Authors: Scott V. Duff
“Seth, calm down, please,” Ethan cooed softly at my side, his hand on my shoulder. “You’re scaring the mean men.”
“They’re supposed to be the good guys, Ethan,” I snapped angrily. “And they won’t even feed their own people. Give’em medical care. How do you
not
get mad about that? They’re too busy worrying about whose gonna pay the bill while they sit on their quarter of a million dollar a year salaries. How much
sense
does that make?”
“I know, Seth, I’m there with ya, man. I really am,” Ethan said sympathetically. “But we can’t fix everything. You can’t fix everyone. It’s the hardest lesson we have to learn as wizards because as powerful as we can be, sometimes it just isn’t enough.”
Those four words echoed in my mind as I looked into his big, blue eyes and remembered the second death of the Twice-Dead God. The day
Eth’anok’avel
was ripped from my side and thrown to the sky to fight the enemy only to be batted to the ground like so much flotsam in the sea. That day he and his countless brothers were counted and found wanting. I calmed down immediately.
“Okay,” Kieran said behind me. “Now we know to get Ethan when Seth is mad.”
I sighed as I turned around. “Well?”
“It’s nearly full by the sound of it,” Kieran answered. “I think it’ll last until Tuesday or Wednesday.”
“Can you take a crew over?”
“Yep,” he said. “Should take just a few minutes.”
“Major,” was all I needed to say and a six-man team formed near Kieran.
Mike was still on the phone. “Mike, what’s going on?”
“They’re giving me the run-around,” he said, aggravated. “Bouncing me from one place to the next and telling me he’s in this or that meeting and can’t be disturbed.”
I rolled my eyes and calmly took his phone.
“This is Seth McClure,” I said. “To whom am I speaking?”
“This is Diana Riggs, one of Mr. Fuller’s personal assistants, Mr. McClure,” the voice on the phone declared sweetly. I wondered briefly if that was her real name and if her boyfriend’s name was John Steed, but I pushed that out of my mind. “As I was telling your assistant, Mr. Fuller is in a meeting with several members of the Council. The barriers that are in place will not allow us to intrude and cell phones simply don’t work. Perhaps if you were to tell me what you require, I can begin preparations on getting that for you until he can be contacted?”
“I see,” I said, more to Mike than to her. “Well, the reason I was calling was because I was rather desperately needing water, fresh water, for roughly five hundred US soldiers stuck in Northern Alabama without a sufficient potable water supply. I’m sure the Deputy Director Harris of the Marshals has informed him of the situation by now. My thinking on the matter was that with all of Mr. Fuller’s shipping and trucking businesses that surely he owns a water truck or two that he could lend me for the weekend so that these men could have enough water to drink.”
“Oh, that doesn’t sound unreasonable,” she said. “I’m sure we can come up with something along those lines, Mr. McClure.” I didn’t think so, either, as I turned to face North and pushed out, searching for that familiar little twist of space that was Fuller’s home, the energy signature of his wards. It was quite a reach, but I found it. Might not have if they’d’ve re-invoked them. Why don’t people do the simple things? It would have been much harder to find, maybe even impossible, but I could even still feel the plane of the knowe in the dining room from here.
“I take it that neither you nor Mr. Fuller have had much experience with the Lord and Ladies of the Fae,” I said as I slipped into their wards unnoticed and started identifying the people there. I found Fuller sitting at his desk with Phillips opposite him, sitting nervously steepling his fingers through awkward patterns as they listened through a tiny speaker on the desk between them. This was his L-shaped office with her at the top while they were at the far end.
“I couldn’t speak for Mr. Fuller there, but I haven’t,” she answered. “Why do you ask?”
“Because then both of you would know the dangers of lying to one,” I said, watching Fuller’s head snap up from whatever he was writing, worried that he might be caught. Yeah, little man, you’re caught. “Darius, speaking to Mike is the same as speaking to me. Giving Mike the run-around is the same as giving me the run-around.” His jumped up from his desk, his expression tense. “You should be worried, Darius. You’ve pissed me off. I’ve had enough problems here today. You wouldn’t even listen to my request. Very bad manners, Darius.”
“Shit!” I heard over the phone.
“That is, indeed, one of the problems these men are facing,” I agreed calmly. “And another one you’re choosing to ignore while you sit in your great big nice house while they wallow in the mud. Damn, Darius, you wouldn’t even listen to me. Do you realize just how angry that makes me? No, I don’t suppose you do. So, let’s talk ramifications instead. Short and oh, so, sweet. At least from my perspective.”
I sighed as I watched him stumble around his desk, knocking things over in a rush to get to his secretary. “Lord Daybreak remands his invitations to all members of the United States Council to the Emissaries Meeting to be held this Thursday without exception. Gatecrashers will be rather violently deterred, so don’t try.” I cut the connection, but continued to watch Darius Fuller standing at the turn of his office, slack-jawed at what had just occurred. I’m sure he considered it extreme. He rounded the turn quickly, overcoming his shock and yelling something repeatedly. It looked like “Get him back,” which made sense.
I looked dead at Calhoun, a cold, hard stare in a sudden movement. It was full of intent, of my will and desire to know. “Where is Deputy Director Harris and why haven’t we seen him lately?”
“He’s in Washington, hiding from you,” Calhoun answered, then seemed surprised that he did. I watched his psychic shielding begin to reform in his mind. Sorry, Glen, I wasn’t done just yet.
“Why, Glen?” I asked softly, still pushing and prodding around his weak and insufficient defenses. “You had to know we’d figure this out. I couldn’t let these guys starve and you know it. Harris knows it. So why are they hiding?” Diana Riggs found my entry in her card file then, so I reached out and rather blithely cut through space and took it. After that I stopped watching and handed Mike back his phone.
“I just don’t know, Seth,” he said. I watched him continue rebuilding his shields, still scared of me, still knowing I was going to catch him at something or another. Anxiety was rampant in his aura.
“What about you?” I asked, turning to Messner. “What do you know? Why are government officials suddenly hiding from me? Or am I being forced into dealing with the military?”
“That hadn’t occurred to me and it’s actually the best option I have,” Messner said, shrugging. “I am behind the curve in this investigation merely because I don’t know the history behind all the players or even who all the players are, yet. I can’t identify half the men you brought with you. How am I supposed to know if one of them is stabbing you in the back?”
An understanding smile and a consoling pat on the shoulder that probably came out as condescending. “I know what you mean, dude, really. It’s like you need a score card or something. Does the FBI have a stand on which of the two Councils it follows?”
“To my knowledge, the FBI stays staunchly apart from such politics,” Messner said. “That may, however, be projection of a personal opinion rather than reality. You’re making me wonder if I’m being played as much as you are.”
I sighed again. “Gentlemen, I need to have a word with my family and our assistants for a moment. Excuse me while I confuse the hell out of you.” Throwing a Tower of Babel spell out in a twenty-foot radius around us and following it with a sound baffle from the foundation Stone. Then I said, “Major Byrnes, I left you and your men out of the confusion spell but I need for you to
not
react about this discussion. Everyone can still see you and make judgments on that. Look around you and act like everyone else.”
“What did you do to them?” Ethan asked, watching everyone around him just gawked at everyone else.
“Temporarily removed their ability to express or understand the concept of words,” I answered cryptically. “Major Byrnes, how long would it take for your men to collect your personal belongings to evacuate this camp? You only care about personal belongings, no beds, no cooking units, nothing but changes of clothes and such.”
“Um,” the major said rather concisely. “As a guess, fifteen minutes.”
“Make it shorter, Major,” I said. “As soon as I break this spell, start your men working on this as quietly as possible under the noses of Echols’ men.”
“Seth, what’s going on?” Dad asked.
“I wish I knew,” I said. “Here’s the problem, and Byrnes, listen up, because this concerns you, too. Messner’s and Calhoun’s support dries up at a critical juncture and Echols shows up to save the day. We’re away in New York and scheduled into a tight squeeze, not paying attention to Alabama, but on customs and getting back to Ireland. This in the meantime has turned into… what? What are they doing here?”
“Sweeping this under a rug,” Steven said, sounding somewhat depressed about it. “Echols wasn’t here to help get them ready for court, but to ship them back, the most expeditious route.”
“’Expeditious’?” I snarled, startling more than just Byrnes and his men. “I need to calm down again, don’t I”
“Wouldn’t hurt,” Kieran said, walking up and throwing his arm over my shoulders as I paced through the forest of Babel-zombies. “But I do see the situation. The military doesn’t want to deal with the problem at all, so they are putting us in a sacrifice position. You either sacrifice your ideals and break the compulsion, or gamble with these men as the stakes. And they have somehow coerced the Council into believing this is a good idea, or at least necessary.”
Mike’s phone starts ringing, then Peter’s. They both ignore them.
“How can anyone believe that covering this up is a good thing?” Peter asked. “All that will accomplish is let the bastards hide deeper and better. How can Fuller and Harris be this blind?”
Dad snorted a laugh, shaking his head. He muttered, “Lap dogs.”
Kieran’s and Ethan’s phones started chirping. They both reached into their pockets, pulling out their phones and powering them down without looking. Everyone with a phone made similar moves, then Dad and Mike went after Messner’s and Echols’ phones. They wore theirs clipped to their belts in pure geek style.
“I don’t understand what the problem is,” Byrnes said.
“That’s understandable, Major,” I said, grimacing but still not speaking directly to him. “What it comes down to is that I’m a young, idealistic little snot who actually believes in the crap they sell.” I sighed heavily at the admission of culpability. “I think things will become more clear as I twist these two in the wind.”
“What are you going to do, Seth?” Kieran asked.
“As I see it, we have two options,” I said. “We can break the compulsion now and let the military reabsorb them with a slap on the wrist. We can turn our backs on the situation completely. Or, we can find a new place for them to stay safely until due process can occur.”
“But letting them scatter means we lose any chance of tracking down accomplices,” Peter said, grimacing in thought. “Whoever Pennington’s associates were, they’re just going to dig in deeper and hide better anyway. This is just going to give them another level of obfuscation. Why is the Council agreeing to this?”
“Welcome to politics, son,” chortled Dad, slapping his shoulder lightly.
“Echols’ first task was to assimilate them,” I calmly explained, “but that hit a snag pretty quickly. My youth and idealism slapped them in the face.”
“The geas,” Steven muttered.
“Compulsion, but yeah,” I corrected him. “They couldn’t just throw the fish back into the sea if the fish kept swimming back into the nets, so they had to switch that around. Echols got a new job—con me into breaking it while they made the situation as untenable as possible. That’s where we are now, sitting in an untenable situation. This is what you aren’t understanding, Major Byrnes.” I turned to look at him for the first time since the Tower spell. The sun had touched the horizon, shining in a deep, ruddy red just over his shoulders on the treetops: a bloody sun. Tremendously ironic at that moment.
“The Pentagon is embarrassed, Major,” I said. “And can you blame them? Over four hundred soldiers caught in an act of such proportions with such a dangerous word as ‘Treason’? Can you imagine the public outcry if this comes out? More than heads will roll here. So now you and your men are sacrificial goats to the cause of keeping the American public safe and ignorant. They’re going to keep you quiet one way or another.” I looked back at Echols as he watched the others mill around him blankly, like a lost child.
“So they made a summary judgment,” I continued. “I guess it was supposed to appease me since I believe the penalty for treason is death by firing squad anyway. And it certainly takes the fire out of lawsuits. That leaves the last option, which for the most part, they aren’t thinking about at all.”
“And you’ve already refused to do that for Bishop,” Kieran reminded me.