Authors: Scott V. Duff
“That’s why you’re here, Mitch, to make all those arrangements,” I said, nodding. The children were both in a bit of shock over the big man accosting them with affection, pleading to become their father. The fairies buzzed around them slowly and carefully, watching as Ana reached up and touched Dawes’ face lightly where the tears streamed down across his half-day’s growth.
Pulling a few stacks of cash from my desk in Gilán, I handed them to Cpt. Pierce since Dawes’ hands were full, then pulled a credit card out of my wallet and handed that to her as well. “Mitch, do you know how to move through the veil, yet?”
“Yes, sir, I was taught this morning,” he said.
“Then you will have handling transportation,” I said, handing the two slips of paper to Pierce as well. “This is Marine Cpt. Margaret Pierce. She’ll be with the three of you for a few weeks while you get settled in. They know nothing of Gilán except the Deas. So you will have to introduce them to it slowly. Commander Byrnes will go with you to gather their belongings here then you will go to a hotel in New York where he will assign a set of Guards for the hotel room and another set to accompany you where ever you go in New York. I want your attention on the children and Cpt. Pierce, not on your surroundings.
“Your only task today is to get to know each other a little better,” I continued. “Spend time with each other. Take them shopping and get them some clothes they like and some toys and games. I’ll stop by later this evening and explain the rest of what I want you to do, okay?”
“Yes, Lord. I can’t thank you enough,” Dawes said through bleary eyes.
“One last thing before you leave, Donny and Ana,” I said to the kids still in Dawes’ arms. “Stay close to Mitch and Maggie while you’re in New York. If you hear them or the Guards call out ‘Bug Out’ loudly, you must find Mitch immediately. You, too, Cpt. Pierce. Find Mitch immediately and hold onto to him. He will take you to safety. Let the Guards deal with the difficulty. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Donny said, wide-eyed.
Pierce looked between Dawes and me confused.
“Don’t worry, Pierce,” Byrnes said. “It’ll make sense shortly. Shall we get going and leave Lord Daybreak and General Harmond to their meeting now?”
“Certainly, sir, right this way,” Pierce said, suddenly quite business-like and gesturing to the door. Byrnes led the way out with Cpt. Pierce directly behind him. Dawes followed with the children behind her.
“Why did you call him ‘Lord Daybreak’?” Donny asked Dawes quietly as they started moving, watching his face carefully.
“Because his name is ‘Daybreak’ and he is my Lord, sort of like a king,” Dawes said. “His realm is where I live.”
“He said his name is ‘Seth’,” Donny said, challenging Mitch and squirming out of his arm.
“Did he?” Dawes asked, acting very impressed as he stopped and gently put him on the floor, holding out his hand. “He must really like you. ‘Seth McClure’ is his given name. He earned the name ‘Daybreak’ and made his realm, Gilán. So I suppose you could say his full name is ‘Seth McClure, Daybreak, Lord of Gilán’. It’s hard to figure out what I’m supposed to call him sometimes. Mostly, over here, I stick with Mr. McClure. In Gilán, he’s Lord Daybreak. Only his friends get to call him ‘Seth,’ so if he said it, then you can call him ‘Seth’ and nobody will object or they will answer to him.” Dawes nodded once sharply, looking fiercely at his son. Donny looked over at me, so I nodded once and looked fierce, too, then smiled. He grinned back at me and took Dawes’ hand. Dawes led him out through the door Byrnes held open.
“Thank you for allowing me to deal with that first, gentlemen,” I said as I sat down and poured a glass of water from a pitcher on the table. “I don’t think I could have been that sweet after talking of spies and treachery.”
“How did you know so much about them?” one of the aides asked, Second Lieutenant R. Hanson, according to his nameplate.
Deacon buzzed his ear as Deason clattered to a halt in front of him. “If they ask questions with such obvious answers, you will be here all day, Lord,” Deason squealed, giggling uproariously. He shot up to the ceiling, curling suddenly toward Jimmy, who was calling them both to heel.
“Why is that obvious?” Hanson asked, unperturbed and not terribly smart.
“Because of who he is,” Barnett said quietly, rubbing the bridge of his nose in frustration. Hanson nodded and shut up, accepting that explanation as gospel, and probably the only one he was going to get.
“So, did Morelli lead you to anything useful?” I asked.
“Yes, he did,” Harmond said grimly, taking out a sheaf of clipped papers with hastily scribbled notes along the sides. “After you left us at the airport, we contacted a little-known cross-departmental agency that works primarily with the FBI and NSA to covertly search, review, and record everything that Morelli had in his office and home, including private and work computers. Every disk, photo, memory stick, scrap of paper, everything carefully and quickly catalogued. I don’t know
how
they do it.”
“Probably illegally,” Peter muttered, grinning.
Smiling slightly in response, Harmond continued, “When you gave us Pennington’s files back, we extracted the information we needed and gave the rest to analysts for study. A simple comparison of the two brought out six references in three particularly deeply nested files. These references led to other files within Pentagon and other military departmental records that seemed completely useless until someone in this agency I mentioned noticed something about these files and…” Harmond made a “hands-off” gesture and a confused face. “And ‘ran the stump on it,’ whatever that means.”
Peter snickered, but quickly fell into a full-blown laugh, dropping his head down onto his arms on the table. Ethan and Kieran turned to watch, smiling. Harmond’s aides didn’t take it so kindly.
“My guess would be that they ran whatever remnants of the decoding programs Peter left on Pennington’s file structures,” I said, rather enjoying Peter’s laughter. After the last forty-five minutes, I needed some honest joy of something.
“That would make sense,” Harmond agreed, flipping a page. “That led us to a list of some nine hundred names and code words. Of those we were able to eliminate close to six hundred as either permanently removed or deceased, leaving us with three hundred, twenty-nine.” He paused, turning another page and took a deep breath. “Of those, a hundred and twenty exactly were reported AWOL on Friday morning along several eastern posts and bases. The remaining are split between naval vessels at sea, overseas deployments, and those currently under arrest, excluding four.”
Harmond looked up at us. He pointed at the table, eyes gleaming and the corners of his mouth curling slightly. “Those four,” he said conspiratorially, “are currently in this building undergoing random drug testing and security reviews.”
“A very nice start, General Harmond,” Kieran said smiling with him, surprising Barnett and Harmond and deflating their egos. Considering the numbers Harmond quoted, I had to agree with Kieran, though.
“A start? That’s nearly a thousand people! How can that be just a start?” Harmond asked desperately.
“Because it’s only a thousand people, General,” Kieran said calmly. “Not nearly enough to even cover this country, much less any of the other countries involved with attacks of this kind. Further, from the speed of their capture, I would suggest that most of these men were low-ranking and easily located, showing that they are somewhat disposable to someone. Disposable implies numerous or rapidly replaceable.”
“That doesn’t mean that it’s not productive, though, General Harmond,” Peter added. “You are saving innocent lives by doing this, and some not so innocent.”
“And I dare say the AWOL men are dead somewhere in upstate New York,” I said coyly.
Kieran barked a laugh, saying, “Yes, probably,” and nodding.
“So we’re going about this the wrong way,” Barnett said, disgruntled.
“Not entirely,” I said consolingly. “Just slowly. It’s like chopping off the bottom of a pyramid with a machete. We’ll get there, but we’ll go through a few machetes first.”
“Then perhaps we’re going at the problem the wrong way,” Cpt. Thorn said, the second aide who had been as quiet as Ethan so far. His deep tan and strong arms marked him as a sportsman of some kind but the paunch around his middle either said too much beer or too much time in front of a television or monitor. He had dark blue eyes with a light brown hair that could have been blond when he was younger. Turning to Kieran, he asked, “You said ‘rapidly replaceable’. How are they being recruited?”
“We’re not precisely sure,” Kieran answered.
“We do know some things about it, though,” I said thoughtfully, following Thorn’s reasoning. “Each man has similar qualities. They’ve all been tormented in some way by something of magical origins or intimately know someone who was. That gives them a deep, abiding hatred of anything magical. Most have a severely deflated self-esteem, even a self-hatred in many cases. Generally they have a skewed morality that whoever is in charge preys on.”
“What holds the secrets so deeply, Seth?” Kieran asked.
“Well, the mind-lock is self-induced,” I said, remembering how Morelli’s looked. “A simple twisting of thoughts around a core spell involving three drops of blood if what I recall from Morelli is right. Anything more than that would probably cause a ward to shriek bloody murder.” Kieran’s eyebrows shot up.
“Really?” he said. “Curious. General, may we have a look at your four drug testees?” Everyone to Kieran’s right started snickering and chortling. This might be a long morning.
~ ~ ~
The first two were guards, Marine Corps sentries who watched secure hallways and doors, ideal for allowing access to the right places at times. The third was an Army captain in an accounting department. Technically, he didn’t have access to anything classified, but it wasn’t always difficult to get around computer passwords and stacks of signings from bored, trusting superior officers. The fourth was a Marine Corps captain in telecommunications. We were about to meet him.
I found the whole “different services under one command” more than a little confusing. Yes, Harmond was a Brigadier General, but in the Army. His orders crossed boundaries of three other branches of the military. Obviously some Pentagon agreement in action, or something. Luck of our draw on missing the Navy, I guess, and Harmond hasn’t mentioned the Air Force or the National Guard at all. As curious as I found that, I didn’t feel obliged to mention it, which I also found curious. That made me wonder which of my brothers was suppressing the idea around the room. Of course, it could have been Thorn or Hanson. It was weak enough. I’d have to watch.
Two Marine sergeants escorted Cpt. Bradley Anders with military courtesy and proficiency. Harmond had arranged us around the table so we presented a “normal” aspect to each man. Like the rest, the three of them came to attention in front of Harmond, snapping off a salute just like in the movies with perfect precision. For the sergeants, it was quite subconscious timing.
“Please, Cpt. Anders, have a seat,” Harmond said after a sloppy salute, I thought anyway, and a hand wave to the opposite chair.
Anders wasn’t a big man, rather lean and lithe, a runner by practice, which made him a loner. This gave his subconscious time to regularly bind his own magic down to near uselessness. He was one of those that the Earth just bubbled up from time to time, a natural talent but a small one. One that six of us sat up and noticed. Cpt. Thorn, then, it seemed, was my culprit, another with low-level ability. They couldn’t operate in this environment without throwing off sparks with more talent.
“Cpt. Anders, we’ve called you here to talk—” Col. Barnett began to say, but he was interrupted.
“He’s different from the other three,” Jimmy said suddenly, staring at Anders unfocused.
“Very good, First,” Ethan said, turning and smiling at him. This was good, because Ethan was a little hard on him this morning and I didn’t need to be the only person showing support for him. “Yes, Cpt. Anders has more than one lock hidden away in there. One or two of them look a little nasty even.”
“What do you mean?” Harmond asked.
“He means that you’ve lucked up and hit a small jackpot,” Kieran said cheerfully as I formed a Faraday cage around Anders. He was following us fearfully as we spoke, head whipping around to each of us like a frightened dog. He’d grown suspicious during his time in the security offices and more nervous as he waited. Now he was panicking at the sight of a general and a colonel, even here.
“You get the prize for the most boring code words of the four, captain,” I said, standing to lean on the table closer to him. “’Alaskan armadillo bush’? Not terribly imaginative.” His fears came to fruition as his code phrase released the prohibitions on his knowledge, more recently replaced than the others. “Yes, Cpt. Anders, I’m afraid that means you’ve been caught and being one of the more active members of that little group, I don’t think General Harmond and Colonel Barnett are going to be as lenient with you.”
“What do you mean?” he asked quietly, looking up at me, appearing innocent and feeling it, almost. The complicity was just beginning to sink in.
“You’ve been a busy little captain of late, haven’t you, Brad?” I asked, searching through his memory. “Yes, there, General, I think Cpt. Anders can explain your AWOL men perfectly. And you had a hand in my Guard as well.”