Doorways to Infinity (44 page)

“Wait.” Terry handed each of them a bulletproof vest and a black ski mask. “Put these on first.”

“And everybody make sure you have your countercharms,” Fred said, “or you’ll get as stupefied as the guards.”

Jamie pushed open the magic doorway and a blast of frigid air swept into the room.

Fred crossed her arms and shivered. “Oooh, it’s cold.”

“That’s why we have to wear heavy coats and gloves.” Terry flicked off the overhead light. “Jamie, check it out for us.”

Jamie stepped through to the narrow ledge where they had entered Romania the last time, which was lit by thin light from the quarter moon. He inspected the footing, kicking at the powdery snow, and took a few tentative steps down the length of the rocky outcropping, and nodded to himself. Then he leaned back inside the doorway to where everyone still waited. “It’s okay. I don’t think we’ll slip and fall.”

“How far is the drop?” Rollie said.

“Couple hundred feet, maybe.”

“It’s more than that.” Eric walked out with his assault rifle held tightly in both hands and his ski mask over his head. Everyone else followed, and crowded onto the ledge. Eric put a finger to his lips and pointed skyward, and Jamie nodded and floated up to the edge of the cliff, twenty feet above. He stopped and hovered when his eyes cleared the last of the sheer rocky wall, and he scanned the area.

Lights on tall poles still illuminated the runway, which was cratered from Jamie’s blasts weeks earlier. Two guards stood nearby with their backs to him, and about 50 yards away sat a new helicopter, protected by two more men. All of them wore heavy coats and hoods, with rifles slung across their backs and their chins tucked low against the cold, shifting their weight from foot to foot or shuffling about.

Jamie descended to the group waiting below and held up four gloved fingers. “Two just ahead,” he whispered, “and two by the chopper.”

Terry pointed at Fred and mouthed, “Your turn.”

Fred, nearly unrecognizable with her head covered in a black ski mask, grasped her silver fairy necklace in one hand and nodded. Jamie summoned his will and gestured, and she slowly ascended, as if being lifted by helium balloons. When she reached the top, she began spinning the charmed pendant in a broad circle, the silver chain blurring into a ghostly disk in the light from the runway. After a few seconds, she held out her free hand and raised her thumb.

“The guards are stunned now,” Jamie said in a low voice.

Eric tapped his chest with his hand, and Jamie levitated him to join Fred, then Jamie sent Terry, both agents with their weapons level and ready for violence. Rollie was the last remaining with Jamie on the narrow ledge.

Rollie tugged his mask lower and cleared his throat softly. “I guess it’s my turn, huh?”

“Scared?”

“Nah,” he said, though Jamie didn’t believe him.

“This isn’t as bad as when we had to deal with the demon,” Jamie said.

“Nothin’s bad as the demon.”

“You got Fred’s other Stupefyin’ pendant?”

Rollie opened his hand and showed him the small brass cross and chain. “You got the spyin’ device?”

“It’s in my coat pocket.”

“Fake mistletoe?”

“Other pocket. You’re stalling, Rollie.”

“Just making sure.” Rollie tilted his head back and looked upward. “I’m ready. Send me.”

Jamie floated Rollie to the edge of the cliff where the others waited, then flew up to meet them. Eric and Terry crouched on either side of Fred with their guns trained on the runway. Fred was still spinning her necklace, and all of Cage’s security guards stood like statues. The only clues that they were alive were the small mists of frosted breaths that escaped from their slack mouths at regular intervals.

It was a surreal scene: Four unknown men, frozen in place, sculptures silhouetted by the glare of the security lights. They spread stark shadows across the hard concrete of the runway, which still bore the deep scars of Jamie’s previous sorcery. Quiet as a graveyard.

Rollie tapped Jamie on the arm and whispered. “Show me exactly where I gotta go.”

Jamie pointed off in the distance to his right. “That big tree near the corner of the building. Remember, I can’t make a doorway for you because the glow is too bright, so you have to run as fast as you can without tripping, and stick to the shadows. Soon as you get there, start spinning the pendant in case anybody comes by.”

“Eric,” Rollie said, “are you sure there are no land mines or traps or anything?”

Eric looked over his shoulder at them, still aiming his gun at the men on the runway. “Not where you’re going. It’s too close to the edge of the cliff. There may be some by the access road, where they’d expect an attack to come from. It’s the only way up here unless you have a sorcerer with you.”

Rollie turned and ran off, immediately blurring as he streaked away at a supernatural speed. He stopped when he reached the designated tree and began twirling the enchanted pendant, and Jamie prepared to join him. “Here goes,” Jamie muttered. He summoned his will and translocated.

He reappeared next to Rollie, who stood behind the giant poplar near the south corner of the old stone monastery. “Keep that thing going,” he said to Rollie and pointed at the pendant. Rollie twirled it with one hand, eyes darting about, looking for possible trouble.

“Hurry,” Rollie whispered. “It’s cold, and I can’t do this all night.”

Jamie looked down and saw dozens of crumpled white stubs the size of pencil erasers, scattered on the ground among the gnarled roots. “Are those cigarette butts?”

Rollie glanced, too, still spinning the necklace. “I guess this is where the guards hide from the boss when they’re on break.” Then he grunted and said, “Now, will you go already?”

Jamie leaned back and gazed up the length of the giant tree, the upper reaches of it dimly illuminated by the distant runway lights.
Eric said don’t go any higher than seventy-five feet
.

Jamie eyed a spot that looked promising and floated slowly toward it, careful not to hit his head on any branches as he rose. When he thought he’d gone high enough, he settled onto a stout limb and rested one hand on the trunk. He carefully slipped the listening device from his coat pocket and studied it for a moment, trying to decide where to put it. He chose a place on the nearest branch, which was slightly above and off to the side of the one on which he was sitting.

I’ll have to do the spell bare handed to make this gizmo stick to the tree
. He rested the deceptively heavy piece of electronics on his thigh and pulled at the tight-fitting glove on his right hand. It resisted stubbornly at first, and he had to yank to free it. It finally popped off, but the motion jostled the apparatus from his leg. It tumbled away.

He reached for it in a panic but grabbed only air.
Oh, crap!
His senses immediately shifted to his slow-motion vision as he watched it hurtle downward, spinning as it fell like an electronic meteor. Straight toward an unsuspecting Rollie.

Look out!
Jamie wanted to shout but couldn’t for fear of alerting other guards. Instinctively, he pointed a bare finger at the missile and commanded:
Levitate
. It slowed to a halt inches from Rollie’s skull and hovered in the air like a satellite over his head. Rollie still twirled the pendant, unaware, while he scanned the surrounding area for danger, never seeing the near-disaster that floated just above.

Jamie exhaled a sigh of relief, gestured upward, and the device rose and returned to his hand. He wrapped his fingers firmly around it, careful of the nail that was fixed to it, and pressed it against the neighboring branch. Then he summoned his will as he pushed it in flush against the tree, the wood accepting it easily. He urged the bark to become softer, like cookie dough, and it flowed and grew around the edges of the device until it was firmly in place, now part of the mighty poplar as if it always been there.

Jamie smiled to himself, then pulled the fake mistletoe out of his other pocket and threaded the stem through one of the plastic straps on the unit. He paused and admired his work.
That looks pretty good. I don’t think it’ll be noticeable from below
.

He put his glove back on, dropped off the branch and descended to the ground next to Rollie, who was still spinning the necklace.

“Did you do it?” Rollie whispered.

Jamie nodded. “Let’s go.”

“You need to get rid of our footprints first. You got a spell for that, right?”

“Of course.”

They returned to Eric and Terry’s house, and Jamie made a doorway for the rest of their friends so they could join them. Nova was visibly relieved to see that Rollie was safe, but Rollie tried to act nonchalant about the mission. “It was nothin’,” he said with a shrug. “Everything went just like we planned it.”

“Except that I almost knocked you out with the device when I dropped it,” Jamie said.

Rollie wrapped his knuckles against his skull. “Wouldn’t ’a hurt. Head’s too hard.”

Eric put on his headphones and listened for a few minutes while everyone watched silently, then he pulled them from his ears and draped them around his neck. “It’s working. Even though it’s still only about four o’clock in the morning there, I heard a door close and some men’s voices, probably the guards.”

“Are they acting like anything’s up?” Bryce said. “Like they know you were just there?”

“Not really. Sounds like they’re bitching about the cold.”

“So it looks like nobody knew you were coming,” Nova said. “Does that mean you have a mole at the agency?”

“Not necessarily,” Terry said. “If Cage has been getting his warnings from the witches, and they were asleep, then he wouldn’t know about our mission tonight.”

“The witches were definitely asleep,” Fred said. “Either that or they weren’t at the monastery. With Rollie and I both using Stupefyin’ pendants, we were generating a lot of magic that any witches in the area could feel.” She looked at Jamie and smirked. “A magical signature. That’s what you’d call it.”

Melanie furrowed her brow. “I have a question about the listening device. What’s to keep someone at the CIA from finding out it’s there? They’ll have access to the transmissions from it, too, won’t they?”

“There are over a thousand channels of data streaming to headquarters from the satellite that the device is transmitting to,” Eric said. “The only way somebody could find the channel we’re using is to stumble on it by accident, and it would be nearly impossible to tell where it’s coming from. It’s not broadcasting a locater signal.”

Jamie scratched his chin for a moment. “What if it were routed through a supercomputer, first?”

“It’s not. We still do it the hard way.” Eric tapped the headphones draped around his neck. “With these. I ought to know. I do it enough.”

“We both do,” Terry said and curled up one corner of her lip. “It’s the most boring thing imaginable.”

“Are you going to have to do that now with the bug you just placed?” Nova said. “Listening to guards yakking under a tree?”

“More than just that,” Eric said. “We’ll monitor their two-way radio conversations and cell phones, too.” Eric flashed a wicked grin. “We’re going to get a leg up on Cage, now. I feel it. This mission just gave us an ace in the hole.”

Chapter 19

Fred got a text from Terry on Monday morning and met her after class by the fountain, which was turned off due to the cold. They had it to themselves, with everyone else inside where it was warm.

They sat on the nearby steps that led down to the wide, red brick plaza, and Terry handed Fred a Styrofoam cup of coffee and yawned.

“Late night?” Fred asked and took a sip.

“Early morning, doing my shift monitoring the listening device.” She pressed her knees together and grimaced as a stiff breeze blew by. “It sounds like Cage is up to something. We think he’s going to do another hit, but we don’t know where. Maybe if we’d gotten the bug in place sooner, we would, but we’re hoping that we can be more proactive now that we have it there. We might pick up enough intel to anticipate his next attack, and if we can’t catch him or kill him, maybe we can at least stop him.”

“How are you going to do that if he’s using magic?”

“Well, that’s something I wanted to talk to you about. If we know for certain who Cage’s next target is, would it be possible to give countercharms to the target’s guards?”

“Not without explaining what they’re for, and good luck with that. Plus, you’d have to know exactly what spell Cage is going to use before preparing the countercharm.”

“Isn’t there an all-purpose one? One that works on most spells?”

“Not according to Momma Sue.”

“Too bad.” Terry yawned again and rubbed her eyes with the knuckles of both hands. “I have a history test today. Hope I can stay awake.”

“How are you finding time to study?”

“I make time. Eric helps me out by taking the lion’s share of the work on the monitors. When it’s my turn, I study with the headphones on. It’s mostly just hours of sitting, listening to nothing.”

“Sounds boring.”

“You have no idea. If I had known that it was going to be this way, I wouldn’t have joined the agency. I thought it was going to be lots of action and excitement, but mostly it’s not.”

“I thought Saturday night was exciting, when we went to the monastery.”

“Well yeah, of course. But that kind of fun is rare, for me.”

“Fun? Risking your life is fun?”

“You didn’t enjoy it?”

“Um….” Fred had to consider it for a moment, but she realized that she had enjoyed it. Her first mission with secret agents was exhilarating. She had trouble sleeping that night, thinking about what happened. “Yeah, I suppose it was, a little.”

Terry laughed through her nose. “Liar. You loved it, didn’t you?”

“No,” Fred said firmly. “But I liked it. I wouldn’t want to make a living doing it, though.”

“What
do
you want to do for a living?”

Fred cradled her warm cup in her lap and waited before answering. “I’m not sure. I haven’t declared a major yet because I’m still trying to figure it out. I want to work in Rivershire, doing something to help Jamie with whatever he does, at the school or whatever. I’m sure there will be plenty to do.”