Whatever process transformed the interior of the real department store called Daniel’s into the thoroughly imaginary department store Mad Maggie’s had not impacted the rest of the city. In Oliver’s imagining, Mad Maggie’s existed as a large warehouse in a parking lot oasis, a standalone building in the exurbs. Conversely, Daniel’s was the place you took a subway train to reach, or to come across because it was next to a host of other shops.
The shopping village aspect was still all there. They were downtown, much closer to the hub—and Pallas—than before they took to the underground at Candle Square.
This area of the city was sort of like an outdoor mall. The streets had been surrendered to pedestrian traffic over a decade earlier, and there was a constant rotation of stores through the high-rent storefronts. It lacked the singularity of vision one might see in a real outdoor mall, with several landlords instead just the one, but that just made it less homogenous, and also less artificial.
Ollie liked the area, although he never shopped in it, even though it wasn’t at all far from his apartment. These stores catered to a clientele that had money, which he did not have. Wilson and Minerva, perhaps, would be more familiar with it.
Of course, all of that was before there were aliens, a warrior from an imaginary timeline, ghosts, and whatever was going on with Minerva at this moment.
“Who is he,” Oliver asked.
“There is no other man here,” Cant added. He was scanning the area like any good warrior would. “We are alone.”
“I don’t know who he is. He jumped me in the basement.”
“All right, what does he want?” Ollie asked.
“This garment you wear. Is it enchanted?”
She addressed Cant first. Minnie didn’t seem to be having any trouble with him being there, and also had no problem flipping from modern woman in a modern city, to Atha the elven archer.
“The vest is cursed,” she said.
He gasped.
“We require a blessed token! Sorcerer! With all of those trinkets of yours, do you have a charm?”
“If you recall, I didn’t exactly pack for this trip,” Oliver said, “so no.”
“Then use your magic!”
Oliver decided he’d be better off ignoring Cant for the time being.
“What does he want?” he repeated to Minerva.
“He said there was something he needed inside that store, and he didn’t know where it was, but you would find it. He seems to have a strong opinion about what you should do with it next.”
She held up a cell phone, high over her head, and walked it over to Oliver.
“Don’t do anything crazy,” she said under her breath, “I think he may be able to see us, somehow.”
Ollie accepted the phone, while Minerva took several steps back, as if the phone was the bomb and not the thing on her chest. The line was already open. He hit the speaker button.
“Hello? Who’s this?” Oliver asked.
“You shouldn’t have to ask, Orson.” The man on the other end of the phone had a Russian accent. He sounded familiar, but Oliver couldn’t place him.
“I’m not…”
He was about to say I’m not Orson, before Minerva looked him in the eye and shook her head.
Her eyes were green, and they weren’t that kind of green before, and it distracted him temporarily, because she was clearly now playing the part of both Minerva and Atha, and Atha had unique and not-quite-human green eyes.
“Hello… old friend,” he said on the phone. “I thought you were dead.”
Minerva made a silent what? to which he shrugged. He was ad-libbing, but with the best generic dialogue that came to mind. It seemed to fit the situation.
His old friend laughed.
“And now you have followed the clues right to where I wanted. Do you have it?”
He realized he had spoken to this man.
“Not sure what you’re talking about, Koestler.”
“We’ve been playing this game for too long, comrade. Please don’t make me blow up your lovely little girlfriend. You know I will. Singapore wasn’t all that long ago.”
Singapore was where I killed him, Oliver thought. After he murdered my partner. He was holding her captive to force me to betray my country and I wouldn’t do it, and he killed her. I hunted him down and had a chance to bring him in alive, and instead I shot him in cold blood and watched his body fall off one of the tallest buildings in the world. He shouldn’t be alive.
“I remember,” Oliver said.
“I am sure you do. Now. Do you have it?”
“I have it.”
“Prove this to me.”
“Lot forty-two.”
There was a pause. Then: “Is it intact?”
“Of course it is. It’s a lethal poison, isn’t it? If it broke, we would be dead.”
“The whole city would be dead. Perhaps the country. And yet since the evacuation, we are very much alone. I could have been convinced the contagion escaped, but for the lack of bodies.”
“All right so you have your proof. This is your game, how do you want to play it?”
“Ordinarily, I would meet you in public, where your lady friend’s kaboom would destroy many more lives, and where you might be less inclined to employ that irrational heroism of yours. But since you’ve gone to such great pains to remove all the collateral damage from the city, I have had to make other plans.”
“I’m not hearing an answer.”
“That place you spoke of. Pallas, yes? You will go there and you will await further instructions. You have thirty minutes.”
“Yeah, I’m gonna need more time than that.”
“What makes you think you are in any position to negotiate?”
“Koestler, look around. There’s no public transportation, the cars are all dead, and this is just a guess, but I think sprinting in a suicide vest is a bad idea. Plus, we’ve been trying to get to Pallas since the middle of the afternoon, it’s just not that easy a commute.”
“You are going to run out of time in your effort to talk me to death, as always. You now have twenty minutes.”
“All right, how about this? She’s gonna be holding the vial you’re so keen on, so if you blow her up, you blow up your prize too.”
“This would aerosolize the pathogen. You would not be so reckless.”
“I admit, it’s not ideal, but if that happens I’ll be dead too, so maybe I don’t care all that much about the consequences.”
There was a long silence, as Koestler ran through his options.
Oliver thought he was foolish for having arranged all this without a secondary consequence, like another hostage, and Koestler wasn’t a foolish man. This meant Oliver was missing something.
“All right, you have one hour.”
“Might take longer.”
“One hour, and then I will set off the bomb and let this entire nation go to hell.”
Koestler hung up.
“Did you just use our lives as collateral to buy more time?” Minnie asked. She looked a little nonplussed, but that might have been the bomb she was wearing.
“Not really. Pretty sure he’s bluffing.”
“Why, because he doesn’t want to release a pathogen in the city?”
“He’s motivated by money these days. When he was younger, it was the cause, but not any more. The vial is worthless to him if he can’t sell it.”
“How do you know any of that?”
“No idea. Let’s just go with it.”
He pulled out the Lot 42 box from his back pocket.
“Now, we have a little less than an hour to figure out what this really is and to disarm that bomb.”
“I thought you guys said it was a lethal virus or something.”
“Could be. I never wrote any of this down. W is for weapon, but that could mean a lot of things. All I know is, Koestler wants me to think that’s what it is. Just like he wants me to think he’s okay with blowing it up. Wilson? I could use some plot advice.”
He turned around to the space Wilson last occupied when they emerged from the entrance of Mad Maggie’s/Daniel’s. Wilson wasn’t there.
“Where’d he go this time?” he asked.
“You saw Wilson?” Minnie asked.
“He was with us. Didn’t you see him?”
“Just you two.”
“He is a sorcerer,” Cant said. “Their trickery is no surprise.”
“If you feel that way, maybe you should stop kidnapping them. But you just gave me an idea. I need a modern wizard. I need the Internet.”
“Is that one of your gods?” Cant asked.
“It might as well be.”
“The city has no power,” Minerva said.
“But the cell phone towers are working, babe,” he said, holding up Koestler’s phone. “So let’s get moving.”
“All right. But, did you just call me babe?”
The trip to Ollie’s apartment was only ten minutes at a casual pace, which they took. It looked like the local alien invaders were on a break.
Minerva seemed a little on edge on account of the bomb she was stuck inside of, and wanted to move faster, but Oliver wasn’t kidding when he said it seemed like a bad idea to sprint when wearing one of those things.
He had the irrational belief that he could disarm the bomb vest when the time came. It was irrational because it stemmed from an understanding of how bombs worked that he was pretty sure he didn’t actually have, but that Orson likely did. That was good enough, because the other thing Orson had a lot of was confidence. And hyper-competence was a job requirement, so he had good reason.
“Tell me what this is,” Minerva asked, when they were about a block from the apartment building.
“It’s a techno-thriller. Or something like it. Something with spies. Maybe a Cold War story.”
“Did you write one? I don’t remember hearing about it.”
“No, but it was going to be next. Also, I think Koestler might have been the pilot of that helicopter that crashed outside of your building.”
“The one we saved? He doesn’t sound very grateful.”
“He doesn’t, does he? Well, that’s Koestler for you.”
Minnie laughed.
“Your old friend, Koestler,” she said. “I wasn’t sure you were going to follow me into that smoke.”
“Well, somebody had to.”
“Glad you did. I was worried you were going to stay passive. Sure, now I have a bomb on my chest, but it’s mostly worked out.”
“I guess. I’m pretty positive I’ve completely lost my mind, sweetheart, but I figured I’d better get to the end of this first and then pick up the pieces. Might as well embrace the absurd.”
“That’s the spirit. So what makes you think he was the pilot?”
“I don’t think he was the pilot; I think he was the guy sitting in the pilot’s seat. But that’s splitting hairs. I was thinking of this plot when the chopper went down, and the plot I was thinking of had a crash in it.”
“So did your military sci-fi. Inferentially.”
“Ben from my romance outline had a map to treasure that was hidden in the floor of the store from my ghost story, which I found with the help of a warrior from my epic fantasy. Everything’s running into everything else. I wonder why he was named Ben?”
“He was just a sketch. All you wrote was an outline.”
“Yeah, but his name was Nathan in the outline. Yet you said the first time you heard Ben’s name you knew he was important. I still don’t get why. Was it because he had a last name?”
“That was half the reason, yes,” Minerva said. “But only half.”
“What was this Ben’s family name?” Cant asked.
Minerva smiled.
“It was Codeks, Cant,” she said.
Cant laughed.
“Ben Codeks!”
Then Oliver got it. Maybe he needed Cant to say it out loud first.
“Ben, for Benja Codex,” Ollie said. “That’s cute.”
“Indeed! The ur-text for the legend of the Kingdom itself, hidden in human form, in this strange land. That potion so coveted by your foe, the sorcerer Koestler, is the key to the Kingdom itself, for that is the only thing the Benja Codex could be leading us to. Where is this man now?”
“He died,” Minnie said. “He had a heart attack. We tried to save him.”
“This only means you’ve lost track of the codex,” Cant said. “As before, you cannot kill what is not alive.”
They got to the stoop of the apartment building.
“This is where you live?” Minerva asked. “Looks nice.”
“It isn’t. It’s an old building and I live in an expensive coffin. But it’s what I could afford.”
Cant hesitated at the base of the stairs.
“Coming?” Oliver asked.
“No. These places disturb me.”
“You mean… buildings?”
“It’s unnatural. You southerners mock us for the way we live north of the Ailings and then build your own mountains and live inside of them. I can see enemies approach better from here.”
“His people aren’t fond of enclosures,” Minerva said. Unless she was Atha when she said it, which was entirely possible.
“And elves prefer trees. They hide their discomfort better is all.”
“Especially when they’re wearing cursed objects and the only available sorcerer wants to go inside,” Minerva said.
“We’ll be right out,” Oliver said, “don’t vanish.”
“You think I would know how?”
“I think people have been vanishing a lot lately around here, so don’t do that.”
The inside looked no different than the last time Oliver was there, which was refreshing. No lights, though, and that was a little annoying, because he’d lost the light he’d been using for the past couple of genres. What they had to navigate by was the soft glow from Koestler’s cell phone and the blinking electronics on the bomb. This was enough, but only because he already knew the way.
Six flights up creaky stairs was a little unnerving. He was on edge, and not sure if that was a residue of the ghost story he’d just survived—the building still felt haunted—or a component of his new ultra-competence. He thought it was probably the second thing, and wished he had a gun in his hand.
They were too exposed.
But they got to the door okay. He’d changed outfits two or three times by now, and wasn’t entirely in charge of those wardrobe swaps, so it was a nice surprise when the key to the place was still in his pocket where it was supposed to be.
“Prepare to be not impressed,” he said, opening the apartment door. They stepped in.
“All right,” she said. “I’m not impressed.”
“Told you.”
“I’m kidding. It’s dark and I can’t see anything. But what’s that smell?”
“I don’t really know. Laundry, probably. I don’t have any food in here. It always smells like that.”
“I’m glad Cant stayed outside. My senses appear to be heightened when I’m around him.”
“Well, you are an elf.”
“Not right now. And when did you start talking about this stuff like it was perfectly normal?”
“It’s not normal, darling, it’s insane. But I’m gonna keep moving forward. No sin in keeping alive.”
“I think you like this version of yourself a little too much, Oliver. Meanwhile, I went from warrior to damsel in distress. If we survive this, remind me to be mad at you about that.”
“You can’t hold me accountable for a popular trope.”
“Sure I can. You had a problem with every other cliché, but not this one?”
“Clichés and tropes aren’t the same thing.”
“Take that up with Wilson. I just want this bomb off, thank you. And maybe to not be called sweetheart and babe quite as often.”
The laptop was on the mattress, where he left it. He opened it up, which bathed the room in a healthy glow. He used that to find a proper flashlight.
“This is the whole apartment?” Minerva asked. “There isn’t another room on the side somewhere?”
“This is the entire place. Enjoy the spacious accommodations. Especially the palatial mattress on the floor that’s also the full extent of the seating possibilities.”
“It’s body odor.”
“What is?”
“The smell. You don’t go to the laundry enough.”
“That’s true. Look, if I knew today was the day I’d be bringing you here, I’d have picked up and fumigated.”
“Oh, but you planned on bringing me here?”
“I wouldn’t call it a plan. An aspiration.”
She laughed.
“I think I probably would have come.”
It wasn’t easy to tell in the light, but he thought he was getting a good smile from her. Given there was hardly any standing room, she was smiling at a time when they were right on top of one another, which resulted in a brief, electric frisson that Oliver was sure he wasn’t imagining.
“Look, I would love to talk about any other plans you had for me, Ollie, but I’m going to need to change into something more comfortable first. Something less explosive.”
“Right.”
He returned his attention to the laptop, sat down in his usual spot and began typing commands. Minerva stood around awkwardly for a few seconds before deciding to sit as well.
“So how do you have Internet access?” she asked. “Without any power?”
“The laptop has a battery, and I’m magic.”
“No, I mean really.”
“All right, battery power, and the need for expository information to be obtained at this point in the story.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, I’m serious. We don’t have a story to follow here, but every story has beats it’s gotta hit. Right now, I need to know more about Lot Forty-Two, so here we are.”
“I don’t know how you’re going to get anything with only that piece of information.”
“Oh, I have more than that.”
He was actually just entering commands into a search engine, which was the same thing anyone with basic web access and a little free time could do. He expected to hit a firewall at some point that would require a more robust skillset, but that hadn’t happened yet.
“Like what?”
“Koestler wants it, and he said it’s related to the government in some way, so now I’m looking for Lot Forty-Two plus U.S. Government. I also know it’s related to a program that suffered some kind of accident: a fire. People were killed. I think the accident and the deaths were both classified, and I think the bodies were buried underneath the old department store downtown.”
“Daniel’s? That’s been there forever.”
“The building has, but the basement and the subway connection only dates back to… 1972, it looks like.”
“So a local top secret government program from the late 1960’s that ended with a fire and a mass grave. In the city, somehow.”
“It’s not that crazy. The first nuclear reactor was built in a sub-basement in Chicago. And part of that land… There.”
“What?”
He turned the laptop so she could see his screen. She didn’t look as impressed as he expected her to be.
“I don’t get it,” she said.
It was a city map, circa 1967. One block from the corner on which Daniel’s sat was a square building identified as a student center for the university. A subway station existed in that spot now.
“I don’t think that was really a student center,” Oliver said.
He called up images from the street for the same era, revealing a brick building with a glassed entrance and no windows.
“I agree that that’s the most uninviting student center I’ve ever seen, but this is pretty thin,” Minerva said.
“The building burned down a year after that photo.”
“Okay, now I’m with you. What happened?”
Oliver scrolled through a couple of pages. There was only so much more he was going to be able to get from public resources, though.
“The papers at the time have almost no details. It happened in the summer, during a renovation, and that’s all. Nobody hurt, infrastructure damaged, the school sold the property to the city rather than rebuild. That’s it.”
There was an icon on his desktop he had never noticed before: the silhouette of an owl. Seeing that made everything fall into place.
“He needs my access,” he muttered.
“What’s that?”
Oliver ignored her, because time was now very important. He had to know what Lot 42 was and then get out. He clicked on the icon.
A screen he’d never seen before—and yet was somehow intimately familiar with—popped up. It was a security portal for a firewall, and it needed a user ID and a password. Putting zero thought into it, he let his fingers type whatever they wanted.
The user ID that worked was OrsonDTN. The password was fifteen digits, and he entered it so fast he couldn’t have repeated it at gunpoint.
Just keep rolling with it, he told himself.
The portal led to a list of files.
“Ollie.”
“Hang on.”
There were dozens of file names. He didn’t have the time to go through every one of them to figure out where he was supposed to be looking. On top of that, this was the first stage of access, and if what he wanted was hidden here, it was poorly hidden indeed. He scanned the page until he discovered an Archives link. From there, he found the right era—they were split into five year chunks—where he was greeted with a collection of random character file titles, half with RESTRICTED flags on them.
“It’s just that we’re running out of time,” Minerva said. “The bomb, and all that.”
“Oh, right. Don’t worry, it’s not a real bomb.”
“What? Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
“How long have you known?”
“About a minute.”
The random character file titles were all four letters long. His first thought was that he was looking at DNA coding, but there was far too great a variety of letters in use for it to be something like that. Then he saw what he wanted. The file was called TAWU.
“Tenth Avenue Writers Underground,” he muttered.
“Oliver!”
“What?”
“How do you know it isn’t a real bomb? This is kind of important, so I’d like to understand your reasoning, if that’s okay.”
“Our time was up thirty seconds ago, that’s how I know. Now give me a second.”
He clicked on the TAWU file, and was greeted with another password portal. This one required a four-digit code. After trying TAWU—which unsurprisingly did not work—he thought about it for a few seconds, and then tried Wilson and Minerva’s condo number.
The file opened. He began reading.
Lot 42 was the name of the most successful—and last—trial run in an experiment in remote viewing: Project Wise Eyes. It was similar to the MK Ultra experiments the CIA ran, except the subjects in these tests were chemically induced into a state which allowed them to remotely view things.
These experiments worked, or so the team running it thought. The test subjects were able to report back with accurate information, providing details they couldn’t possibly have known. Better, the formula could work on anybody: the government didn’t need someone who already had psychic powers. They could give psychic powers to anyone, temporarily, under extremely controlled conditions.
Things started to go wrong when one subject—a young woman whose picture happened to be in the file—reported that not only was she able to see remotely, she was able to move things around remotely. It got worse from there. Others soon found they could not just move things, they could alter the nature of things: suspend the laws of physics, transform people into dogs, and so on. It was fantastic, and impossible, and entirely unverifiable. In the real world, nobody ended up being turned into dogs, gravity was never suspended temporarily, or any of that.
Despite this, all of the remote viewers insisted their experiences were real. The conclusion of the head scientist attached to the project (his name was redacted, even at this level) was that the test subjects were indeed remotely viewing something, but it wasn’t the real world. It was some other place.
It read like bad science fiction, which a part of Oliver’s brain decided it probably was. At the same time, he couldn’t ignore the fact that he knew the face of the woman in the file. It was the ghost in Mad Maggie’s. It was also, somehow, Minerva.
“All right,” Minerva said. She’d been hyperventilating for the past minute or so, as Ollie read, and she expected to die. “How did you know it wasn’t real?”
“Koestler’s too smart. If that’s a real bomb, he put the power into my hands, since I’m the one holding the Lot Forty-Two samples, and he doesn’t want it blown up. He’d like me to think this is some kind of world-ending virus to appeal to my sense of duty, but really he just wanted me to look it up to find out what it really is.”
“You mean, what you’re doing right now?”
“That’s exactly what I mean. I have access to information he doesn’t have and he’s tricked me into using it. Which means somewhere in that vest you have on is a spybot that just airhopped onto my computer’s signal and recorded my keystrokes.”
“If you know all this, why did you do it?”
“Because I still had to know what the formula really was. Besides, I had nothing better to do; we’re already cornered.”
The cell phone rang. Ollie answered, and put it on speaker again.
“How’d I do?”
“Very good,” Koestler said.
“He’s in the building?” Minerva asked, quietly. Oliver nodded.
“Now, I would ask you to kindly deliver the samples to me, and promise to let you live if you did this thing, but we both know this is a waste of breath. I am not letting you exit alive.”
“You’re nothing if not an honest man.”
“I would be hurt if you thought otherwise.”
There was a small black steamer trunk sitting under the front window. Oliver had been using it as a table to hold up a houseplant that had perished sometime in the past year. He kept watering it anyway, in part because he thought it would eventually recover, and in part because he didn’t feel like throwing it away and finding a new plant to kill.
What was interesting was that he could have sworn the thing holding the plant up was an actual table, not a trunk.
“So now what, Koestler?”
“Now you stay where you are. I’ll be along presently.”
The line went dead.
Oliver shoved the plant aside, and opened the trunk.
“I hope you’re keeping track of this, because I’m lost,” Minerva said.
“I am. Let’s get that vest off of you. He can still use it to track our movements.”
Inside the trunk was a layer of neatly folded clothing, which should have been a giveaway that something was amiss inasmuch as Oliver never folded anything. He lifted the clothes aside to reveal a much more interesting layer. Specifically: a bulletproof vest, a Glock G29, and a toolkit.
He removed the toolkit first.
“Step over here,” he said.
The bomb vest was locked to her with a high-tension cable wire usually seen attached to bike locks. It didn’t look like something Oliver could cut through quickly without a bolt-cutter, and he didn’t have one of those. He did have a lockpick, though, and the padlock holding the whole thing together looked pretty basic. That could mean it was a trick.
With the flashlight, he examined the vest closely, top to bottom, on both sides.
“What are you looking for?” she asked.
“A failsafe.”
“I thought you said it isn’t a bomb.”
“It’s not, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing lethal about it. He can kill you without blowing us both up.”
“I continue to not like this in the slightest.”
“Noted.”
There wasn’t anything else there. He saw everything one would expect from a live bomb, which only meant that the wiring and electronics were real. If the C-4 bricks were fake, it wouldn’t matter.
Oliver got to work on the lock, which was in the center of her chest. This was slightly awkward, but only slightly.
“You’re sure there aren’t any other surprises?” she asked.
“Pretty sure, yeah. You want me to cut the red wire first?”
“Or the blue.”
“I could start to cut the red wire, change my mind at the last second, and cut the blue. That always seems to work.”
“Funny.”
“Then I could exhale when the bomb doesn’t go off, and say something clever.”
The lock opened.
“There we are,” he said, pulling the padlock off. “You can remove that now.”
“You’re sure.”
“Pretty sure. I mean, there’s a chance this is a misdirect and I’m not actually the hero, in which case the bomb will go off and the real hero will be whoever turns up to avenge my death, but I don’t think this is one of those.”
“Jesus, Ollie, what if it’s just real life? Bombs actually go off in real life.”
“True. Take it off anyway. Put this on instead.”
He tossed her the bulletproof vest.
“It may be a little big,” he added.
“What about one for you?”
“I’ll be fine.”
He checked the Glock. It was loaded, as he expected it would be.
Minerva took off the bomb vest. They did not die. She slipped on the bulletproof one.
“Now?” she asked.
Now you get taken hostage, he thought.
“We try and get out of here alive,” he said. “Let’s move.”
Ollie cracked open the door. There was good reason to think the hallway was clear, only because the building had eight floors. Whatever tracker happened to be in that bomb vest, it wouldn’t be all that helpful when it came to identifying the correct floor. GPS is great with north-south-east-west, and not so good with up-down.
This was assuming Koestler had tech that was functioning during a citywide blackout. Since his cell worked (as did Ollie’s laptop) he imagined this was a good assumption.
He considered using a hand mirror to check the hallway more thoroughly, but he had no mirror and the hall had no light, so it would have been a fruitless exercise. He did have a flashlight now, but that was going to end up being more useful when it came to getting shot at than it would if he were the one doing the shooting. Better to acclimate his eyes as well as possible and keep the flashlight for emergencies.
When they came out of the apartment, it was in a crouch. Ollie went first, on his knees, checking both ends of the corridor. He crawled out to the opposite wall and then waved Minerva out. No guns went off, and the floor was quiet. He got to his feet and helped her to hers.
“We make for the stairs,” he whispered, “and get you out of here.”
“What about you?”
“I don’t leave until Koestler does. That’s just how this has to work.”
She looked like she was ready to argue, but decided this was not the best time to do that.
They made it to the landing, when the floor erupted. Gunfire, from above. Oliver more or less expected it; he was already pushing Minnie back against the wall of the stairwell before the first bullet landed.
It wasn’t the kind of place that lent it self naturally to clean sight lines. He knew it, and so did Koestler.
“That doesn’t sound like your Walther PP, buddy,” Oliver shouted. “Did you finally retire that thing?”
“I’m afraid I lost it when dying in Singapore,” Koestler said. He was one flight up. “A shame. But, sentimentality is not best expressed in small arms, I’ve decided.”
Ollie stepped out and fired twice in roughly the correct direction. He stepped back again, and waited.
“You’ve held onto the Glock, though,” Koestler said. His voice was higher up now. “Perhaps your perspective on sentiment differs.”
“I just like the gun.”
Ollie moved to the base of the stairs leading up. The way looked clear.
“Go down,” he whispered to Minerva. “Get to Cant, I’ll be out when I’m done.”
“Come with me!”
“I have to finish this.”
“No you don’t. You can just…”
She gestured rather than finishing the thought, which was fine. The gesture meant surrender, but what she meant by it was, you don’t have to follow this plot if you don’t want to. He was pretty sure she was wrong.
Koestler fired once, a shot that came nowhere near anybody, but caused both Ollie and Minnie to duck defensively. Then they heard him running.
“He’s heading for the roof,” Oliver said. “I have to stop him. Go, get out of here!”
He didn’t wait around to see her head down; Koestler was getting away.
Not this time, he thought. Not again.
He reached the next floor and pushed up against the wall in anticipation of gunshots which never came. Then on to the next flight, and then to the top, and the doorway leading to the roof.
The building had a flat rooftop that was officially off-limits to the tenants, and was unofficially the best spot to get a suntan in the summertime. It was possible to go from this roof to either of the adjacent buildings by jumping a five-foot gap. That made it a viable escape route, and a sensible option for an international mercenary.
Oliver knew the roof well. He knew as soon as he exited the door that he was vulnerable to an attack from the side of the door and from above the exit. Other than that there was no place to hide. So, when he pushed through the door he checked both positions.
He’d miscalculated, in two ways. First, Koestler wasn’t there, and neither was anyone else. Second, Koestler didn’t mean to use the rooftops to escape. There was a helicopter parked on the top of an adjacent building.
He swept the whole rooftop just to be sure. Cigarette butts and seagull poop, a couple of empty beer bottles and an old tube of suntan lotion. No Russian.
He wondered how it was possible for him to have gotten to the roof first, then he heard a creak. The door to the stairs was opening.
Ollie spun around, and trained his gun on the opening.
“What, did you stop for the bathroom?” Oliver asked. But Koestler didn’t emerge from the doorway: Minerva did.
“I told you…”
“I’m sorry,” she said. She looked frightened, which he realized was caused by the Smith & Wesson pointed at the back of her head.
“So eager you were to catch me, you ran right past, old friend,” Koestler said. “What a tragedy, your young lady elected to follow you up.”
The Russian wrapped an arm around Minerva’s neck and pushed the gun barrel against her temple. This was hardly the first time he’d picked up a human shield in his travels, evidently.
Koestler was a hard man. He had thin, grey-white hair atop a square block of a head that looked as if it had been chiseled. Every scar and wrinkle looked earned, and his cobalt eyes looked like they belonged to someone ready to tell you about every one of them. He was dressed in a black turtleneck and a brown jacket, as if he’d only just stepped off of a Russian sub from thirty years past. He looked like the kind of man people had to come up with a plan to deal with. He was bad news.
“Why don’t you let her go?” Oliver said. “I have Lot Forty-Two. It’s yours.”
“Yes, we will get to that. You read the file, did you not? Tell me, do you know how they shut down this Project Wise Eyes?”
“The fire.”
“Oh, yes, the fire. But that’s such an understatement. I will read the documents later, at my leisure, once you are dead but before I sell the contents of that entire database to some extremely motivated parties with which I am familiar. My information comes from a jocular scientist who had no reason to lie after all the torture. This fire, you see, it came only after the test subjects stopped needing doses of the compound. Now, I admit the man who told me this was in a tremendous amount of pain, but he swears that things began happening around the facility. Little things at first, but then… large things. Entire doorways replaced by walls. Objects levitating. Hamburgers lowing like cattle.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I thought so as well! But it was a string I had to pull. Now, I feel it is far less ridiculous. Now I believe it is true. And the fire is the worst part. For when it became clear they could no longer control the test subjects, the military—your government—decided to liquidate them. Twenty men and women, in twenty separate rooms, each dosed with Lot Forty-Two, and sent on some mission, just as they had been every other time. It put them in something like a coma, I’m told. Only, on this occasion the dose was laced with a poison. None of them would awaken, and to make certain of that, they sealed up the building and burned the bodies right where they lay.”
“Oh, god,” Minerva said quietly.
“Yes indeed,” Koestler said. “I wonder, what do you suppose happens to you if someone kills your body while you are not inhabiting it? Perhaps you know, Orson?”
You get angry ghosts, Oliver thought.
“Sounds like a fairy tale, Koestler,” he said. “But if you want to test it out yourself, here you go.”
He held up the Lot 42 tin.
“Just put it on the ground, and kick it aside. I’ll collect it once I’m done with you.”
Minnie looked like she was about ready to try something. She was gesturing with her hand, out of sight of Koestler. She was holding up three fingers.
Ollie knew the trick. She’d count down to one and then drop, or head-butt Koestler, or elbow him in the groin, and Oliver was supposed to shoot at the same time, all before the Russian had a chance to retaliate against either of them. It was a cool trick that worked great in the movies, the problem being that it wouldn’t work here. Their opponent was too well-trained.
“Now place your gun on the ground as well, if you would please.”
Oliver crouched down, and had just let go of his gun when Minerva reached her last finger. She went with the head-butt. It missed, because Koestler saw it coming and moved aside. She fell backwards a little, off-balance, before he caught her.
“Such initiative!” he exclaimed. He spun her around and in a quick, and rather elegant maneuver, flung her right over the side of the building. Ollie had his gun again by the time Koestler righted himself.
Koestler fired, but at the spot Oliver no longer occupied. Ollie dove to his left, came up on one knee, and fired a round into the Russian’s right shoulder. Koestler’s second shot went wide, and there wasn’t a third, because he needed the shoulder in order to fire the gun.
“Now we’re done, you son of a bitch,” Oliver said.
“I don’t think we are.”
“Oliver, help me!” Minerva cried. She hadn’t gone all the way off the roof; he could see her hand on the edge.
Distracted, he didn’t see Koestler drop down and grab a handful of roof gravel until that gravel was being thrown in his face. The Russian charged, and nearly took them both over the side. Ollie landed hard on his back, his gun skittering out of reach.
But Koestler only had one good arm. Oliver rabbit-punched him in the wounded shoulder and shoved him aside, and then scrambled over to Minnie. He reached down and caught her by the vest just a second or two before her grip gave out.
“I have you,” he said.
“You’re letting him get away!”
He was indeed. Koestler scooped up the Lot 42 tin and ran to the helicopter, electing that over finding one of the guns and possibly giving Ollie another chance to kill him.
The chopper’s rotors got going. It took longer to get Minerva back up onto the roof than it did for Koestler to get airborne.
“I can’t believe you let him have it,” Minerva said. “Isn’t that formula dangerous?”
“It is, yes.”
“So did you switch them out?”
“No. That would have been a good idea, but I didn’t have a chance.”
“All right, then why don’t you look worried?”
The chopper reached an altitude sufficient to clear all the buildings in the vicinity, and then made a bee-line inbound.
“There’s a no-fly zone over this city, remember?”
“Sure but that was…”
Then a set of lights swung into view behind Koestler: one yellow, one a little purplish. They split up and flanked the helicopter. A second later a pair of lightning bolts erupted from the alien devices, and the chopper looked like something caught in a Faraday cage. It dropped out of view.
“Ouch,” Minnie said.
A plume of smoke rose up from what had to be a pretty rough crash landing.
“I guess he’s going to need us to pull him from the wreckage again,” Oliver said. “Good thing we’re going that way already.”
“Are we?”
“Sure. I know it’s hard to see with the power down, but he just crashed that thing right in front of Pallas. Hope you’re still up for dancing.”