The next morning, I prepared to help Caina rob a few banks.
That was technically illegal, I know, but the High Queen had told me to find proof to bring down Sulzer, and so long as I didn’t kill or hurt anyone, I doubted she would care very much how the sausage got made. Besides, I was planning to break into the safe deposit boxes of a man who was a Rebel and Archon collaborator, and who was either harboring or actually was a necromancer.
Once the proof of his crimes went to Homeland Security and possibly the Inquisition, some safe deposit boxes were going to be the least of Sulzer’s worries. And no Elves used the five banks that Sulzer employed for his secret businesses. That meant I wouldn’t have to worry about magical defenses. With my Cloaking, Masking, and Occlusion spells, I could walk right in, take what I wanted, and leave again without any human guards or mechanical alarms noticing my presence.
Which disturbed me a little, if I was honest.
I had a lot of power, which meant I had the responsibility to use it well. The High Queen and Morvilind had both told me that the price of power was the duty and the responsibility to use it wisely, and they hadn’t been wrong. If I really wanted to, I could probably steal enough in a single day to make myself a billionaire.
If I was going to rob some banks, I had to make sure I did it for the right reasons.
Then again, since I had seen a small army of undead specters rise from the ground, I was pretty sure I had damned good reasons.
Caina and I had worked out our plan the afternoon before, and I got dressed. I donned a gray pencil skirt, a white blouse, and a gray jacket, finishing the outfit off with high heels and a light touch of makeup. Into a small purse, I tucked my phone, a handgun, and a lockpick gun, though I didn’t think I would need them. Once I was dressed, I looked like a secretary.
Which was good, since that was the goal. The last time I had dressed like this had been the last time I had helped rob a bank, come to think of it. Back when Morvilind had been forcing me to work with Nicholas Connor and his Rebels, and Nicholas had been planning to break into the vaults of the Royal Bank to find information about the Sky Hammer project. The Royal Bank had been far better defended than the banks that Caina and I would visit today.
Then again, I had almost gotten killed several times during that job, and I had been shot four times.
No, best to be careful, even in a bank that lacked the Royal Bank’s superb defenses. One mistake could still get me killed.
I finished checking my reflection in the bathroom mirror when I heard my phone ring. I hurried to the dining room to fish it out of my purse, and I saw that it was Riordan’s number. It was seven in the morning, which meant it would be noon or so in London. I grinned and lifted it to my ear.
“Nadia’s printer toner,” I said, remembering when he had called me to ask me to dinner for the first time. “You empty out the cartridges, we’ll fill them up again. Satisfaction guaranteed.”
“You’re running an office supply business out of my condo?” said Riordan in a dry voice.
“I think you’d be more interested in the guaranteed satisfaction,” I said.
“I’ll take you up on that very soon,” said Riordan. “The business trip has gone well. We’ve tracked down most of the clients, and we haven’t lost any associates.”
That meant the group of Shadow Hunters had found and killed most of the wraithwolves, and they hadn’t lost any of their number in the process.
“That’s very good news,” I said. “Never fun to lose associates.” I hesitated, unsure of how much I could tell him. “My boss has a job for me right now.”
“Does she?” said Riordan, his voice growing wary.
“It’s nothing major,” I said. “I don’t even have to leave New York, and it should be wrapped up in a few days. I’ll tell you all about it when you get back. Um...but I do need to ask you something, and I think I can discuss this over the phone.”
“What is it?” said Riordan.
“Have you ever heard of a company called Ghost Securities?” I said. “I thought they just provided security guards for hospitals, but I suppose they do more.”
“Just a bit more, yes,” said Riordan. “They’re...very dedicated to their mission. Ruthless when they think it necessary. But my company has done business with them before. They can be trusted, once they give their word.”
“Can they?” I said. That was good to hear. I didn’t think Caina was setting me up, but I hadn’t survived this long by taking chances. “Have you ever met their New York branch director?”
“I’ve never met her, no,” said Riordan. “I’ve heard of her, though. She has a good reputation with my company. We’ve subcontracted some work out to Ghost Securities from time to time.”
“Really,” I said. I supposed that meant Caina knew that the Family of the Shadow Hunters was a real organization and not a group of stock characters in popular fiction. (I had seen a few movies about Shadow Hunters, and they were always ridiculously inaccurate.) I decided not to ask her about it. She had already deduced more about me than I was comfortable sharing, and I didn’t want her to know that my husband was a Shadow Hunter.
“If your boss has you working with them, you can trust them to a point,” said Riordan. “They won’t double-cross you unless they have a very good reason.” His voice turned dry again. “And if they double-cross you, I suppose you’ll make them regret it.”
“And how,” I said. Caina’s abilities made her immune to illusions, but they wouldn’t stop a sphere of elemental fire or an ice spike. I wanted to ask if Riordan had ever heard of the valikarion, but that wasn’t a safe topic for a phone call.
“Be careful,” said Riordan.
“I’m always careful,” I said.
He laughed. “And you’re such a good liar.”
“No, I’ll be careful,” I said. “I’m really looking forward to you coming back. Satisfaction guaranteed.”
“I’ll look forward to it,” said Riordan.
The conversation reminded me of when we had first started seeing each other, over a hundred and sixty years ago from my perspective, but only a few years from his. We had taken things slowly, because I had been burned in my relationship with Nicholas, and both of Riordan’s previous lovers had betrayed him and tried to kill him. But we had flirted a lot, had a lot of long phone conversations like this.
But, well, we were married now. There was no reason to do anything slowly.
Except for reasons of satisfaction, of course.
I wanted to stay on the phone with him, but we both had work to do, so we said goodbye and hung up. I let out a long breath, switched the phone to silent mode, and dropped it back into my purse. I really wished that Riordan were here. For one thing, I missed him. For another, he could have watched my back. I was reasonably sure that Caina was trustworthy, but I had been wrong before. And we were chasing a corrupt Congressman and a necromancer. A Shadow Hunter was a useful man to have around for that kind of thing.
I checked my reflection one last time, nodded to myself, and headed out.
I caught a taxi and told the driver to take me to the House of Agabyzus in Brooklyn. The fare was exorbitant, but I didn’t know how long today’s work would take, and I didn’t want to leave Riordan’s SUV on the street. The only thing worse than dealing with New York parking was dealing with New York’s impound lots. I claimed to be heading to the House of Agabyzus for a job interview, and the driver chatted away (well, rambled, mostly) about the various job interviews his children had done over the years, and the monologue eventually changed to a detailed analysis of the profound failings of New York’s various professional sports teams, followed by an account of how the driver had managed to stay alive during the Rebel attack on New York.
We both agreed that was the damnedest thing we had ever seen.
A half hour and several thousand words of conversation later, the taxi dropped me off at the House of Agabyzus. I looked around and spotted Caina sitting at one of the tables on the terrace, two cardboard cups of coffee before her. She was wearing a black suit and a white blouse of a different cut than yesterday. A gold chain glinted around her neck, along with earrings and a gold pin in her lapel. She had on a brown wig, and this time her contact lenses darkened her eyes to a near-black color. The combined effect made her look stark and forbidding, like a particularly humorless auditor.
“Good morning,” I said. “I like the Power Bitch look.”
Caina grinned. “It is a bit much, isn’t it? But since I’m going to pretend to be your boss, you can’t talk to me that way.”
“Sorry,” I said, sitting across from her. “I like the Power Bitch look, ma’am.”
Caina laughed. “Better, I suppose.” Her voice changed to her upper-class New York accent. She passed me the cup of coffee, and I took a grateful sip. “Ready?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s go engage in off-the-books financial transactions.”
“That’s the politest way I’ve ever heard a bank robbery described.”
Caina had managed to find a parking spot only five blocks away. We got into her unremarkable blue car and drove off.
“All right,” said Caina. “First bank on the list, United Banking of Western Brooklyn.”
New York had a lot of different banks, and I knew why. Martin Corbisher had been the chief financier of the Rebels, and he had also been an enormous asshole. (He had also been running for governor of Minnesota until I blew up his life, but that was another story.) Despite that, Corbisher had been a financial genius, and if the battle of New York had gone differently, he probably would have wound up as the finance minister of whatever totalitarian government Nicholas erected out of the ashes. Corbisher had explained that one of the chief reasons that pre-Conquest societies had failed was the concentration of too much power and money into too few banks and that even when they didn’t fail large banks inevitably caused social chaos. Consequently, the High Queen and the Elven nobles prevented any banks from getting too large or too powerful, one of the few royal policies that Corbisher had liked. (I think Nicholas had planned to shoot any surviving bankers once he took over.) Certainly, bankers turned up a lot on Punishment Day videos. I think there were something like a hundred different banks in the New York metropolitan area, none of them too large or powerful.
The flip side of this was that all the different banks made it easy for a guy like Sulzer to hide his money. Then again, Sulzer hadn’t hidden his money well enough to conceal it from someone like me, or an investigator like Caina.
United Banking of Western Brooklyn was a stately building that looked like a Roman temple, but the marble was actually painted stucco. Caina and I walked into the lobby, a long rectangular room with a counter for tellers, and Caina requested a meeting with a banker. She claimed to be an asset manager for the estate of a wealthy industrialist, and was interested in moving some of her client’s assets into CDs and bonds. I pretended to be Caina’s personal assistant, taking notes diligently on a legal pad.
I was actually noting the location of the bank’s safe deposit boxes and security cameras.
Five minutes into the banker’s pitch, I pretended to get a phone call for Caina, and she told me to take it in the car. I walked out of the bank’s front doors, Cloaked, and darted back inside before the doors closed. I reached into the pocket of my jacket and fished out a pair of latex gloves, tugging them over my hands. Wrapped in the invisibility of the Cloak spell, I hurried to the counter, climbed over it, and walked past the rows of counting machines and printers.
Then I slipped into the bank’s vault, the walls lined with safe deposit boxes.
As skilled as I had become with the Cloak spell, I still couldn’t use any other spells while it was in place. I ducked behind the vault door, out of sight of the security cameras, and dropped my Cloak and cast the Masking spell. I disguised myself as a random Homeland Security officer, wrapping myself in the illusion of a middle-aged man in a blue uniform. When the bank’s security people reviewed the footage later, the sight of a Homeland Security officer who did not actually exist would throw off any attempt to track us down.
I walked to the safe-deposit box that Joseph Sulzer had rented through his shell company. A quick spell of telekinetic force opened the lock, and I slid it open.
It didn’t have anything useful. I saw a pouch of diamonds and another of sapphires. There were several cardboard sleeves of gold coins. Sulzer had been clever enough to move some of his wealth into an anonymous and portable form. In the old days, I would have helped myself to the gems and gold to finance my efforts, but since I was a royal shadow agent now, I didn’t. I relocked the safe deposit box, ducked behind the vault door and Cloaked again, and walked outside the bank, tucking away the gloves as I did.
Then I dropped the Cloak and strode briskly back to Caina’s meeting with the banker. She thanked him, took his brochures, and promised to get in touch once she had spoken with her client.
“Anything?” said Caina as we left the bank.
“Nothing useful,” I said. “A couple hundred thousand dollars worth of diamonds, sapphires, and gold coins. No documents, though.”
Caina nodded and put her sunglasses back on as we approached her car. “That’s probably his emergency stash. If he needs to flee the country or go underground, he’ll take the gems and run. If we spook him badly enough that he runs for it, he’ll head here first. Might be a good way to catch him.”
“Well,” I said as Caina unlocked the car doors, “there are four more banks. We might find something more useful at one of them.”
The next two banks were a bust. We repeated the same tactics, with Caina as an imperious asset manager interested in purchasing bonds and CDs and me as her beleaguered personal assistant. I was struck again by how good of an actress Caina was. She disappeared into the role of the asset manager, and she did it so well that none of the bankers showed an iota of suspicion about who she really was. For that matter, none of them seemed surprised when I had to slip out to take a phone call for my demanding boss.
In the safe deposit box at the second bank, I found more gems and gold coins, along with the deeds to a couple of places in Brooklyn and (if I read the Spanish correctly) what appeared to be several properties in Bogotá, Colombia. If the gold and gems were his emergency money, I was willing to bet that the houses in Bogotá were his bolt hole. Sulzer must have realized there was a possibility that the Rebels were going to lose, and had prepared to escape if necessary.
Though if he was ready to go on the run, why hang out in New York and cast spells of necromancy?
The safe deposit box at the third bank held a collection of bearer bonds, but no documents.
At the fourth bank, though, I found all kinds of interesting things.
The fourth bank was in Manhattan. It had the pompous name of the Grand United New York Bank, and it was on Wall Street, not that far from the New York Stock Exchange. Like the first bank, it looked like a fake Roman temple. Unlike the first bank, it was built of actual marble and could have doubled as a courthouse or maybe a really fancy library. The Grand United New York Bank was the most prestigious bank in New York, and a lot of rich people banked here.
Of course, they accepted a guy like Sulzer, so maybe their standards weren’t so high after all.
The lobby was a vast space with polished marble floors and ornate pillars. It had clearly been built in imitation of the Royal Bank in Washington DC. A long counter of polished oak stood at the end of the lobby, perfectly coiffed and suited tellers standing behind it. Dozens of desks stood in the lobby, the bankers seated at them typing and talking into phones and generally looking productive. The place was busy enough that Caina and I had to wait forty minutes to see a banker.
Once we did, I repeated my usual procedure. I ducked outside, Cloaked, slipped back into the lobby, donned my gloves, and vaulted over the counter and headed for the safe deposit vaults. There were four vaults with safe deposit boxes behind the counter, and it took me a moment to locate the vault that held Sulzer’s box. Once I did, I ducked behind the vault door, Masked myself as a Homeland Security officer, and headed towards his box.
And as I did, I froze in surprise.
I felt a magical aura in the vault, something cold and corrupt and crawling. Dark magic?
No. Necromancy.
I worked the spell to detect magical forces, and I sensed the cold power radiating from Sulzer’s safe deposit box.
Bingo.
Despite the necromantic aura, I didn’t detect any warding spells on the safe deposit box, so I cast the spell to open locks and slid it open. Inside were deeds to various properties in Brooklyn, and I took quick pictures of them with my phone. I could sort through them with Caina later.
Beneath the deeds was a book.
It wasn’t a large book, about the size of a trade paperback, and it was only an inch thick. It had the look of a journal or an expensive notebook, and the leather cover was cracked and worn. There were Elven hieroglyphics on the cover, and the symbols glowed with sickly green light. I started to reach for the book and then stopped. If there was a necromantic spell on the thing, touching it was probably a bad idea.
Instead, I cast a minor spell of telekinetic force, grasping the cover with my thoughts. I used the spell to open the book and flip through the pages, and I saw rows and rows of Elven hieroglyphs, some of them accompanied by diagrams. I could only read some of the formal Elven hieroglyphs, but the ones I understood spoke of torture and death and spells of blood. The diagrams only reinforced that impression. They showed pictures of Elves being vivisected, probably while still alive, and more hieroglyphs explained how to use the various parts of an Elven corpse for necromantic purposes.
There were also detailed instructions on how to create an undead creature.
I wasn’t sure, but I thought this book was a beginner’s guide to necromantic magic. Like, the textbook for Necromancy 101. Someone like Vastarion had been far more powerful and advanced, but if Sulzer was teaching himself necromancy, this book would be a good starting point. Maybe Vastarion himself had given Sulzer the book.
I closed the book, took a picture of the cover, and then closed and locked the safe deposit box. Then I ducked behind the door, Cloaked, and headed back outside, hurrying across the bank’s lobby as fast as I could. Once I left the bank, I dropped my Cloak and walked back into the building and to the desk where Caina was meeting with the banker. I was breathing a little hard, and a faint sheen of sweat had appeared on my forehead. I could stay Cloaked while moving for around twelve minutes, maybe thirteen if I really concentrated, but it was still a strain.
“Are you all right?” said Caina. “You look like you were in a hurry.”
“Sorry to rush, ma’am,” I said, “but I got another call from the office. The documents you have been waiting for have arrived.”
“They have?” said Caina, raising her eyebrows. “Well, that is a pleasant surprise.” She turned to the banker. “I hope you’ll excuse me, but urgent business calls. I’ll discuss the details of your offer with my client and contact you if a decision is reached.”
The banker made apologetic noises, passed Caina another pamphlet about the Grand United New York Bank’s bond offerings, and then we left. We crossed the lobby and emerged back into the sunshine. It was just about noon, and the street was full of cars and the sidewalk filled with pedestrians hoping to get some lunch from the food carts lining the street. Caina and I descended the broad stairs that led to the bank’s door, and then we stepped back from the flow of traffic, putting our backs to the wall.
“What did you find?” said Caina in a low voice, putting her sunglasses back on.
“Some deeds for properties in Brooklyn and Queens,” I said. “I didn’t have time to take a good look at them, but none of the deeds are registered to his official companies. But I found a book with a powerful necromantic aura on it. It’s written in Elven hieroglyphics, and I think it’s a manual of necromantic spells.”
“Would another wizard recognize it?” said Caina.
“Instantly,” I said. “I felt its aura in the vault, and I wasn’t even checking for magic. I think we just need to make an anonymous call to the Inquisition. Any Elf who happens to stand in that vault would feel the presence of the book. That will get Sulzer arrested and have him turn up on a Punishment Day video, which is what my boss wants.” I looked at Caina. “Would that satisfy your client?”
“It would,” said Caina. “My client wants to resolve the problem of Sulzer’s necromantic activities. That would suffice. We...”
She stiffened and looked to the side.
In the same instant, I felt a flicker of necromantic power nearby.
I turned my head and saw Joseph Sulzer walking towards us.
***