I’d hoped for better answers from my two unnamed pilot buddies, but Milton Hardy had never sent them to Buenos Aires before, so they didn’t have a company hotel or whatever. It was, the copilot assured me, the same with their trip to Johannesburg. Neither had been there before; arrangements had been made for them, but everything would be explained once they landed.
I’d also hoped that they could give me the information I needed, then I could leave them with the plane. Tell them to fill up the tank and get ready to head back to the US, because once we cleaned up Hardy’s mess, we had to get back to clean up Hardy himself and help track down Serrac’s cousins.
It was a lot. I knew it was a lot, but we would manage. All we had to do was press ahead and keep fighting.
The copilot said he was friends with the pilots on the other flight, and he promised to help. If he couldn’t track down the passengers, he’d find the pilots and figure out what they knew.
Annalise had told me to stay in the cockpit until she called me, but I thought she might want an update.
I slipped out of the cockpit and moved toward the door into the cabin.
And there she was, sitting in her chair with a work table folded over in front of her. She was holding a pen in her hand, and she was drawing something on the back side of a silver soup spoon.
Sweat ran down her face. Her breathing was ragged, but I could hear the way she struggled to keep it steady and measured. All of her focus was directed downward at the little piece of metal before her.
On the table to her right was a little pile of spoons, no more than half a dozen. She was replenishing her spells.
From personal experience, I knew that casting a spell—channeling all that energy into an inanimate object—was the most painful thing imaginable. Creating my ghost knife had felt like setting myself on fire. By the way she looked, Annalise was going through the same shit.
I leaned back out of sight. For whatever reason, she wanted privacy for this, and if there was anyone who deserved a little privacy, it was her. I felt like an asshole for returning before she was ready for me. I opened the little fridge and found a platter with chicken and mashed potatoes. I peeled back the plastic and ate it cold.
Annalise and I had already snapped up the Book of Oceans, one of the three original sources of magic in this world, but she hadn’t used it. She was still casting spells from the diluted version passed on to her by the mentor/teacher/all-around creep who had brought her into this life, and she maybe had the weakest spells out of anyone in the whole stupid society. My ghost knife, the only spell I’d ever cast myself, came from a spell book that was much closer to the source than what she had.
The thought made me want to call Elizabeth Tredwell again to tell her that Annalise needed better weapons. By their own admission, no one in the society worked as hard as she did, and still she had to torture herself over and over just to have the spells we needed. And it was all because the society wouldn’t let peers share spells, so the powerful could hoard their power.
Things needed to change.
I slipped back into the cockpit and buckled myself into the jump seat. The pilot didn’t seem happy.
“Don’t you think you’d be more comfortable—”
“My boss needs privacy. Wake me when we’re going to land.”
I shut my eyes, letting the hum of the engines fill my thoughts. Once again, when something in the cockpit chimed and a voice with a heavy accent started talking about approaches and heading, I woke up feeling as if I’d closed my eyes moments before.
We landed at a single-runway airport in a dense, residential—meaning poor—neighborhood and secured a hangar close to the other FriendShip jet. That jet was already being refueled, but the men in overalls working on it didn’t speak English. The people talking over the cockpit radio could, but not the guys working in the hangar.
Annalise forced her way onto the other jet—which pissed off a lot of people and got us nowhere, because of course it was empty. We found a supervisor or someone who spoke English, but he didn’t know where the passengers and crew had gone, and when he asked the staff, they all shrugged and walked away.
The copilot led us out of the hangar to avoid the customs official who was on the way. Red tape would be our friend if it slowed Hardy’s people but not us. The copilot had his phone to his ear, and he was chatting in a friendly way to someone on the line. We went out the back of the hangar, which looked remarkably like the one we left behind in California, except that all the signs were in Spanish. An older guy with a checked shirt straining against his potbelly stood beside an SUV, and the copilot showed him a few bills, then we were inside, driving through the gate without anyone giving us a second glance.
I might have said that Argentina in general and Buenos Aires in particular was not how I imagined it, but the truth was that it never occurred to me that I could imagine it before I went there. I arrived with no expectations, because all I could think about was the problems we were facing and what, if anything, I could do about them.
The airport was blocked by a river on one side. We crossed it onto cracked roads with sickly palm trees growing out of the green median, and a narrow sidewalk that no one was using. Once we passed into the city itself, buildings became closer together and the green median narrowed, although it still supported sickly palm trees. The buildings were built against each other—brick and stone and concrete so close that a cat couldn’t have run between them—but nothing stood higher than three stories.
It reminded me of Lisbon without being anything like Lisbon. Everything looked foreign and familiar at the same time.
When we passed into the downtown, the trees in the median were no longer palms, and they were not taller but were definitely healthier. We passed a couple of pretty little parks, and mixed in with the tile-roof buildings were a few scattered glass skyscrapers.
“Don’t tell them I’m on the way, all right, Jude? It’s supposed to be a surprise.”
The copilot ended his call and pocketed his phone.
“Don’t tell who you’re on your way?” Annalise asked.
“Jeff and Ruby,” he said. “Pilot and copilot of Friend One. Just a moment.” He leaned toward the driver and asked to be brought to a particular hotel, although I couldn’t make out the name. I’d spent years in Los Angeles, but my Spanish had never gone further than ordering at Poquito Mas. Besides, the guy’s accent was terrible.
The driver protested, and the copilot said, “Surprise surprise, he wants to be paid extra for such a long trip.” He pulled a couple more bills from wallet and passed them forward. The driver accepted them with the air of a man doing us a favor.
“For this trip, Milton did that one thing his flight crews have been wishing he would do for years. He invited the crew to stay at his swank hotel, on his dime. Right now, Jeff and Ruby—who are not just pilot and copilot, they’re a married couple—are in the hotel bar, looking for a third for the night. They’re like that. Jude’s with them, but she’s not with them, if you know what I mean. But what you care about are their passengers. Jude’s doing a little shopping, so she can’t be sure if they’re in their rooms or not. If we get there quick enough, we can chat up our happy swingers before they score and slip off to the privacy of their room.”
“Hurry,” Annalise said. She shifted in her seat, and the spoons rattled in her pocket.
The sun was going down, and when we passed an east-west street, I could see it almost touching a cluster of trees in the west. I’d expected to see mountains—whatever they were called—but either they were too far away or they were in another direction. Another thing I never learned in prison.
The hotel was on a multi-lane one-way street—no median—and I had no idea we had arrived until the driver pulled off the road into a little tunnel. He dropped us off at the front door with a friendly wave, leaving us standing in a driveway made of little connecting arcs of gray stone. The entrance to the hotel was wood and glass and a shitload of marble. A fancy carpet lay across the marble steps leading up to the revolving door.
Working for the Twenty Palace Society had taken me into places meant for the rich and for the poor, but this place looked like it was going to be a step above.
“There’s a bar on the roof, right? And they’re in it?” I asked, moving forward. The copilot stood in the driveway, in the exact spot where his feet had landed when he stepped out of the SUV. He stared up at the doorway as if it was the entrance to a haunted house. “Let’s go.”
“Are we going to see another… Is there going to be another creature inside?”
“We’re here to make sure that doesn’t happen. So, let’s go.”
He didn’t seem convinced. Our buddy had been all friendly and chatty with his pal on the phone, distracting himself from the truth of his actual situation, but now that he was faced with the possibility of facing another predator—or actually moving toward one instead of running away—he looked ready to go AWOL.
Annalise came up beside him. “Get the fuck in there and do what we need you to do. Right now.”
He studied her expression for a moment, and maybe he was reminding himself she had killed the thing he was so afraid of, and maybe it had also just occurred to him that he could do what she wanted willingly or she could force him to do it.
“That’s a persuasive argument,” he said, striding toward the front of the hotel. We followed him through the door.
We passed fresh flowers, wall sconces, and a big Rolex display to step up to the concierge desk. The copilot spoke in his terrible Spanish, then explained we’d have to register before—
Annalise slapped a credit card on the counter and asked for a room. Staff immediately switched to excellent English to reserve a small room for us that we would probably never enter.
The bar was indoors but the people were on the rooftop terrace. “Hang back a bit,” our buddy said over his shoulder. Then, with a Hey! delivered in a voice that was a bit too large for the space, he strode up to a couple lounging on a striped sofa at the edge of the space.
“Will you be staying for a drink?” the bartender asked in flawless English.
“We don’t know yet,” I answered.
Annalise pushed by me and approached them. I stayed on her heels.
The couple were wearing the same uniforms as our pilots, but where our guys looked like a pair of uptown lawyers, these two looked like the coolest parents at a suburban PTA meeting. “These must be them,” the woman, Ruby, said in a simpering voice that I hated immediately. “Hmm.”
They looked like they were playacting a role, maybe to amuse themselves. Annalise squared off with them and said, “Where is Golnar Ghassemi?”
“Well,” Jeff said, “aren’t you direct?”
“Before we tell you where to find our friend,” Ruby said, “I’m going to need to know what you want with her. We’re not in the habit of telling perfect strangers—”
Annalise turned to the copilot. “You didn’t tell them about the attack at your plane? That Millicent is dead?”
That wiped the smirks of Jeff and Ruby’s faces. They sat up, saying “What?” and “Millicent?” at the same time. The copilot nodded at them.
“And maybe ten more bodies, including Lauren Woo. The danger isn’t over. We need to get to Golnar immediately.”
“But you’re not Milton’s security team,” Ruby said. Jeff was fumbling with his phone, trying to find a news report. “They all look like former soldiers, but you—”
“Shit,” I blurted out. “She said ‘Milton’s security team,’ boss. Milton Hardy is here, isn’t he?”
They looked flummoxed. The copilot said, “Answer.” Jeff and Ruby both nodded.
“Why?” Annalise asked. “What’s he doing on this flight?”
Jeff shrugged. “Giving Golnar a tattoo, apparently. She showed it to us just as we were about to land. She seemed pretty excited about it.”
I pulled the collar of my shirt down to expose the iron gate. “It looked like this, didn’t it?”
They looked flummoxed again and nodded. “But why—”
Annalise leaned close to them. “Room. Number.”
Jeff said it. I turned to the copilot and said, “Go back to the jet, fill the tank, then get inside and don’t open the doors for anyone but us. Get some sleep while you’re waiting. Go.”
He went. Annalise and I started toward the elevator, while Ruby called, “What about us? Should we do that too?”