One-Eyed Jack (25 page)

Their luck, it seemed, was determined to be universally bad. The assassin rounded the corner in the corridor and caught sight of the American as the same instant the American saw him—and he had to be able to see the lockpick, and also see that the athlete was no longer chained. The assassin met the American’s eyes, coldly considering, and pushed his forelock back with one hand as he drew his Walther into the other. The American smiled, and didn’t stop working on the lock.

You never knew. Some times you got lucky.

“He must be beside the door, then?” the assassin asked. “Left side or right, I wonder?”

The American kept his eyes straight ahead. He’d used the same trick himself. It wasn’t any different from playing poker; half the game was influencing the opponent, and the other half was reading him.

“He went to help Tribute,” he said, and let his eyes slide toward the other exit just as Tribute started in on the verse about Romeo and Juliet. “I’m sure he’ll be back, if you just wait a minute.”

The assassin just grunted, and cocked his gun. He raised it, and squinted through the iron sights. “
Do
hold still.”

The sound of the gunshot was shattering in the confined corridors of the dam. The American flinched, eyes tightening, and felt shards of concrete pepper his hair. His fingers stung, shocked, concussed, as if he’d let a cherry bomb go off in his hand, and the lockpick was no longer in his grasp.

He looked up, expecting blood on his fingers, missing flesh. They looked uninjured.

Apparently, the assassin was still a very good shot.

And he moved like a snake on ice. As fast as the American registered that the assassin had shot the lockpick out of his hand without so much as scratching him, the assassin was in the room. He guessed wrong and glanced left; the athlete was on the right, and lunged.

Helplessly, the American struggled with his manacles. He got his feet under him and heaved himself into a crouch. The combat was too fast for him to follow. If he’d been in it, he would have been operating on instinct and balance and training, the reflexes that would let him anticipate and counter his opponent. As it was, he saw the assassin’s pistol fall as the athlete slammed his hand into the wall. The assassin turned, got a grip on the athlete’s arm and sent him flying with a twist of shoulder and hip.

The athlete rolled with it, fell well, came to his feet in time to duck the assassin’s kick. The assassin closed, and the American lost what happened next in a flurry of strikes and counterstrikes. They fought silently, the only sound the scuff of shoes, the sharp smacking noise of flesh striking flesh.

The manacles scraped the American’s wrists. He leaned on them; it was useless, of course, but he brought his weight to bear as best he could, chained into a crouch, put his head down and rocked hard, yanking. No good, no give at all. Nothing, and when he looked up again the athlete was down on his back, the assassin’s hands locked on his throat.

The assassin’s forelock dragged across his face, bright nail-scratches livid on his wrists as he pressed down against the athlete’s hands. The athlete’s mouth gaped open; he wasn’t getting any purchase. His hips thrashed, feet kicked, but he couldn’t shift the assassin’s weight.

“By the way,” the assassin said, very calmly, “your partner is dead.” And then he pushed the athlete hard against the floor, one hand clenched on his throat, straight-armed, and pressed his palm across the other man’s mouth and nose.

The athlete groaned, purple-faced, heaving in superhuman effort as his breath whistled against the assassin’s hand. The American dropped his head and yanked on the chains, eyes closed, feeling the muscles in his shoulders strain and tear. His back screamed. His thighs cramped, ached.

The chains did not give.

When he looked up again, hot blood trickled down his forearms, soaking his cuffs. The athlete lay still. His eyes, half-lidded, gleamed through the lashes. The American gritted his teeth and made himself watch as the assassin wrenched the athlete’s jaw open and reached into his mouth, roughly, hooking his fingers as he pressed down the unconscious man’s throat.

The athlete kicked, twitching. The assassin dragged something out of his mouth, a small shining thing, pale blue, gleaming and wriggling in his hands like a goldfish grabbed from the fish tank. The assassin contemplated it for a moment, examining it as if to make sure it was complete, and popped it into his own mouth. He swallowed without chewing.

The American choked on bile, turned his head and spat, as the assassin stood, coolly, and dried his hands on his pants. The athlete lay still, unreal as a wax mannequin. The American forced himself to ignore it, to move on, to register nothing. No fear, no grief, no fury. Not now.

Maybe not ever.

He made himself look up, and meet the assassin’s gaze. “And I’m next?” he asked, mildly.

The assassin raked his hair off his forehead and rolled his shoulders back, like a boxer ready to come out of his corner. He looked brighter, somehow. Sharper, more brilliant, more real.

Concrete.

“Not just yet,” the assassin said, and collected his gun before he walked back around the corner. The American heard him on the call box there, summoning someone to deal with the body.

Of course they had minions. There were always minions. That wasn’t the reason for the relief that eased his shoulders as he let himself slide back down the wall and sit.
Don’t feel it
, he ordered himself, and watched the athlete’s body twitch one more time and soften into death.

The assassin wasn’t ready to consume him yet. Which meant that somewhere, out there, the Russian was alive.

Which was generally speaking a very, very good sign.

One-Eyed Jack and the Wrath of Gods.

Hoover Dam. Summer, 1964.

As luck would have it, the Russian’s trick worked, and two hours later, Stewart and I were dressed up like 1964 and strolling through the bowels of Hoover Dam with a tour group composed of ten innocent bystanders, ourselves, and three spies with their baby blue hard hats pulled low. The Englishman amused me in particular, with his bowler in his hand and his umbrella hooked over his wrist, head tilted back in transparent amazement, ogling and pointing and nudging complete strangers in the most aggravating fashion imaginable.

If I hadn’t seen his partner in action, I would have assumed he was a complete idiot and a danger only to himself. Which was, fortunately, what the tour operator seemed to assume as well—and he did keep her distracted from the rest of us.

The distraction was necessary, because Doc and John Henry couldn’t walk through these walls. And weirder—it turned out they could affect things that were part of the structure of the dam. Push lift buttons, for example, and turn doorknobs. Weird and unsettling, and it made me wish I were a better magician, or I had a real, honest-to-Prometheus Club Mage around who would be willing to answer theory questions. If they hadn’t been the guys who built the magic into this damned hunk of concrete in the first place.

Unfortunately, the only one I knew of was unlikely to agree to consult.

So anyway, the ghosts had accompanied a previous tour group down, and were supposed to meet us when they’d finished mapping everything they could, and tried to figure out where Tribute, the athlete, and the American might be held. And in the meantime, Stewart and I, and the Russian and the Englishman and the widow, got a tour of the cool concrete interior of Hoover Dam. And I kept my hands in my pockets so I didn’t mistakenly reach out and muss Stewart’s hair, or something else wildly inappropriate, and I kept reminding myself that it didn’t matter how long things took us in the sixties—we could come back to the same instant in 2002 that we’d left.

For all the waiting made my palms sweat, the dam
was
pretty neat. Especially the vast humming powerhouse, with turbines as big around as grain silos spinning in their dark red and chrome housings. The whole of the upper powerhouse
surged
with the force of the water flowing through those giant machines; it shivered through my shoes, trembled in the railing when I laid my hand on steel. Under my feet lay the lower generator room, where the turbine shafts whirred ceaselessly, balanced fingertip on a single bearing. The tour would take us among them next.

Eight turbines on this side, the Nevada side. Nine in Arizona. The dam was completed and dedicated in 1935. And I couldn’t begin to explain why it was that I had never come down here before, except—

Except I could feel in the thunder of the dam’s enormous heart, in its chambers and its pulse, that I was not welcome here. This was not a place for me and mine: this was an immortal animal, constructed by mortal animals. It wanted nothing of mirage-born cities or their genii. Las Vegas was beneath it.

Goddess was right, when she said that this was not my dam.

I couldn’t decide if the Russian was more entranced by the gigantic machines or if the widow was; they stood shoulder to shoulder, their ear protection leaned together as they peered through the viewport into the churning water inside. The Englishman, I noticed, was patently ignoring them, staring up at the chromed railings on the gallery we’d just descended from and twirling his bowler on the handle of his brolly.

He tapped a toe on the speckled stone floor, which was grooved with steel tracks for some sort of trolley apparatus, and turned to glance over his shoulder with a wink and a smile. For me. Not for the widow, and
definitely
not for the Russian. I was half-watching him and half-listening to the shouting tour guide when I felt a breath of coolness on my cheek and turned to face Doc Holliday.

“Find something, Doc?”

He opened his mouth. I tapped my earcovers and he nodded, and then doubled over into a wracking cough. I knew he couldn’t possibly be getting worse—he was dead already—but it hurt to look at, just the same.

When he was done he straightened up, made a “circle the wagons” kind of gesture, and waited impatiently, crinkling candy wrappers, while I rounded up Stewart and the rest.

It made for an interesting game of charades, as it was much too loud in the powerhouse for us to hear each other without shouting even if we were stupid enough to pull off our earmuffs. Finally, the Russian held his wrist up and tapped the crystal on his watch, and when I nodded, the Englishman tugged my elbow and pointed with his umbrella. There was a little door in the corner, under the observation gallery.

I looked at Doc. Doc nodded, and coughed, and I passed the first part along.

The trick was going to be getting away from the tour guide. Or so I thought, until a hollow thudding, the sound of a good-sized chunk of solid steel slung rhythmically into concrete, caught my attention through the hearing protectors. I leaned around the turbine and looked—in unison with Stewart, which got a smirk out of the widow—down the echoing powerhouse.

John Henry stood on the catwalk along the top level of the powerhouse, his hammer swung overhand, ghostly chips of concrete flying from his ghostly steel. There was no damage to the dam itself—the real dam—and I could tell with one look at the spies and at the tour group that they couldn’t see a thing.

But they could hear it, all right, and the tour guide was hustling people together preparatory to getting them out of the powerhouse as fast as possible.

I suspected the tour was at an end.

And our little group, as if informed by the same, sudden decision, hustled after the Englishman and his umbrella in the opposite direction, toward the door under the stairs.

It wasn’t locked. Doc must have checked before he fetched us, and we filed through quickly and in order. Stewart double-checked once we were inside, in one of the greenly lit inspection tunnels, and made sure it latched behind us. The click, when I pulled my hearing protection off, seemed loud enough that I flinched.

I put a hand on the concrete wall of the inspection tunnel and felt it, felt the belly of the beast quivering under my fingertips. I snatched my hand back and stuffed it in the pocket of my suit jacket, and looked up to see the Englishman grinning at me as he dropped his hardhat on the floor, kicked it to one side, and settled his bowler back over his greased cap of curls.

“Further up and farther in,” he said, and offered a bent elbow to the widow, who stepped up beside him in her two-toned boots and clicked her heels like a soldier coming to attention.

“That’s not a reassuring comparison,” the Russian said. “Jackie, I take it your spirit guides have reported for duty?”

“Doc?”

Wonder of wonders, Doc didn’t cough this time, but he did reach for his handkerchief, just in case. “There’s a room down here you need to see,” he said, and tromped through Stewart and the Russian on his way to the head of the line.

“He says that way,” Stewart translated, for the spies, and the five of us headed down in pursuit of the ghost.

Doc was right; we did need to see it. He led us through a regular maze of inspection tunnels that took us from the powerhouse to the dam proper, and then up inside the structure. Some of the tunnels vented to the surface of the dam, harsh sunlight and hot air drifting in through barred vents.

“We must be careful,” the Englishman said, as we paused at a lift. “The opposition can get here too.”

“1964?” Stewart asked.

“Further, even. He goes back a ways—up or down, Doc?”

“Down,” Doc said, and Stewart pushed the button and then stared at his own thumbnail curiously, as if it had grown overnight. “Guns out?” he asked.

“Can’t hurt.” Which I relayed, because Stewart was looking away. I was surprised to see that the Englishman didn’t have a weapon in his hand. The widow and the Russian were well-armed; I thought the widow’s weapon was the one we took off Angel in the parking lot. And Stewart had his Colt, which I didn’t think I’d seen since 1935 or so, when the West got a tad bit less wild.

You know, I never remember to pack a gun.

“Are we there?” the Russian asked.

“More or less,” Doc said.

I glanced over at the Russian and nodded.