy couldn’t entirely blame him if that was the case. She was pretty hot, even now, and that was saying something. She was wearing a bulky sweatshirt—over shape-compressing body armor—and she looked like she had been through hell, which couldn’t have been far from the truth. If she could look this good under these circumstances, how good would she look when she was dressing up for a party? Or, better yet, naked?
Wolfy shook his head. He was letting his imagination get away from him. Even if Frey had never issued any warnings about how dangerous the detective was likely to be, she had already proven herself to be a bad-ass, having apparently slipped a noose at Salem Hills High that should have been unslippable. Young would have better luck forcing himself on a giant scorpion than doing the same to Anna Abbott.
So what was he doing?
Wolfy heard a sound in the direction he was facing. What the hell? At first he thought it was a car, but that didn’t seem quite right.
And then he realized the truth. It wasn’t a single car—it was a fleet of them. A swarm of angry wasps bearing down on the concrete parking area in front of him with reckless speed.
He was on the east side of the warehouse, the only side completely out in the open. The other three sides faced a nearby woods, which could provide cover for a retreat. The woods were densest to the west, making that his best option.
He took off running, but before he reached the edge of the building the swarm of vehicles broke into view, and their headlights turned the approaching dawn into broad daylight. They screeched to a stop in the empty parking area, fanning out.
“This is the police!” boomed a deep voice through an electronic megaphone. “Surrender and you won’t be harmed! Repeat, this is the police. You have no chance!”
Wolfy manipulated his phone as he ran, placing a call, which was picked up on the first ring. “We’re under attack!” he shouted at Shane Frey. “Where are you?”
“Still ten minutes out.”
“Hurry!” shouted Wolfy as he made it to the edge of the warehouse, unable to pay attention to Frey’s response, as he half-expected to be cut down by gunfire at any moment.
As he emerged on the other side, he found that he had jumped from the frying pan into the fire. His three comrades had all tried to escape into the woods, as he was planning, but the cops had anticipated this move. They had planted teams in the woods before making a flashy entrance from the east. Now, all three of his teammates were retreating back to the west warehouse door, and multiple spotlights were locking onto them like they were Broadway stars.
Wolfy took in the scene all at once
, realizing that his men had just unlocked the padlock on the door and were rushing inside as warning shots from the woods hit the warehouse, producing sparks and a symphony of steel-and-bullet percussion. Miraculously, all three made it inside, slamming the door closed behind them, and Wolfy realized this was his only chance as well. Inside they would be protected, and would have hostages, which would buy them the time they needed for reinforcements to arrive.
Wolfy sprinted for the door, laying down a steady burst of machine-gun fire directed toward the unseen enemy in the woods as he ran, which threw up bark and leaves like a wood chipper. But when he was only eight feet away from his destination, a bullet found his kneecap, shattering it, and sending him to the ground screaming in agony.
***
Lieutenant Carl Mendoza kept his eyes on the road as he and his five fellow mercenaries streaked toward the coordinates he had been given, which led to an isolated warehouse. They had been warned to come prepared for a war, just in case. But their actual mission simply involved locking down two prisoners who, based on everything they had been told, were already locked down beyond any possibility of escape.
Meanwhile, Shane Frey, their new boss, and a few of his friends were ten minutes behind, not wanting to be too close to any action until the mercenary muscle they had hired assured them that it was safe.
It was the strangest op Mendoza had ever been involved with, and that was really saying something.
The panicked voice of Shane Frey burst through Mendoza’s comm, nearly rupturing his eardrum. “There’s trouble at the warehouse!” thundered Frey. “My men there are under attack!”
“How many hostiles?” asked the mercenary.
“Uncertain,” replied Frey, thankfully no longer shouting. “But it must be a large number to spook a five-man team armed with automatic weapons.”
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