“There’s been an incident here,” I said. “A possible IED planted in a parked car.”
I heard her speaking to someone elsewhere in the room. She returned to our call.
“Just go inside,” she said. “He’ll be there immediately.”
“Inside,” of course meant “inside your own mind.” I returned to the bedroom and did so. I’d barely sat down in the image of a chair when Y joined me. This time Y looked martyred rather than angry.
“Oh, very well,” he said. “This latest threat has tipped the balance. I’ll withdraw my veto, which means you can go with Nathan.”
“Ah. The higher-ups had already approved the move, I take it?”
“Yes, but only if you go as an observer. I don’t want you to be an official part of the TWIXT team, and the higher-ups agreed with that. We need research into TWIXT methods. This will be a good chance for you to observe them firsthand.”
I received an icy-cold touch of psychic insight: he was speaking truer than he could know.
“If there’s trouble,” I said, “I may not be able to stay neutral.”
“Do your best. Get out of trouble’s way. You have a license to ensorcell. Do what you need to do to protect yourself, and leave the scene as soon as possible. That’s a direct order. I do not want you entangled in some TWIXT-related debacle.”
I was about to point out that leaving a deviant world level might not be as easy as taking a bus home, but the truth might have led to him revoking permission.
“I’ll do my best,” I said instead.
“Good. I’m still making an official protest, by the way. It will go into my file, not yours, so don’t worry about repercussions.”
With that, he disappeared. I woke up and found Ari standing in the door of the bedroom, watching me.
“Y’s allowing me to go,” I said, “but only as an observer.”
“I’ll ring Spare14 and tell him. I’ve settled everything with the police, just by the way.”
“Oh, good.” I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed. “Y’know, I didn’t feel the slightest trace of danger. I would have if that car had really been rigged with a bomb.”
“Admittedly I may have overreacted. But I’m not being paid to take chances with your life.”
That was as much an admission as he’d ever make, I figured, that he’d been wrong.
“I know,” I said. “And I appreciate that. But—”
“Yes, of course, and the next time I’ll listen to you.”
He turned around and stalked off down the hall. I got up and went to use the bathroom. By the time I joined him in the living room, he was sitting on the couch with his cram book in his lap. He looked up at me and smiled, a perfectly normal, calm smile.
“I’ll be glad to have this exam behind me,” he said.
“Yeah, I bet! What did Spare have to say?”
“We’re to be at his office at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. The world-walker will meet us there. You know, I can understand Y’s feelings in the matter. I’d be angry, too, if my superiors had overridden my better judgment. Especially if they were doing it to further some sort of arrangement that I disliked. But I’m certainly glad that everything’s a go.”
“Not quite everything.” I smiled to take any urgency out of the words. “I’ve got to call Annie and tell her she’ll have to hold down the fort here for the day we’re gone. By the way, did Spare14 say anything about what we should wear?”
“No. How like you to ask! Something respectable, I should think. That means a suit and tie for me.”
“And something besides jeans for me. The glen plaid pants suit, I think. Or maybe the plain gray with the blue silk blouse.”
Ari sighed and opened the cram book. I took the hint and shut up.
CHAPTER 3
SPARE14 KEPT A SHABBY LITTLE OFFICE down near the Hall of Justice, on an alley just off Bryant Street. Next morning, we took a cab down, but we paid off the driver and got out two blocks away in order to keep our destination reasonably secret. As we walked along Bryant, an ambulance went screaming past. In that brutal neighborhood, I thought little of it until the ambulance turned down the right alley, at which point its siren fell silent. Ari muttered something in Hebrew.
“We’d best hurry,” he said in English.
We did. At the mouth of the alley we saw that the ambulance had stopped right in front of the building that housed Spare14’s office. Just down the block a patrolman was getting out of his squad car. He glanced around, yelled something at the ambulance driver, and ran upstairs. The bail bondsman who had the office on the ground floor had come out to watch, but he seemed only curious, not involved. We jogged down to join him.
“Do you know what’s happened?” Ari said. “We had an appointment upstairs.”
“I don’t,” the bail bondsman said. “Everything was nice and quiet until—bam!—this ambulance pulled up, and the medical guys went running up the stairs.”
Ari and I walked over to the open door that led to the stairwell. The patrolman stepped out and held up his hand for us to stop.
“Interpol.” Ari pulled his ID out of the inner pocket of his suit jacket.
The patrolman looked at it and nodded. “Okay, Inspector,” he said. “She with you?”
“My assistant, yes.”
Although I wanted to kick him, it would have been unwise. I merely flashed a small smile and followed Ari up the stairs. Toward the top I noticed drops of fresh blood dotting the gray carpet. Not a good sign.
A pasty-pale Spare14, alive and unwounded, met us at the door and ushered us into the office, a small white-painted room with a white pressboard desk and filing cabinet sitting on moldy turquoise carpet. Dusty venetian blinds hung at the two narrow windows. An inner door gave us a view of the second room, equally plain, dusty, and sparsely furnished. Two emergency medical techs knelt on either side of a white woman lying sprawled on a stretcher on the floor. As far as I could tell she was still alive, but I could see blood soaking her blue flowered shirt. The med techs were working hard with bandages and devices.
“The world-walker,” Spare14 murmured. “Two women waylaid her about a block from here. One stabbed her. They grabbed her bag. You know what that means.”
Ari let fly with a muttered string of Hebrew words. I was too shocked to say anything. In that bag she would have carried her focus orbs, the devices that allowed a world-walker to travel precisely where she wanted to go. It took me a moment to realize that one detail stood out. Two female assailants? My back brain twitched and delivered a wild guess—maybe a coincidence, maybe not.
“Your cover’s broken,” Ari said, also sotto voce.
Spare14 nodded. At the moment I was more worried about the woman on the floor than the cover story, but rationally I knew the situation sucked all around.
One of the techs sat back on his heels and smiled at the victim. “You’ll be okay,” he said. “Bleeding’s stopped. We’re going to get you to a hospital now.”
She whispered something too faint for me to hear. I did however get a clear look at her face, pale, sweaty, and distorted by pain though it was—black hair with a hint of a wave, hazel eyes, and fine features, though her nose was straight, not tip-tilted like mine.
“Ari,” I said, “she looks kind of like me. Maybe it wasn’t the bag they wanted. That could have been a prop to make the attack look like a robbery.”
Ari reflexively laid a hand on his shoulder holster. I took that as meaning he agreed. My wild guess seemed slightly less wild. The woman criminal I was thinking of had reason to hate me, which might explain the stabbing. During our original encounter she’d only seen me from a distance. She could have made the easy mistake of thinking the world-walker was me.
The EMTs began strapping the world-walker—Evelyn Murphy was her name—to the stretcher. Since Spare14 needed to accompany Murphy to the hospital, he designated Ari a temporary admin assistant and gave him the day’s passwords. As the EMTs carried Murphy
out of the office, Spare14 grabbed his sports coat from a chair and hurried after them. We heard him speak to the police officer. The ambulance siren started wailing, and the engine roar followed. Slowly the sound died away.
“I hope she’ll be okay,” I said.
“So do I.” Ari sat down in the chair behind Spare14’s desk. “I’d best check in with HQ. At times I wonder why I have to sit the sodding exam. In some ways I’m already part of TWIXT.”
I ran an assortment of scans but felt no danger or threat close at hand. Ari used the trans-world router in Spare14’s desk to report in to TWIXT HQ and call for backup on a four-oh-one request—their highest emergency code. I went downstairs to speak to the officer at the door. When I handed him my cross-agency ID, his eyes widened, and he made a small deferential coughing noise.
“The victim was robbed,” I said, “of a courier bag containing important material. Spare gave us the description, a pale tan leather shoulder bag, about two feet by eighteen inches. Is it possible to get a search underway? The thieves will probably grab what they want and dump the rest.”
“Right. We can do that for you. I’ll just call in from the car.”
“Thanks. I appreciate it.” I made a point of checking his name and badge number. “I’ll mention your help in my report.”
He smiled and hurried off to the squad car. I returned upstairs.
Our backup arrived some fifteen minutes later. TWIXT could move fast when it needed to. I heard a familiar voice in the inner office room, saying, “All that blood on the floor. Looks real bad to me.”
“Willa!” I called out. “Yeah, it is real bad.”
Willa Danvers-Jones walked out of the room, followed by Jan Hendriks, a TWIXT officer we’d worked with before. Hendriks was a white man, on the portly side, with brown hair and eyes. He was wearing a pair of blue slacks with a gray blazer, which hung slightly open to give him access to an automatic in a shoulder holster. Willa, a tall Black woman, was wearing her usual work clothes, disguised as someone too poor to rob in many layers of torn, faded tops over a skirt over a pair of bike shorts. She carried a beat-up mesh shopping bag that appeared to be full of cloth scraps. Hidden inside, I knew, lay her focus orbs.
“I can only stay a minute,” Willa told me. “But what happened? HQ told me that Murphy was seriously injured.”
“She was stabbed by thieves,” I said. “Spare14’s with her at the hospital.”
“I’m here to replace him,” Jan said. “She’ll have a twenty-four-hour guard, and I’m the first shift.”
“Excellent,” Ari joined in. “Willa, are you going out into the streets here on Four?”
“Nope. I’ll be going back the way I came in.”
“Good,” I said. “Why didn’t Murphy arrive inside like you just did?”
“She’s new,” Willa said. “She doesn’t have the pinpoint control yet. I’m assuming she landed at the overlap point with One. It’s about six blocks south of here. She must have walked to Bryant and met up with the creeps nearby. Damn good thing she managed to make it to the office.”
“Yeah.” I turned to Ari. “Did they take her to San Francisco General? That’s usual.”
“I don’t know which hospital.” Ari looked vexed. “Spare14 didn’t say.”
The landline rang. Mental overlap kicked in. “That’s him now,” I said. “You can ask him.”
Ari picked up the phone and answered with a set of numbers: TWIXT code, I assumed. For some minutes he and Spare14 conversed mostly in numbers with a few scraps of English thrown in. Occasionally Ari made a note on a pad of paper on Spare14’s desk He hung up the phone and turned to me.
“Yes, General Hospital at the Trauma Center,” he said. “Hendriks, I’m to lock up here, and O’Grady and I will escort you.”
“Nathan,” I said, “what about your exam?”
“It’ll have to be rescheduled,” Willa broke in. “The boss mentioned that to me when I was leaving. Which I need to do. Gotta take a couple of agents elsewhere. Very elsewhere.”
Willa walked into the other room. Through the open door I saw her take a couple of steps and vanish in a flicker of pale light. Hendriks shuddered.
“One never quite gets used to it,” Jan said. “Nathan, do you have the keys to the office?”
“No.” Ari patted his pants pocket. “But I have my lockpicks. They do work in reverse.”
Ari secured the doors, and we left. We’d just reached the street when a black sedan pulled up at the curb, an unmarked police car, in fact—you can always tell one when you see one. Detective Lieutenant Sanchez got out of the driver’s side.
“Just in time,” he called out. “I need to talk with you, Nathan.”
“And we need a lift,” Ari said. “Could you take us to S.F. General? I suspect you’ll need to go there yourself eventually.”
“Yeah, sure thing.” He shook his head. “Sometimes I gotta wonder if you two are psychic or something.”
We smiled and got in the car, me in the front, the two guys in back. Ari introduced Jan as another Interpol officer and informed Sanchez that the stabbing victim was a courier for that agency. Needless to say, he never mentioned TWIXT.
“Okay,” Sanchez said. “I’ve put out a search team for that bag. The officer who called in mentioned your affiliation, O’Grady. I hope that’s okay. It made it real clear that this is a serious business.”
“It is,” I said. “You never know who might be behind incidents like this. Foreign nationals of the worst sort is my guess. Let’s just say that Tehran might be interested. I can’t tell you more at this point, but I’ll try to get clearance to let you have more intel.”
“Thanks. I know you can’t say much, but I’d appreciate knowing what in hell’s going on.”
In the rearview mirror I could see Jan smiling at me in admiration. Hey, when you grow up in a family like mine, lying comes easily. It’s a survival technique. Besides, for all I knew, Tehran might well have been interested—assuming they ever heard about it.
By the time we reached S.F. General, Murphy had been stitched up, transfused, and transferred from the Trauma Center to a private room in a part of the hospital set up for police cases—a locked ward, in essence. The point, of course, was not keeping her in but rather keeping her assailants out. When we arrived, she was more-or-less awake, lying propped up and groggy with pain meds on her hospital bed. They’d hooked her up to an IV and an assortment of monitors. Gray fog light filtered in through the bars over the narrow window. Spare14 got out of his chair and walked over to usher us in.
“Not the most cheerful place to recover,” I remarked.
“We’ll be transferring her as soon as possible.” Spare14 glanced at Sanchez. “With police permission, of course.”
“Since she’s the victim, that shouldn’t be a problem,” Sanchez said. “Is she up to answering questions? You’re another Interpol man, right?”
“Quite. Sorry.” Spare14 took his wallet out of his pants pocket. “I should have offered you my ID before this.”
“That’s okay,” Sanchez said. “Nathan and Hendriks here vouched for you in the car.”
“Very well.” Spare14 put the wallet back. “About those questions, perhaps I can answer them. She’s given me what report she could, and I do think she’d best rest.”
Spare14 gave me a glance of significance before he led Sanchez out into the hall to talk. I walked over to the bed and introduced myself to Murphy. She smiled and seemed reasonably aware.
“I’m the local psychic talent,” I told her. “Hendriks can vouch for that.”
“Fine.” She spoke in an exhausted whisper. “Have they found my bag?”
“No, not yet. They’re looking. Did you have orbs?”
“Three of them, yeah. From the general stock.”
“Does that mean the thieves can use them?”
“Only if the little cunts are world-walkers. But, yeah, they’re not tuned orbs.”
“These girls.” I decided to t
est my earlier wild guess. “Was one of them blonde?”
“Yeah. Slender, tall, pretty. Vicious.” Her mouth twitched in a smile. “Bruised. I got one good chop on her lousy little face. She squeaked real loud. I hope I broke a tooth.”
“I’ve got a theory about her. Look, I don’t want to wear you out. But can you see EIs? Extruded Images, that is.”
“Yeah, if you can put a little extra Qi behind them.”
“Not a problem.”
I summoned Qi, then extruded my memory image of Ash, a hardened young criminal type from Interchange. I shrank it down to about three feet high so that it hovered over the bed. Murphy caught her breath with a little gasp and moved uneasily against the pillows.
“That’s her, all right. She did the stabbing. A Japanese girl grabbed the bag.” Murphy frowned as she tried to reclaim her drug-scattered memories. “One of them yelled, ‘I’ve got it.’ Not sure which.”
I retracted the image rather than distress her further. “Sometimes hunches pay off,” I said. “The blonde’s name is Ash, and she called me a bitch once. She’s going to have some reasons to call me that again, I promise you.”
“Good. Kick her in the guts for me if you catch her.” Her voice faded away. “I think I’ve got to go to sleep.”
“You do that. Best thing for you.”
When I moved out of the way, Jan pulled a chair up to her bedside and sat down. He opened his jacket to reassure Murphy that he was armed. She smiled, sank back into the pillows, and fell straight asleep. When Sanchez and Spare14 came back in, I huddled with them in a corner and lowered my voice.
“Robbery,” I said. “They wanted the courier bag. Murphy confirmed it.”
“All right,” Sanchez said. “Should I keep my men looking for it?”
Spare14 sucked his lower lip and considered the question. “Doubtless a waste of their time,” he said at last. “I very much doubt if it was merely an ordinary robbery.”
“Yeah, with O’Grady involved, I doubt it, too.” Sanchez smiled briefly in my direction. “Okay. You can get in touch with me through Nathan if you need to.”