Back From the Undead (26 page)

“So I went to Heaven, but not the
only
Heaven?”

Eisfanger hesitates. “Yes, but—”

“But what?”

“There’s a good chance it was, in fact,
your
Heaven.”

“Why?”

“The way you were brought there. I can’t be sure without examining the bell itself, but considering the principles involved, he most likely focused the bell’s vibrations through you. He was driving, but it was your essence that told him where to go. That’s how I would have done it, anyway.” He frowns. “Did you see anything familiar there? Somebody you know, maybe?”

I let out a long, slow breath. “Just a guy I watched die once.”

“Oh.”

“Wait. I’m not
from
here, right?” I say. “Shouldn’t I go to whatever afterlife exists in my
own
reality?”

“Actually, no,” Eisfanger says. “Souls don’t automatically cross the dimensional divide on death. You’d stay in this universe—it’s just a question of which sub-dimension.”

First time I’ve ever heard of Heaven and Hell referred to as sub-dimensions. Kind of like the suburbs, only with a longer commute.

Nobody says anything for a long moment.

“Well,” says Charlie. “Guess it’s a good thing Heaven was never really an option for you in the first place, right?”

I give him the best smile I can muster. It’s not very good.

“Don’t take it so hard,” Charlie says gruffly. “You’re not gonna die for a long, long time. I guarantee it.”

I almost believe him.

*   *   *

I lie in the darkness, staring at the ceiling, and think.

What’s really interesting is that Isamu didn’t just kill me. The only reason for that is because he can’t, and that means that killing me would cause more trouble than scaring me off. Whatever he’s up to, he wants me out of the way with the minimum of fuss—which means no investigation into the murder of an NSA agent.

Gashadokuro certainly seemed to be doing his best to kill me, but he didn’t strike me as a professional assassin. And the two cops who took me to Isamu didn’t seem like they were there specifically to target me; more like they were part of a larger effort and just happened to get lucky. That means there’s another player in all this—and somehow, I don’t think it’s “the fishies.”

Isamu mentioned delicate negotiations. With who? Potential investors? Possible, but the Yakuza has plenty of cash; if it’s trying to woo financial partners, an enormous amount of money must be at stake. Government-level funds, or at the very least multinational corporations.

Or maybe the negotiations aren’t strictly about economic considerations. Maybe they have to do with alliances, agreements. Hemo is in the midst of brokering deals with an uncountable number of Kami, and those are exactly the kind of talks that can easily break down—trying to hammer out a contract with, say, the Spirit of Thunderstorms might mean dealing with abrupt flashes of anger and/or bouts of weeping. So it could be that Isamu doesn’t want to risk ticking off a particular spirit by simply eliminating me—though I have no idea which one would be put out by me meeting an intimely end. Is there a Kami of Unreasonable Stubbornness?

I turn the facts over and over in my mind, looking for the thread that links them all, the pattern I know is there. I can feel it, but it won’t materialize. Something else is there, blocking the way, distracting me. I know what it is, but I don’t want to admit it.

I’m scared.

Fear is nothing new to me, or any cop. We just find ways to deal with it, live with it, acknowledge its presence without letting it interfere with our work.

But this is different.

For all his threats, Isamu never really scared me. I don’t care how long he’s lived or how many terrible things he’s done, in the end he’s just another bad guy who thinks he can beat the system. He’s wrong—they always are. They make a mistake and then I get them. It’s really that simple.

But this situation has me spooked. It’s easier to risk death when you don’t know what’s on the other side, and now I do: a big sign reading
DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT YOUR ETERNAL REWARD
. Suddenly, I have a real, genuine reason to not want to die.

Okay, that sounds a little nuts. What, before this happened I didn’t
care
if I lived or died? No, of course not.

It’s just that now, I care
more
.

It’s a brilliant strategy. Guaranteed to make me nervous, insecure, prone to second-guessing myself. Even if I don’t knuckle under, Isamu’s got me at a definite disadvantage. Forget menacing my life, or even my friends and family—here’s a nice existential crisis to slow me down.

There’s a knock at my door. “Jace? You still awake?” It’s Eisfanger.

I get up, throw on a robe, open the door. “What’s up?”

“With all the excitement, I forgot to tell you—Stoker had this delivered to the front desk.” Damon’s holding a cardboard box with a folded piece of paper on top. “I’ve already examined it, but I thought you’d want to, too.”

I take the box and step back into my room, motioning Damon in with a jerk of my head. “What is it?”

He steps inside and closes the door. “Possessions of one of the pire kids that disappeared—that’s what the note said, anyway.”

I unfold the note and read it.
Jace: This belonged to one of the missing children, a pire named Wendell—I managed to track it down in a pawnshop. Don’t know if your shaman can pull any psychic traces off it, but thought you should have the chance.

I put the box down on the bed, open it, and peer at what’s inside.

It’s a baseball glove.

“I’ve run all the tests I can think of,” Eisfanger says. “Couldn’t find anything that will help us locate the owner, but I can verify it belonged to a pire boy named Wendell.”

I pull the glove out. It’s a soft, faded brown, the gilt lettering of the brand name almost completely worn away. It smells like old rawhide and linseed oil. This was a glove that was well used. And well treated, rubbed with oil to keep it supple. An outfielder’s glove, it looks like.

“How long did he own it?” I ask, turning it over in my hands.

“Thirty-four years,” Eisfanger says quietly.

Thirty-four years. Three and a half decades of playing catch, laughing with friends, snagging pop flies out of the air. “The boys of summer,” I murmur. “Except this little boy didn’t play in the sun, did he? Nothing but night games for him.”

“He played center field, if it makes any difference.”

“It did to him,” I say. “Any idea how it wound up in the pawnshop?”

“I talked to the spirit of the glove, and all it remembers is how long it’s been since Wendell picked it up—a few weeks.” Eisfanger pauses “It … misses him.”

“I’ll bet you do,” I say to the glove. “Thirty-four years. That’s not a possession, that’s a marriage—ending in a very sudden and unexpected divorce.”

I toss the glove back in the box. “Well, no way Wendell sells this glove or leaves it behind on purpose. He’s either dust or a captive.”

“Kind of what I thought. But it still doesn’t prove Stoker’s telling the truth.”

“No. It doesn’t.”

I give the box back to Eisfanger, thank him, and tell him good night. Then I go back to bed and resume not sleeping.

I haven’t really thought about the victims in this case. I’ve been so focused on Stoker that I haven’t connected with the reason I’m here. My own drama is getting in the way—and that has to stop.

A profiler needs to know the victim of a crime as well as the criminal. The victim tells you many important things, from why they were picked to where the perp will strike again.

But there’s more to it than cold, hard facts. Knowing the victim connects you to the case in a very intimate way. It gives you resolve. It gives you motivation.

It gives you anger.

I lie in the dark and forget all about my hypothetical problems with some presumed afterlife. I focus on what I know for sure.

I focus on Wendell. And his glove.

What seems like years later, I finally fall asleep. Except I don’t, quite. I’m in that zone where dreams and reality collide, where you think you’re still awake but you’re really not. I keep coming back to something Isamu said. Something he asked me.

Surely you do not believe that even I could create an entire plane of reality simply to fool you?

My eyes snap open. I sit bolt upright.

An entire plane of reality, no.

But an entire
virtual
reality?

Hell, yeah. Heaven, too.

I get up and throw open the curtains. The sun is just starting to peek over the horizon. It’s going to be a good day, after all.

But not for everyone.

*   *   *

If you’re going to break into a business run by pires, the best time to do so is high noon; even the ones that work late and always pack a protective daysuit in their briefcase tend to be home and asleep in a very dark room by then.

“You want to tell me again why this is a good idea?” Charlie says in a low voice. A fair question, since we’re currently inside an elevator shaft, without the benefit of any actual elevator.

“Sure. Because security inside elevator shafts is notoriously lax, the locks on doors to elevator machine rooms are a joke, and even gaining roof access to a building with an elevator machine room on top of it isn’t that hard.”

We’re climbing down a maintenance ladder, Charlie below me. Somebody’s helpfully scrawled the floor number in chalk beside each set of doors, so I know where we are and how far we have to go.

“That’s not what I meant. I meant why are we burglarizing the headquarters of a multinational corporation in the first place?”

“Because this is where the answers are.”

“Really? Because all I’ve seen so far is a lot of grease and dirt.”

“You’re lucky I didn’t go with my first idea.”

“Which was?”

“Gaining entry through the sewer.”

“This is mostly a pire building. Probably only one toilet in the whole joint.”

“That’s why I went with the roof.”

Thirty-third floor. Charlie pries open the doors, then gives me a hand across. We’re right outside the lab where Mizagi so proudly showed off his TASS project.

But that’s not the only thing in there—that much I’m sure of.

The door is locked, with a keypad beside it. I pull out the fetish Eisfanger gave me, a knotted piece of hair, wire, twine, and bone, and drape it carefully over the lock. It’s not a key, though; it’s a gag.

“Go ahead,” I say.

Charlie kicks the door in. Sometimes it’s handy to have your own personal battering ram for a partner.

If the fetish is doing its job properly, the alarm system is currently stuck in a feedback loop, screaming into its own ear but nobody else’s.

Charlie stalks inside. I follow.

The lab looks pretty much the way I remember, only a lot dimmer; the room’s mainly lit by the hundreds of small telltales on the equipment, glowing a steady red or green. The large screen at the front is dark. The server farm hums and whirs to itself in the far half of the room.

“Answers, huh?” Charlie says. “Do we look for a filing cabinet with a big
A
on the front, or d’you figure they store ’em in a separate room?”

“We need to check the computer system, genius.”

“Oh, these are
computers.
I thought they just liked watching TV while getting in a little typewriter practice.”

I sit down at a workstation and tap a key at random. The monitor switches from screensaver mode to active—doesn’t look like the system is encrypted. I start looking around.

Most of the files relate to shrinespace, a cross-indexed list of thousands of Kami. But that’s not what I’m interested in.

I find it in a file marked
HEREAFTER 2.0.

There’s a lot in there, mostly files jammed with machine code. But there are a few text files, too, and the one marked
OVERVIEW
provides me with a pretty good idea of what’s going on—not the technical aspects, but the real purpose behind this project. I whistle, long and low.

“So you’re impressed?” Charlie asks.

“Was that my
I’m impressed
whistle?”

“I believe it was.”

“That’s because I’m impressed.” I shake my head. “What these guys are up to … well, it’s impressive.”

“I’m getting that. You want to say it again, or are you done?”

“Done? I’m just getting started. Charlie, we have to go in there.”

“In
where,
exactly? The computer-generated Paradise you say these guys built? I thought Isamu locked you out of there forever.”

“He did—which is fine by me. I don’t care if I never see Roger Trent again, in any version: dead, alive, or alternate.”

“You forgot computer-generated.”

“That’s just it, Charlie—he wasn’t a program. He was the real thing, a spirit. It was his surroundings that were man-made.”

Charlie tilts his fedora back on his head. “And you know this how?”

“Because of this.” I point to the screen and the file I just pulled up. “Heaven won’t have me, Charlie. So I’m going to pay a visit to the other place.”

“Not without me, you’re not.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it. Which, apparently, is kind of how we’re going to get there.”

The protocol is fairly simple. Charlie and I go over the process together—the only equipment required is an intricately braided platinum-and-gold necklace with a single crystal embedded in the weave and the exposed tip of a fine silver wire embedded in that. The wire, sheathed in black plastic, ends in a jack that plugs into the keyboard. Every workstation has one in a drawer under the monitor, though I don’t remember seeing any in use during Mizagi’s demonstration.

“That’s it, huh?” Charlie says, dangling the necklace from one finger like a dead snake. “Put this noose around our necks and jump?”

“I’ll have to hit a key, actually—but jumping is more or less accurate. We’ll leave our bodies and enter what they’re calling the Interface Zone—kind of a holding area. From there we choose one of two bridges. We want the one that isn’t all bright and shiny.”