Dark Oracle (8 page)

Spokes are tied together to form a wheel. Yet, it is in the hollowness that the usefulness of the wheel depends.

Clay is sculpted to make a vessel, but it is in the hollowness that the usefulness of the vessel depends.

Just as we take advantage of what exists in the physical world, that which can be touched, we should recognize the usefulness of nothingness.

Beside these, Magnusson had scribbled
How to detect that emptiness, that immeasurable and fluid darkness?

She thought back to the articles she’d skimmed in Magnusson’s file, about his research interests in dark matter and energy, in the vast portion of the universe that was unseen. Her eyes flickered back up to the poster. If he was right, then only a small proportion of matter—light matter—would be visible, like the city lights. The rest of the universe, like the Earth, would be in darkness.

Had Magnusson come too close to this darkness?

A car engine roared and died in the driveway. Hearing the clomp of boots and a key in the lock, her head snapped around. Harry rose from the desk, unholstered his gun. Maggie bolted toward the door at a dead run, collar jingling and claws scraping on the hardwood.

Maybe she was a better guard dog than they thought. Tara followed Maggie and Harry to the entry.

A young woman pulled her keys out of the lock. Her jaw-length hair was dyed jet black, with blue highlights. She wore a long black coat two sizes too big for her that smelled like patchouli. Her waffle-soled black combat boots flopped unlaced, snapping against the floor as she walked into the foyer. Kohl-rimmed eyes were fixed on Maggie, who bounded up to her and pressed her paws to the girl’s shoulders. The girl giggled, wrapping her arms around the dog.

“Cassie?” Tara asked. Though she looked nothing like the file picture of the clean-cut girl beaming beside her father, the resemblance was unmistakable: the same startling blue eyes, the thin frame.

“Who’re you?” The girl stepped back, eying Tara and Li with suspicion.

“I’m Tara. This is Harry. We’ve come to find your father.”

“Do you work with him?”

“No. We’re not with the military. We’re with the Department of Justice.”

Cassie took a deep breath, and her lower lip shook. “He—”

She took a step back and tripped over the dog as a gunshot rang out. The leaded glass of the kitchen window shattered, and Tara lunged forward. The girl, the dog, and Tara fell together in a tangled pile as the plaster foyer wall blistered open above them.

H
ARRY DUCKED AND SPRINTED TO THE FRONT DOOR, SWINGING
out onto the porch. Maggie surged ahead of him, barking and snarling. He followed, trying to keep his footing in the gravel as the dog launched through a stand of pine trees to the fence at the property line. His breath burned in his throat, scalding his hammering heart. Maggie flung herself at the fence with such force the posts rattled.

He reached up for the dog-eared edges of the fence and swung up as another shot splintered into the cedar fence, close enough to shake dew from the pine trees. He swung his leg over and dropped to the ground in the neighbor’s cactus garden. Swearing under his breath, he crouched behind a decorative boulder, scanning the scene over his gun for movement, some sign of the shooter. Trapped behind the fence, Maggie howled as ferociously as chained Cerberus.

There.
Movement flickered around the corner of the house: a man stuffing something under his coat. Gravel crunched as he fled. Harry ran after him, ordering him to stop. As they tore through yards, lights came on, dogs barked, and suburbia woke with a start and a snort.

The shooter sped down a driveway, toward the street. Harry got a good look at him for the first time: he was utterly nondescript, with brown hair, tan skin, muscular build, dark coat and shoes. He’d blend in anywhere, except for the barrel of the rifle peeking out the edge of his coat. As soon as his feet hit the street, Harry heard the rev of an engine.

He’s going to get away,
he thought desperately as a tan SUV rounded the corner and picked up speed. The shooter leaned out into the street as the SUV slammed on the brakes.

Harry ran so hard he thought his lungs would burst, his legs jackhammering against the pavement. The shooter popped open the door and scrambled in. Before the door shut, the getaway car squealed away, leaving Harry in the empty street, panting, with neighbors peering out their windows. Harry recited the license plate number to himself, burning it into his memory, “DCD-1397. . . DCD-1397. . .”

“Hey, buddy. You miss your car pool?” a man in the next yard asked him, newspaper tucked under his arm, as he locked his front door.

Breathless, Harry gestured at the sound of the garbage truck two streets over. “Missed putting the trash out.”

“They change it every holiday. . . It’s one day later after each holiday.” The man nodded to himself and got into his car. “It’s hard to remember, with all those damn federal holidays.”

Harry ran back to Magnusson’s house. He could hear Maggie tearing up the fence, and hurried around the back driveway to check on Tara and Cassie. He hoped they’d hit the deck soon enough. While the thought of the girl getting hit terrified him, imagining Tara being struck trying to save her froze his chest.

It was then he noticed Magnusson’s garbage can was out. If today was trash day, he must have put it out two days earlier.

Magnusson had known he’d be gone.

The thought lanced through his mind as he ran back up the driveway, raced up the porch steps, into the foyer, where his breath caught and blistered in his throat.

There was blood. It stained the white plaster of the foyer in a misty, high-velocity blood spatter pattern. Tara and Cassie crouched in a ball on the floor, below the line of the fire.

“We’re getting out of here.”

Tara turned as Harry spoke, blood smearing from her jacket on the white plaster. All color had drained from her face. Maggie whimpered and jumped up on her, paws scratching on the wall. Under Tara’s arms, Harry could see Cassie’s dark coat and a frightened eye. Tara dragged her back from the broken kitchen window, protected by the wall studs in the foyer.

Harry raced for Magnusson’s office, crouching below the level of the windows. Though the shooter had gone, he had no reassurance there weren’t more, and he was certain the house was still being surveilled. He snatched the laptop from the desk, jammed it under his arm as if it were a football.

Harry sprinted outside for the car. Heedless of the landscaping, he drove it on the gravel, right up to the edge of the porch. He rolled out of the passenger’s side, gun drawn, popping open the backseat door. He scanned the yard, the neighbor’s fence, the street, as Tara and Cassie stumbled out of the front door. Tara had flung her coat over the girl, and they piled into the backseat. Maggie, whimpering, clambered in after them.

Harry looked back in the rearview mirror at the women and the dog. Maggie was vigorously licking Cassie’s face, slapping Harry’s arm with her tail. Tara kept her hand on the girl’s head, keeping close to the floorboards.

Harry threw the car in gear and rattled back out of the driveway in reverse. The tires squealed when they hit the street, passed the garbage truck, and tore out of the cul-de-sac into the gray winter morning.

Chapter Seven

T
HERE WERE
always places to find dirty jobs, if one knew where to look. Black hat work didn’t bother Adrienne much. As a geomancer, she didn’t mind getting her hands dirty—literally or figuratively.

Adrienne stood in the back of a dive bar, arms folded, watching the room. Her boots had stuck to the floor, littered with peanut shells. The bar displayed a selection of liquors illuminated by a television above the bar showing a basketball game. Perched on bar stools, playing pool, drinking in the shadows at booths, were buyers and sellers of services. Judging by the ramrod postures and buzzed haircuts, many of these men were current or ex-military in civilian dress. A few biker types in leathers and long hair mixed in, and there were no other women. Some of the faces were familiar, those of former employers. Adrienne came here when she was looking for work, and never stayed long.

She knew Tara was searching for the missing physicist, Magnusson. Odds were, if she was looking for him, more shadowy types were, as well. Adrienne knew she stood a better chance of finding Tara if she allied herself with someone looking for the same thing. Geomancy had taught her all lines of power, most ley lines, ultimately intersected. . . if one knew where to listen. And unknown to most humans, this place that the black hats gathered was an intersection point for these lines.

Adrienne reached into her pocket for a milk quartz pebble tumbled into the shape of a perfect marble. Tracing its labyrinthine occlusions with her eyes, she breathed her intent into it.
Find me someone who can lead me to Tara Sheridan.

She knelt and set the marble on the floor. Giving it a nudge, she watched the marble roll a few feet from her. It wobbled and began to spiral, fanning outward as it wove behind the pool table, between feet, around chair legs. It spiraled more quickly, gaining speed as it traced its way through the peanut shells and cigarette butts. Finally, it came to rest against a polished black boot.

Adrienne straightened and strode toward the owner of the boots.

“You have a job for me.” It was a statement. Black hats never asked for jobs.

Gabriel drained his drink and set it down on the scarred table. He gestured to the empty seat opposite him. “Have a seat.”

Adrienne slid into the booth, placing both her hands on the table. She knew Gabriel from previous jobs. He liked to see people’s hands; it put him at ease. She waited for instructions.

Gabriel lit a cigar, gave it a couple of puffs before he began with his terms. “I’ve got a problem. I need you to track someone for me. The daughter of a scientist. She’s being protected by a couple of rogue operators. They also have some data I want.”

Gabriel shoved a grainy, folded-up photograph across the table. Many employers brought photos to black hat interviews. Some black hats were squeamish and superstitious, and would reject a target on sight, without explanation. Some wouldn’t work on assignments involving women or children. Adrienne knew one black hat who, for whatever reason, wouldn’t take out anyone who owned cats. Better to know at the interview than out in the field. “These are the operators.” A grainy surveillance photograph of some type showed what Adrienne assumed to be a military installation, bounded by a chain-link fence. The photograph captured a man and a woman standing outside the car. Adrienne didn’t know the crisp-suited Asian man, but she recognized Tara. Her quarry was looking off in the distance, a distracted expression on her face.

“This is the primary target.” He flipped down a photo of a young woman clipped from a college newspaper. She was standing in a crowd, holding a sign protesting global warming.

Adrienne smiled, but it did nothing to warm her cold eyes. “What are the terms?”

“Loose. First priority is the data. Having the girl taken alive is negotiable. I prefer the rogue operators to be rendered inactive. Time’s of the essence on this contract.”

“Rendered inactive” was bureaucratic double-speak for “dead.” And that was how Adrienne preferred it.

“Terms accepted,” she told him.

“O
SCAR
?”

Sophia’s key slid from the lock of Tara’s cabin. The tabby usually came running to her, winding between her ankles before she even had a chance to take her coat off. Sophia clomped the snow off her boots on the rug inside the door.

“Oscar?”

No cat. Alarm twitched through her. Tara would never forgive her if she’d let harm come to Oscar. It had been two days since she’d been here, and the tomcat had seemed perfectly hale and hearty. He’d coughed up a hairball in front of the refrigerator, but Sophia had thought it was normal—she’d never met a cat who couldn’t throw up at will. She glanced at his dishes. Still full.

She peered underneath the couch, arthritic knees creaking. She opened the closet doors, peeked behind the fridge, and finally found a tight, furry gray ball under the bed. The ball didn’t respond when she spoke to it.

“Oscar.” She reached under the bed.
Please don’t let him be dead. . .
Her lips worked around a prayer as her fingers grazed his ribs. He was still breathing. One amber eye peered up over his spine, and Oscar mewed.

“Come here, baby.”

Oscar slowly crawled out, ears flattened, into Sophia’s arms. He worked his way under her open coat and jammed his head into her armpit. Sophia stroked him and cooed at him. He was acting like a cat who’d just been to the vet: frightened. She ran her fingers over his ribs, tummy, spine, and legs, finding no sore spots.

“What happened to you?” She stood slowly, holding the cat now permanently attached to her ribs. Her gaze swung around the room.

Something had happened that had terrified him. She saw the glitter of glass on the dresser. Gingerly, she plucked up the remains of a photo frame with a picture of Juliane and Tara inside.

Someone had been here. Of that much, she was certain.

She stared down at the broken glass on the surface, and her attention settled on a large shard. She blew out her breath, allowed her gaze to soften in the glare of sunshine on the glass. She breathed into the light, willing an image to surface.

“Show me,” she whispered. She didn’t have the dramatic talents of pyromancy the Pythia had, but she was not without her intuitive tools. Scrying was a more subtle art, but no less effective. “Show me who was here.”

The sunlight in the glass wavered, then resolved into a misty outline. An outline of a woman dressed in black with eyes as opaque as agate marbles.

Sophia sucked in her breath. “Adrienne.”

The image of Adrienne opened her hands. Sophia could see they were covered in blood and dirt. She was reminded of Adrienne as a little girl, when she had cut her hands on thorns pulling up Sophia’s roses.

Sophia recoiled from the image. She had to warn Tara.

Cradling Oscar, she crossed to the kitchen and punched Tara’s cell phone number into the phone on the wall. No answer. The phone rang until Sophia hung up.

She had to tell the Pythia. The Pythia could reach her.

With the furry lump under her arm, Sophia headed for the door.

“You’re coming with me, Oscar.”

The cat tensed, and one ear poked out.

“Don’t worry. The Pythia likes cats.”

The cat looked at her with a dubious eye, and ducked back behind her coat.

“W
HERE ARE WE
?”

Tara awoke with a jerk, blinking in the molten light. Afternoon sun slanted in the car windows, warm on her face. Maggie lay with her head on her chest, looking up at her with worried brown eyes. Maggie had bad breath.

Her arm ached, thumping in time to her pulse. Her fingers felt swollen and rubbery as she flexed them. Looking down, she could see her blouse had been torn open to her shoulder, and her arm had stopped staining the makeshift bandage of Harry’s tie with red. A small wound, but it still made her queasy. Maybe the radiation poisoning was still affecting her. Or perhaps it was the memory of older, more serious injuries that made her unable to stomach the sight of her own blood.

Tara remembered trying not to look at her bloody sleeve in the house, trying to focus on Cassie. She remembered the fear piercing her chest, her quickening breath, and the smell of blood, far too close. Her mind lapsed into panic mode, remembering; it had simply shut down once she was sure Cassie was safe, that Harry was back and had it under control.

She’d lost her edge.

Thank God Harry had been there, or the gunman would have invaded the house and Cassie might have been killed.

“North to Colorado. We’re going someplace safe.” Harry’s eyes scanned the rugged landscape before them: violet mountains, dense pine trees laced in frost, and stale, thawed, and refrozen patterns of snow clotting the needles.

Beside her, Cassie had wrapped her arms across herself, hands gripping her elbows, her fists white-knuckled. “You’re going to turn me over to them, aren’t you?”

“To who?” Harry’s eyes flickered back at her in the rearview mirror. “Why do you think they’re after you?”

“The people my father worked for. The ones he was trying to leave.”

“No. This is someplace that belongs to a friend. Somewhere off the grid.”

Tara struggled to sit up under a hundred pounds of wriggling dog. “Are you sure we aren’t being followed?”

“We had a tail for the first half hour. He’s gone, now.”

Cassie rolled her eyes. “Yeah. I have yet to recover from the car sickness.” Her grip on her elbows tightened. “So, where the hell’s my father?” Her tone was harsh, but Tara could see the fear in her eyes.

“We don’t know.” Tara answered her truthfully. “There was an explosion where he worked. There’s some evidence to indicate he was at the scene, but we aren’t sure if he was caught in it.” She paused to rummage in her bag with her good hand and brought out the watch. “Do you recognize this?”

Cassie clutched the piece of metal, running her fingers over its face. “Oh my God. That’s his watch.” Her face crumpled, and Tara thought she was going to dissolve. Tara reached forward to stroke her arm through the coat, and the girl didn’t pull away from the comfort of her touch. Maggie wriggled around to lay her head in Cassie’s lap.

“Who asked you to go to your father’s house?” Tara asked, wondering why DOD hadn’t better prepared her. Someone should have notified her, but the girl seemed to know nothing of her father’s disappearance. The alternative explanation was that she’d fallen into a trap set up specifically for her. Tara could see why DOD would want Tara for questioning: in Magnuson’s absence, maybe the girl would have information.

“Um. . . no one. My father left me a message, said he was going out of town for a while. For work, he said. He wanted me to come get Maggie as soon as I finished with exams.” She rubbed at her eyes with a knuckle. “It’s a long drive from Minnesota. After I got on the road, my roommate called my cell, told me that some guy from the military wanted to talk to me. I didn’t call back. . . I wanted to talk to my dad, first.”

“Do you remember the name? Was it Major Gabriel?”

“Yeah. I think.”

“Do you know what your father was working on?” Harry asked.

Cassie stared at her pale hands combing through Maggie’s fur. She was silent for a long time, and Tara could see she was weighing whether to trust them or not. Tara waited patiently. She saw Cassie’s gaze flicker to Harry’s bloodstained tie wrapped around Tara’s arm, back to Maggie lying with her butt in Tara’s lap. Tara didn’t push. She waited, letting the girl work out things on her own time.

“He was working on detecting dark energy,” she finally said.

“What’s that?”

“Only a small percentage of the universe is made up of what we’d call conventional, visible matter and energy. Actually, only about thirty percent of the universe is made up of that.” Tara could see Cassie falling back into more ease as she spoke. She was her father’s daughter, and this was clearly her area of study; Tara and Harry were just undergrads to instruct. “Dark matter and dark energy are the stuff that physicists expect most of the universe is made up of. They can’t be detected through electromagnetic energy, or any other means other than gravity’s effect on them.

“Dark energy and dark matter are very sparse, very loosely distributed. No one’s had much luck detecting either one, even some guys up in Minnesota who are trying to see if any would randomly hit some super-cooled germanium and silicone they’ve set up deep in an old mine. It’s a theory, but it’s the best one we’ve got. And I don’t claim to understand anything near what my father was doing. I’m just a grad student. He’s been working with this stuff for decades.”

Tara rubbed her arm, winced. “So. . . what brought your father from Cornell to Los Alamos?”

“Particle accelerators can theoretically cause mini black holes and those might be able to draw some dark energy into their fields, just long enough for detection to take place. Cornell has a particle accelerator, but it’s not powerful enough to generate that kind of effect, nor would they be really inclined to let my dad poke holes in space to see what would happen.”

“I can see where that wouldn’t be popular.” Tara tried to imagine the damage to the annual alumni relations fundraising campaign that would be wrought by sucking freshmen into black holes. At the very least, it would probably put a dent in enrollment.

“Yeah. So the Department of Energy offered to let my dad experiment with the accelerator at Los Alamos. As I understand it, they were interested in the idea of dark energy to power some big stuff. . . aircraft carriers, subs. Dad was okay with that, and it seemed like it was going well. . . for the first couple of months, anyway.

“After he got there, he got really quiet. I got the impression they wanted to use his research for other purposes. Dad never said what they wanted, but he wasn’t happy about it.”

Harry’s cell phone began to ring, the ringtone Blue Öyster Cult’s “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper.” He fished it out of his pocket.

“Who’s that?” Tara already knew the answer, but she wanted to know if Harry would be straight with her. Harry’s ringtone evoked a Tarot card image in her mind’s eye: Death. A gaunt, black-robed figure surrounded by white roses foretold the finish of one life and the beginning of a new one. She wished she could pull out the notebook and cards from her purse to explore the sudden intuitive correlation.