Ben Morgan double-checked a computer screen, reached out one gloved finger to tap "Enter" and send his last message, waited until the transmitter LED quit blinking and the screen confirmed reception, and then pulled CDs from three computers. One by one he fed the disks into a heavy-duty shredder, wrinkling his nose at the buzz-saw snarl of the blades and the stink of tortured plastic.
Encryption algorithms and some rather specialized radio control software, the CDs were "one-use" items. To finish his cleanup, he set all three computers to overwrite their deleted files, repetitions that went rather beyond the current NSA standards for secure computing. He flipped his jeweler's loupe down, stared into the bared microcircuitry of a standard UHF ham radio transceiver, and pulled out the jumpers and control board that allowed the synthesizer to transmit on blocked frequencies never intended by the manufacturer. He fed those into the shredder, as well. The machine screeched annoyance at him but did its job.
Then he stood up and stretched. His back and shoulders complained about the morning's work, but he overruled their protests and smiled. Hacking communications satellites could be fun.
And profitable. Alice Haskell now commanded another million bucks, fully laundered and legal, as guardian and trustee for the kids. And Alice wouldn't ask from whence the money came. She knew better. Granted, Ben had started the morning with nearly three times that much on paper, but the wastage served as insurance. Various officials and semi-officials and private bankers and businessmen scattered across twenty countries had a serious reason to keep their own mouths shut. Grease.
But every dollar of that million now owned a paper trail, taxes paid and all. Governments were a pain in the ass. A few generations back, Morgans could just bring home their booty as foreign coin and goods, profits from a trading voyage, and nobody asked questions. Now every government, everywhere, wanted their cut. Call it taxes, call it graft, call it whatever you wanted, they all claimed a monopoly on robbing their citizens and corporations. And they talked to each other.
Damned bureaucrats got in the way of earning a decent dollar. Or stealing one. On the other hand, governments made it possible for an enterprising man to make real money in the import/export business. Declare something illegal and the price for it jumped into the stratosphere, whether you dealt with Shan poppy growers or Guatemalan grave-robbers. And in either case, the middlemen took the lion's share.
Ben grinned again. Make something illegal, and the man who lost it couldn't even call the cops. One major chunk of his morning's work related to a single Mayan "eccentric flint," illegally dug and illegally exported and then stolen and stolen and stolen again.
He stared at the wall, the ancient rough granite curve of the tower called Morgan's Castle, and saw the flint hanging there in his mind's eye, glinting. "Eccentric" didn't even begin to describe it.
God, it was a beautiful thing, ceremonial staff ornament or pole ax or totally unusable knife. Whatever it was. You had to hold it to believe it, as long as a man's forearm and broad as his spread hand, the body a flat openwork no thicker than his thumb and chipped into a delirium of fantastic curves and angles, flake by microscopic flake, the tang thin and sharp as a scalpel, without a single crack or stain or blemish to show the millennia since it had left the artist's hand.
Collectors gibbered and drooled over a piece like that. To be able to hold it and examine it rather than stare at a ghost of the thing locked behind laminated glass in a museum case, feel the contrasting weight and delicacy that stretched the bounds of craft and broke through them into art, turn it in your hands and stare deep into the years and see the stylized perfection of a jaguar's head grinning back at you from its profile of faceted stone. Know that the jaguar god meant sacrifice, that this work of art might once have carved human flesh, loosed blood steaming on the altar.
The buyer would know such things. Or think he knew them. The flint was far too delicate ever to have a practical use, but Ben's "clients" lied to themselves just as easily as any other human. That explained why many of his schemes worked at all. That explained why a single weird chunk of stone could bring a price well into six figures, US dollars, without certification or import license or even a bill of sale.
Blind obsession.
Ben had sold the flint three times, waited a decent interval, and stolen it back three times. He doubted if he'd risk a fourth. He chose his marks well, but the supply of rich and obsessive had its limits. Once in the U.S., once in Japan, once in Europe — anything more could cross that invisible boundary where greed led to a fatal error. Someone might talk to someone else.
And it was a lovely thing.
He'd keep it. He could even build a paper trail for it, trace its lineage to a sea-captain's house and trade routes for Maine shipping a century and a half ago. Write letters on ancient paper with ancient ink and pen, provide scratched glass-plate negatives of stiff Sunday-portrait Yankees in their Victorian parlor. He'd take that paper trail back to the point where owning an old piece of stone was legal.
Not that he'd ever make the paper public. Word might reach certain ears. But hold the documents in reserve, aged in the wood . . . .
Damn, it was a lovely thing. Ben shook himself, and the vision faded. Beauty could be as addictive as all hell. If he wasn't careful, he could end up committing the classic drug-dealer's mistake, getting hooked on his own product.
And that was usually fatal.
He shook himself again, bent down and gathered the iridescent plastic sawdust of dead larceny from the bin of the shredder, and bagged it for feeding to a woodstove up in the main house. He buttoned up the radio case, just another piece of equipment from the cluttered ham "shack" that Dan had shared with Gary, both holders of "Extra" class licenses and fully qualified in the FCC's own files for amateur satellite communications. The computers had finished their routine, so he started defragging their hard drives as a further guard.
He'd used Gary's login and password. No fingerprints left behind, either physical or electronic. After all, Ben Morgan was dead. Dead for twenty years, now, because having a dozen names and no legal existence gave you certain advantages when you lived outside the law. And now Dan was also "dead," leaving Gary and Ellen and Peggy in Alice Haskell's somewhat dubious care. Only in Stonefort could a lesbian witch be appointed guardian to three orphaned minors . . . .
He stepped through a doorway into the musty smell of old, old books long unread, the Morgan archives. A dark woman looked up at him from a table and a bound parchment manuscript, raven hair and dark eyes and the oiled-teak skin of First People genes exposed to fierce Arizona sun. A beautiful young woman, the echo of one summer twenty years ago.
His daughter, a child he'd never seen, never even suspected, until a few months back.
"How's it going?"
"Slow. This dumb schmuck's grasp of Latin is even worse than mine. I'd hate to see what kind of grades Mr. Dean would give him."
"Mr. Dean? He's still teaching? I had him for Latin."
"God. I didn't realize he was that old!" She grinned to take the sting out of her jab, and his heart lurched. The twinkling eyes and quick twitch of her lips came straight out of memories of her mother — Lainie Haskell at that age, not the Haskell Witch but she might as well have been, the way she had bewitched him.
And then he had to go and die. And go away to college under another name, and find another woman to fill the empty spot in his heart, and father Gary. And since he was dead, Maria ended up married to his brother Dan to gain a name and family and fortune for the baby.
The Dragon's Eye was the other reason he was "dead." The damned thing demanded a selkie for the head of the Morgan clan. Ben couldn't change. Dan could. And the head of the clan had to be the eldest living son. Medieval primogeniture bullshit. End of story.
The glowing red football-shaped something had dominated Morgan life for over a thousand years. It talked. It thought. It gave pieces of itself to selected Morgans in each generation, ruby-colored Tears that talked to each other and helped Morgans to hide, to detect lies and see through illusions, to sneak in and steal or sail in with guns blazing and steal. Gave them the glib tongue to convince idiots to part with money for the goods thus stolen.
Between the Dragon's Eye and Morgan family business and the Haskell blood running here and there, life in Stonefort got too damned tangled. Small town, everyone lived in everyone else's back pocket. Take Alice Haskell's current girlfriend for example, the town cop, damned awkward connection by way of Caroline.
Latin made for safer ground. "Who's your current problem?"
Her grin twisted into a grimace. "Some guy calls himself Columbanus. What kind of Welsh name is that? He seems to operate on the Humpty Dumpty principle — 'When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean.' And I think he's applying Welsh grammar rules to Latin vocabulary. But then, I've never studied Welsh. Maybe he's just winging it."
"Hey, some of our priests weren't all that bright. If they had any brains, we gave them something better to do. Columbanus? That'd have to be way back, couple of centuries after the great exodus. What tripped you up?"
"Dingbat seems to think 'domina' and 'magistra' are interchangeable. Mixes 'saga' in with some hen-scratch that seems to be 'sacerdota', as if 'sacerdos' doesn't work both sides of the street. Either masculine or feminine priests. But then, he doesn't seem to like women much. Other stuff that ain't in any of the dictionaries." She waved at a stack of thick books on the table.
Ben reminded himself that she was a doctoral student, a nationally-certified brain a couple of years into grad school when she still couldn't get past the bouncer at a bar. She probably could make sense of stuff that had been gibberish to him.
"I think I know your guy. We had five or six priests call themselves 'Columbanus' — took some tight-assed Irish saint's name and turned it into a title. That one had a hard time getting used to living with a matriarchy. He kept tangling with your ancestress over the natural supremacy of the male. If I recall correctly, he died young. Funny thing, the name fell out of favor after that."
Her mouth quirked again, that fleeting Lainie smile. "Can't have been a poisoned apple. We didn't get apple trees until after the English showed up." She pointed at a museum-grade ash-splint basket full of glossy Winesaps on a side table. "Want one?"
He picked up an apple, buffed it on his sleeve, and bit into it. Cold, crisp, sweet, with the true wine tang in its juice. He remembered the same taste, most likely from the same tree, taken in bites from Lainie's hand while his head rested in her lap. Morgans and Haskells had been close for centuries. Now Caroline was both.
Speaking of which . . . "How's your brother?"
She reached into the top of her blouse and pulled out a pendant. Old worn silver, it wrapped a Celtic or Norse dragon around a red stone that seemed to glow with its own internal light. Dragon's Tear, a piece of the tie that bound the Morgan clan together. She murmured to it, as if it was a radio mike or perhaps a living thing. Both things it might well be.
"He's fine. He's working hard, getting to bed early, eating right, earning good grades. Needs a bigger allowance. Everything a dutiful freshman at college would say." She frowned for a moment, concentrating, then flashed her quirky grin again. "He's got a hot date tonight, a cute sophomore in that Computer Architecture class. She doesn't know he's a freshman."
Gary had placed out of the whole freshman year of Computer Science courses, as well as AP credit for two semesters each in math and physics. It looked like he shared some of his half-sister's brains. And he was about two hours' drive away, at the university in Naskeag Falls, which raised new questions about the Dragon and its Tears, the twinned pendants that Ben's children wore.
The two he knew about, anyway. This fatherhood business included a lot of twists and turns that hadn't been covered in the fine print. Apparently Lainie had intended to get pregnant. He didn't know whether Maria had also tucked that idea in the back of her head. Sex sure could interfere with a man's brain function.
At least Lainie hadn't been looking for marriage or child support. Haskell women usually kept a father's role to the necessary minimum. But Ben thought he ought to have a talk with Gary about that "cute sophomore." If she ever figured out the kid was rich . . .
Caroline's eyes had narrowed speculatively, as if she was reading his mind. Damn Alice and her home-study courses in amateur psychology. Scratch that. No "amateur" about it.
Being around Caroline made him twitchy — too smart, too sexy, a Haskell witch-in-training, and his own daughter. "I'm done with the computers. There's stuff down in the tunnels that wants doing, and then I'll go up to the house. Give me a beep when you're ready to leave. I'll need to reset the security."
Now she wore a sardonic cat-look that said, "I could do that for you, but I'm too polite to mention it." Her mix of Haskell and Morgan genes could mean big trouble, for the world if not for him.
But she only patted the VHF handheld radio that lay beside her stack of dictionaries. "Three longs and three shorts, number seven on the DTMF pad. No problem. I think I can take maybe another hour of this before I run away screaming. Then you can go back to sitting motionless in the center of your web. That's the Daddy we all know and love, the veritable Napoleon of Crime." She chuckled, and it was Lainie's throaty sexy laugh all over again.
Damn the girl.
He fled down the stairs, spiraling around within the tower wall and then passing from old stone masonry into older tunnels carved into the coarse-grained pink Maine granite. Morgans had held this point of sea-girt land for eight centuries, give or take a few, and his ancestors had memories of English fire and sword to fuel their native paranoia. The place hid defenses wrapped one around another like the layers of an onion.
And teeth. He stopped halfway down one damp dark tunnel, pulled on a section of electrical conduit, and then pushed upwards against the next junction box. It clicked, and he reached across to the far granite face and pushed on a particular star-drill groove in the rough-cut wall. Pushed a second time. Pushed a third time, and the click echoed again.
A narrow slit drew away from him, smoothly, with the faint hiss and whine of hydraulics. He slid sideways into the tight space formed between rock walls, a reminder to keep his weight under control, reached up, and tapped a code on three basalt inclusions in the bare granite. Lights glowed, faint and red to preserve night vision, and he felt the coolness of controlled humidity drying his forehead. The air reeked of grease and preservatives.
A storeroom opened out from him, hulking shapes and tubes and boxes. Toys for big boys, acquired by Morgans through the centuries and updated with the changes in military tech.
About time to do another round of buying, he thought. Overseas black market. Replace the recoilless rifle with a laser-guided rocket launcher, better range and accuracy. Took three rounds and too damn much time to blow up that speedboat chasing Dan and the kids. Someone could have gotten hurt.
That damned brujo had captured Dan, kidnapped the girls. He'd found out about the Dragon's Eye and wanted the power it carried. Gary and Caroline had slipped into the Pratt tunnels, a system very much like this one, and pulled Dan and their sisters out. But someone had noticed, in all the fire and shooting of Alice's other raid. The best laid plans of mice and witches . . .
But that wasn't why Ben had come down here. He turned and stepped around long boxes to a high workbench, felt-covered and backed by ranks of gunsmith's tools gleaming faintly in the dim light. He didn't particularly care for guns, had a professional dislike of finding them in the wrong hands, but had to admit that the occasional use of violence solved some tricky problems. Like the Pratts. And if Morgans needed to use guns, he damn well intended that they would work perfectly. Precise and reliable, just like any other proper tool.
He snapped on a work light, harsh and bright against the dimness of the cave, and smiled. An aluminum case lay under the light, rounded and ribbed for strength, about as thick as a briefcase but longer and narrower, sort of a sawed-off airline rifle case. He spun the lock dials and snapped the latches open. Lifting the lid revealed a green foam plastic lining cut to the precise outline of glinting dark gray flint.
The flint.
It took his breath away. It always did, on first sight, intricate and bizarre and beautiful. The jaguar god grinned at him, a flat profile with the illusion of depth to it, laughing at the secrets of the centuries.
He picked it up, startled as always by the weight of it which contrasted so much with the delicacy, and turned it so that the light glinted back and forth on the tiny facets and grooves of its making. Hundreds of hours — perhaps thousands — it must have taken, just for the one artifact. How many years of training and practice? How many false starts, ruined by a single slip of the hand, a single drip of salty sweat into the worker's eye at a crucial moment?
He traced one edge with his finger, the headdress of the god in profile. It sprouted out free from the mass and then curved and tapered to a single feather that he barely dared to touch, yet this fragility had survived a thousand years in the earth. He shook his head in awe.
He turned it again, and again, and again, letting light and shadow play across it, drinking the sight of it, and then laid it back in the protective foam. The jaguar winked at him. And then he noticed the red smear across it, felt the warmth and slick stickiness on his glove, and stared at a fine slash across his right palm.
The damned flint was so sharp, he hadn't even felt it bite. He peeled off the thin cotton glove, fumbled in a first-aid kit for antiseptic and a bandage, and patched his damaged hide awkwardly, left-handed. The cut stretched nearly an inch and a half and sank well into the meat. Almost worth a couple of stitches. But he wasn't about to go to a doctor, or even Alice.
Then he moistened a cotton ball with alcohol, and went to swab his blood off the flint, and froze with his hand in mid-air. The stone gleamed back at him, bare, no stain. The sight chilled him and raised hairs on the back of his neck.
It looked almost as if the jaguar had drunk his blood.
Ben blinked and rubbed his eyes, shivering. The tunnels stayed cold, year round. He shut the flint's case, turned off the light, and worked his way back through the rituals of the doorway.