“Too long. I was hoping to be back for Christmas,” he shrugged. “Doesn’t look like it’s going to happen.”
He must have noticed my odd look.
“Oh,
I
am Jewish, my
wife’s
a good Irish Catholic. We had to give our mothers grandchildren just to keep them from killing each other.”
That made me feel guilty about my own divorce. Did Margaret and I have any issue that compared to that? Maybe Sarah was justified in wanting to be rid of both of us.
“Well, I hope you get back for your kids,”
“Me, too.”
“And on second thought, can you order something from room service? I just realized I haven’t eaten anything all day.”
“Sure, what do you want?”
I lay back on the bed, groaning as the muscles knotted in my back. “Doesn’t matter.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I
SPENT the next few hours running through every conversation I had with Sarah, trying to figure out exactly when I should have known, at what point I could have intervened to prevent this.
Damn it, Margaret, didn’t you notice something? I wasn’t there, you saw her every day.
Yeah, that was really fair, especially when it looked as if my daughter was enticed into something because she was
my
daughter.
Hell, if I wanted to backtrack blame, we could go all the way back to when the Portal first opened. At the time it had seemed reasonable that I would want to stay and cover the story of the millennium—and with every passing year, hindsight told me that it was Margaret who had been the reasonable one.
The times I wanted to feel better about the divorce, I told myself it was inevitable. I was too work-centered for the marriage to work. When I was being honest, I told myself that I had just let it happen. It had been what I really wanted, Margaret and Sarah far enough away that I could concentrate on what I was doing without worrying about them. Jump into my career full tilt, guilt free, and my only family concerns the periodic phone call . . .
Payback’s a bitch.
Just waiting was killing me. I knew that I wasn’t the first father to go through this, and that this wasn’t the FBI’s first experience with kidnapping, but it felt all wrong to me. They should be out there
doing
something. I should be out looking for my daughter, not waiting here for some sort of contact that might never come.
Besides, I doubted that I’d receive any contact while the Feds were baby-sitting me.
“I’m not doing myself any good,” I whispered to myself. If I couldn’t do something productive, I should do something distracting. I got out of bed and opened the door. Agent Francis was flipping through a magazine.
“Mr. Maxwell?”
“You think one of your guys at my condo could bring me my laptop? I should probably try and get some work done. I have a column due tomorrow.”
Francis nodded. “If the forensic team’s done with it, I don’t think that will be a problem.” He picked up the phone.
“And I think I left some of my notes on the coffee table.”
“Sure—Hello, this is Francis, I’m with Mr. Maxwell. Yeah, he wants a couple of things from his condo if you’re done with them . . .”
With my hand wrapped up, I was reduced to a two-finger hunt-and-peck. That was okay. That was the speed my mind was working at. I was lucky that what was due was an op-ed piece rather than anything hard. I just wasn’t mentally up for that kind of fact-checking at the last minute. My notes from home might have a feature story on Mazurich buried in them, but I wasn’t up to digging it out.
Instead, I fleshed out a half-written piece about the rising star of Gregory Washington and his apparent inevitable ascension to the mayor’s office. It was only eight hundred words, but it was close to midnight before I finished it.
At least Columbia will be happy.
I e-mailed the story to her.
I almost logged out, but I saw an unfamiliar e-mail address in my inbox.
Thinking it was news of my daughter, I opened it.
“Someone wants to help you. Midnight at the Superior Viaduct.”
“What?”
I glanced at the clock by my bed, and the digital numbers flashed 12:00 at me. “Great timing,” I whispered. “Maybe tomorrow . . .”
I looked back at my laptop, intending to respond to the offer of assistance, letting them know I wasn’t going to be able to attend any clandestine midnight meetings . . .
The e-mail was gone.
I tried to find the window on my desktop, I searched through the inbox, and the trash, and even tried downloading messages again, but it was gone.
The message didn’t exist, but I knew I had read it.
“Shit.”
“You okay in there, Mr. Maxwell?” Levi appeared in my doorway. The agents must have switched shifts.
“Yeah, I just deleted something by accident.” What was I supposed to do? Tell the Feds about it? And what if the guy contacting me was gun-shy? If someone really had help to offer, could I screw that up?
Then again, what if I imagined it?
Right now I couldn’t even prove that I had been sent anything. It could easily be fatigue catching up with me, granting me a little wishful thinking. I’d only seen it thirty seconds ago, and it was already too easy for me to dismiss it. Why should anyone else take it seriously—
Give it a break, you just don’t want to tell them.
I
was
sure that I had read the message. And going to the trouble of sending me a self-erasing e-mail strongly suggested that the sender only wanted to deal with me. Given what I was involved in, it was likely that I hadn’t been looking at an e-mail, strictly speaking. The more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed that it was some sort of disguised enchantment, made up to look as if it was a normal e-mail. Mages had managed to send me messages that way, through electronic channels. It allowed some layer of camouflage—the mage can cast something on a server, or a switch box, or even wire conduit and the communication can go off at some preset time when the caster is nowhere near the site of the spell or the recipient.
The message had said midnight but didn’t specify a date.
So I had two options. Either the proposed contact was past and I was SOL, or the instruction was a general communication protocol, and any date I visited the site at the specified time, something or someone would present itself. It was easy enough to set up some standing enchantment that would reveal itself at the specified time.
Twenty-four hours.
If there was even a fraction of a chance, I was not going to allow Blackstone’s little army to screw it up. My daughter was a lot more important than his investigation.
“You should get some sleep,” Levi told me through the door.
“I know.” I yawned. Fatigue was finally starting to win over stress. Besides, I needed to get some rest if I was going to lose these guys and get to the Superior Viaduct for this meeting.
I shut off my laptop and tried to sleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I
LOOK, and the goat-faced Devil looks directly at me. Reaching out with a clawed fist, he says,
“Behold the cost of defying me!”
The Devil opens his fist and I see the image of my daughter, Sarah. Her body is naked, battered, and covered in gore.
“Dad,” she manages to whisper.
“No.” I run toward the Devil, but he pulls his clawed hand back and Sarah is gone.
“Show me to my adversary.”
I begin to object, I don’t know who the adversary is. But then the mists clear, and I see a tower hovering over the city, greater than any skyscraper.
“There!” I point.
A booming, inhuman laugh resounds.
“Your service will be rewarded.”
The Devil rises from his throne, and walks toward the tower. Moments later, after losing sight of the Devil, the tower begins to crumble.
“Sarah!”
I sat bolt upright in bed, plastered with sweat. Heart racing.
Daylight filtered through the drapes. And for a moment I allowed myself to relax. Then I heard the noise.
It came from the living room of the suite, a high-pitched electronic whine. It twisted and vibrated, and found just the right frequency to set my teeth on edge. My skin felt prickly, in a sensation that was becoming all too familiar.
I got out of bed, calling, “Agent Francis? Agent Levi?”
I slowly pushed the door open.
The two Feds were nowhere to be seen. The shades were all drawn, so the only light was a blood-red glow from the television. What was on the screen was no normal broadcast. Somehow, despite all the redundant data transmission and all the built-in filtering, the television was picking up pure mana interference. The image was twisting and surreal, faces melting into a flaming blood pudding.
“Agent Francis? Agent Levi?”
One face emerged from the chaos on the screen, the goat face from the tarot, and my dream.
“Look upon my face.”
Not a great idea, but I couldn’t help myself. I locked eyes with the Devil-image and felt a shuddering wave of vertigo as the hotel room was wiped away by flames and blood as the Devil took my throat and pulled me into his presence.
He threw me to my knees and I faced the ground, coughing blood and staring at dirty brown soil.
“Behold, Mr. Maxwell.”
I got to my feet and gasped. I was in a vast floodlit chamber, obviously underground. Behind me were vast spaces with unfinished walls, but in front of me the stone—the salt—was carved into incredible pillars, vaults, and arches.
Statues climbed over each other, toward the ceiling, and—like a cathedral—central to it all was a vast rose window that glowed with stained glass.
“The salt mines . . .”
“The lair of the dwarves.”
I stumbled forward through a vast Gothic doorway. Before me was a great hall, with benches to seat hundreds. It was empty except for a single high chair next to an altar at the opposite end of the hall.
“Sarah!”
I ran toward her. She sat, eyes closed, hands folded in her lap. I almost reached her before a clawed hand yanked me back.
“No. Do not wake her.”
“What have you done?”
“Me? Nothing.”
I reached for my daughter.
“Her conscious mind could not bear the sea of mana she sleeps in here. Should she wake, she would go mad.”
“What do you want?”
“What you want, Mr. Maxwell? Publish your tale. Make public the dwarven trade in the substance of mana itself. Let it be known that they traffic it beyond the shores of the Portal. Tell how your politicians profit . . .”
“Give me back my daughter.”
“Do your job well, and she will be safely returned.”
What the hell kind of blackmail was this? What kind of ransom? I didn’t understand. Still, “Give me my daughter first.”
The Devil chuckled and grabbed me by the shirt.
“Show some good faith, and I might.”
The world turned red and bloody again. I looked into the Devil’s face and his eyes began to glow at me.
“You also know the cost of defying me . . .”
The Devil’s eyes became bright white, too bright to look at. My eyes watered and I shook my head.
“Mr. Maxwell?”
Someone was holding me down and I tried to push him off as the light went away.
“What the—” I looked around and the Devil was gone. Agents Levi and Francis were there, and the man holding me down and shining the light in my eye was a paramedic.
“Are you okay, Mr. Maxwell?” Levi asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” I looked up at the medic, “What happened?”
“You had a seizure,” said the medic. “For about fifteen minutes you were completely unresponsive.”
I sat up. “I’m fine now,” I said despite the fact that I suddenly felt dizzy.
“I think we need to take you to the clinic for observation.”
“Is that necessary?” I looked over at Francis and Levi and their expressions told me all I needed to know. Whatever they had seen was severe, and the growing pain in my back told me I’d been doing more than lying around.