Dark Oracle (9 page)

“Corvus.” He gave a sheepish half smile. “As if it wasn’t obvious by the ringtone.”

“Are you going to answer it?”

He hesitated before clicking it on and pressing it to his ear. “Li.”

Tara could hear the indistinguishable murmur of a transmitted voice. The squawk did not sound happy. “Yeah. We ran into some trouble. A sniper was set up on the house. Tara got grazed. Magnusson’s daughter is fine. I’m taking them to a safe house.”

More murmurs. Tara could imagine his questions.

“I got the sniper’s plate. DCD-1397.” Harry made a face. “Sir, you’re breaking up. I’ll report back to you ASAP.” He snapped the phone shut, powered it off.

“Does Corvus know where we’re going?” she asked. It was clear Harry didn’t want to tell him. There was a seed of distrust between the two men, and Tara wanted to see how deep it had taken root.

Harry shook his head. “No. The fewer people who know, the better.”

He turned off the curving two-lane highway onto a dirt road without a marker. Dust rose in a cloud behind the car as he guided it into a thick maze of pine trees. The switchback trail was narrow enough for only one car to pass, and Tara tried not to think about what would happen if any traffic came in the opposite direction. It seemed Harry followed a trail deep into unknown territory. Tara had no map, no knowledge of how far they were from the nearest town.

She hoped she could trust Harry. She hoped he was truly taking them someplace safe, as he promised, and there would be no men with rifles waiting for them at the end of the winding road to nowhere.

C
ORVUS LEANED BACK IN HIS CHAIR
. T
HE CELL PHONE DISPLAY
played green light over his face as it powered down. He rubbed it carefully with an antibacterial wipe before he stowed it in his pocket. There was precious little light in this place, and each glimmer drew attention. His temporary office gleamed with metal and glass, a one-way window providing a view of workers milling in a data processing room, but there were no windows to the outside. Beyond the false window, the blue screens of computer displays glowed, compiling and sifting massive amounts of data, searching for some forgotten note or algorithm that would unlock the keys to Magnusson’s research.

All they’d found so far had been garbage. The only deciphered strings of data were references to old
Star Trek
episodes. The joke was on them. So far.

“Well?” Gabriel asked him. He scraped muck from the bottom of his boot onto the bottom corner of Corvus’s desk. Corvus tried not to show it bothered him, but couldn’t quite control the twitch under his left eye.

“Li and Sheridan have Magnusson’s daughter. She’s unharmed.”

Gabriel frowned, ran his hands over his buzzed short hair, and laced his fingers behind his head. The buzz cut showed the unevenness of his skull; Gabriel had clearly been in more than a few fights. “Those snipers you sent had shitty aim. Where are they now?”

“I’ve got enough of a cell phone signal to triangulate their current position. It’ll take some time, but we should be able to narrow down the general area.” Corvus stared with distaste at the crumbles of mud on the carpet and leaned back imperceptibly as Gabriel placed his grimy coffee mug on the desk. He more than suspected Gabriel did this shit just to piss him off.

“Do that.” Gabriel rested the top of his boot on the edge of the desk. “And when you’re done, I’ll send a more properly equipped welcome party than the one you put together. I hired someone special.”

Gabriel gestured through the glass beyond the door. The door opened under the gloved hand of a tall woman with hair the color of straw and eyes pale as agates. Corvus winced at the dust covering her leather coat, and his nose wrinkled. She smelled like winter and dirt and more than a bit of gunpowder.

“Corvus, meet Adrienne.”

Adrienne inclined her head. “Gentlemen.” She folded her hands primly behind her back and stood with one boot leaving dirt on his carpet. She had the lanky grace of a ballet dancer. “I’m pleased to be working with you.”

Corvus eyed her suspiciously. “She’s not military.” The stance was too casual, and she moved too fluidly.

Gabriel snorted. “Of course not. I use untraceable people for dirty work. Freelancers.”

Adrienne smiled icily. “I prefer the term ‘outside consultant.’ ”

“And you charge consultants’ rates.” Gabriel grinned. “I’ll be billing her to your department, Corvus. Look for a line item called ‘Miscellaneous project tools.’ ”

Corvus frowned. “What can she do that our people can’t?”

“I’m a tracker, Mr. Corvus.” Adrienne’s voice could frost metal.

Gabriel nodded. “I’ve worked with her before on cleanup details. Remember that independent film team that was caught in the avalanche in the Rockies last winter?”

“Those guys filming the documentary about old missile silos?”

“The very ones. Adrienne was the one we hired to find them.”

“None of them were found alive. That’s not a very impressive bullet point on a resume.”

“Exactly.” Gabriel leaned back in his chair, smiled as Corvus absorbed the meaning of the statement. He swiveled his chair to the young woman. “Adrienne, our tech department will fill you in on the subjects. You can deploy when ready.”

Her pale gray eyes narrowed in anticipation. “Right away.” She stepped briskly from the room, and Corvus thought she seemed a bit too eager to be under way.

Corvus cocked his head at her receding shadow. “Are you sure that—?”

“She’ll get it done. She shows a lot of enthusiasm. I like enthusiasm.”

“That’s not what I meant. Do we have to. . .” Corvus struggled with the word. “Do we have to eliminate Li and Sheridan?”

Gabriel snorted. “You don’t get the luxury of a conscience, Corvus. Not after the things I know you’ve done.”

Corvus felt the blood drain from his face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Gabriel picked up his coffee cup, took a swig out of it. “I did some checking up on you, Corvus. I know you’re an ambitious man. Ambitious enough to make sacrifices.”

“That’s true of anyone in my position.” Corvus steepled his fingers in front of him, pressing the tips together to keep them from shaking.

Gabriel leaned over the desk, letting coffee drip on the polished surface. Corvus’s attention was fixed on the droplets.

“But you made sacrifices of people around you. Of Dr. Sheridan.”

Corvus felt a twitch beginning around his left eye. He kept his face blank. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“You knew the Gardener had her. And you didn’t act. You left her there, because it served your purposes.” Gabriel smiled. “That’s cold, Corvus, even for someone like me.”

Corvus narrowed his eyes. “This, from a man sending snipers and assassins to shoot a twenty-three-year-old girl.”

“My way is quick. It’s painless. And it has to be done, for the sake of national security. It’s not lying buried in a box, bleeding out, for. . . how long was it? Hours? A day?”

Corvus shut his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He tried not to imagine, but the thought of Tara entombed in a pine box, in the dark, still haunted him. The image often surfaced in his dreams, and he awoke often to the scratching of fingernails on wood.

He’d seen the pictures: the broken glass, the blood ground into the wood, the bloody footprints leading into the darkness. He kept the complete file in his desk drawer, as if he someday might act on his knowledge. He never did. The file was never too far from his hands. Or his conscience.

“If that girl lets loose her father’s secrets, we could have an unaccounted-for WMD that could fall into terrorist hands. There’s no comparison to that and your little scheming ambitions, Corvus.”

Gabriel pushed away from the desk and stood.

“Don’t take it personally, Corvus,” he said jovially. “I always make sure to get something on anyone I’m working with. Keeps them loyal. Your skeletons just had more meat on their bones than most.”

Corvus’s knuckles whitened on the desk. “How did you get this information?”

Gabriel shrugged. “Those files you keep in your desk. I followed up on your cell phone records the night Dr. Sheridan disappeared. And. . . I have your house wired. You talk in your sleep.”

He left the room, leaving Corvus in darkness with his guilt.

“I
CAN’T REACH
T
ARA
.”

Sophia paced the length of the Pythia’s living room. A city skyline spread below the glass wall to the south, showing buildings clustered beside a river. Noon traffic clogged the streets, though they were too far up to hear the honking of horns. The gray of the day had seeped into the room, into the Pythia’s oriental lamps and plush carpets, into the luxurious oil paintings of women eating apples and the deep ebony woods of furniture. Only the fire in the massive fireplace seemed to keep the chill at bay. The Pythia, draped in a scarlet caftan adorned with gold fringe, sat before the fire on a cushion. She meditatively stared into the flames, eyes round as coals.

The Pythia shrugged. “I haven’t been able to reach her for years.”

Sophia pressed her lips together. She didn’t know if it was due to the waning of the Pythia’s power, or whether it was a result of Tara’s stubbornness. It didn’t much matter. It was not as if Sophia could ask.

“What do you see, Pythia?” she asked instead.

“Precious little,” the Pythia admitted, clasping her hands around her knees. “I see that Tara is safe. For now. And you? What do you see?”

Sophia stared at her reflection in the floor-to-ceiling window. It seemed she looked older, the worry mark on her forehead deeper, every time she saw her reflection. She focused on remaining still, on looking softly at her eyes. Her reflection pulled her in, and she allowed herself to see through it. . . through her image, through the city landscape, and even through the gray sky. Past all of it. The image of herself in the city burned away to a fine gray mist. In that misty expanse, she saw a cold darkness, spangled with snow. A crow walked along the edge of a desolate road, its tracks quickly washed over with dark and ice.

Sophia swallowed, and her hand fluttered to her throat. She’d not seen that image since Juliane had died. Like many oracles, her visions were not always literal, but required interpretation of the symbols that came bubbling up. This one was crisp and unmistakable.

“I see death,” she said.

The Pythia stared into her flames. The fire intensified and licked outward, toward its mistress. Sophia had no talent for pyromancy; oracles usually only had one talent, sometimes two. It was impossible to know what the Pythia saw, if she did not say. If she saw anything at all.

The Pythia nodded sadly, and it seemed the years piled on to her, all at once. The lines around her eyes deepened, and the silver streaks in her hair seemed more abundant than they had a moment before.

“We must warn Tara,” Sophia insisted. “There must be a way to tell her.”

“There is. But she won’t like it.”

Chapter Eight

L
IGHT HAD
begun to drain from the trees when Harry turned the ignition off. He’d parked the car at the end of a winding trail in the mountains. It was probably as far as he could have driven; the snow had deepened the further into the mountains he drove. Without snow chains, the tires had little traction and the road had become treacherous. More than once, Tara had felt the tires lock and slide beneath them on the way up.

A porch light glowed from a small, aluminum-sided trailer, casting shadows among the stripped trees and pine. Smoke curled from a metal chimney, with wood neatly stacked outside, partially covered by a tarp. A beat-up pickup truck was nestled under the shelter of a pine tree. Bending under the weight of the snow, the tree had sloughed off a small avalanche on the hood. Behind the trailer, Tara could see a makeshift shed constructed of corrugated steel. The carcasses of deer hung from the ceiling, draining onto pink patches of snow.

Cassie reached for her hand when they got out of the car. Apparently, the girl had decided to trust Tara, considering she’d taken a bullet for the girl.

“It’ll be okay,” Tara told her. “Harry knows what he’s doing.” But doubt rattled around her mind, and she did not feel the confidence of her words. For all she knew, Li could be leading them into a trap.

The trailer door opened, and a man in a flannel jacket stepped out onto the makeshift porch. He was a bit crooked with age, clean-shaven ebony face craggy and weathered as a piece of knotty wood. In his left hand, he held a flashlight. In his right, he held a shotgun. Tara reached inside her jacket and wrapped her fingers around the grips of her gun.

“Hey, old man.” Harry walked around the front of the car.

“Harry! What the hell are you doing here?” The man’s face split open in a smile. At that smile, bright as a lantern, Tara felt her sense of alarm drain away. She let her fingers slip from the gun.

“What else? Trying to stay out of trouble.”

“If I know you, you’re not succeeding.”

The two men clapped each other on the back, and the older man ruffled Harry’s hair as if he were a teenager.

“Tara, Cassie. This is Martin.”

Maggie bounded up to him, looked up at him with adoring eyes. Martin rubbed the dog’s ears. “And who’s this?”

Cassie found her voice. “This is Maggie.” She’d followed the dog, wound her fingers in her collar. It was clear she was clinging to the dog, her only piece of security in this mess.

Martin’s eyes twinkled. “Lovely ladies, please come in from the chill.” He opened the door and ushered them inside. “You, too, Maggie.”

The trailer was warm, lit in an orange glow from a potbellied stove in the corner. Rust-colored shag carpeting covered the small living room floor, where a worn plaid couch dominated. A barrel-shaded, fringed lamp from the 1970s cast a pool of yellow light over cascades of spider plants and stacks of books tucked neatly along the walls. A radio played big band music at low volume, and Tara smelled bread baking.

Cassie’s stomach growled audibly. She blushed, wrapping her arms around her belly to silence it.

Martin jacked a shell out of the shotgun’s chamber and leaned the shotgun beside the door. He moved to the tiny galley kitchen and peeked in a Crock-Pot. “Have a seat! Dinner’s almost ready.”

Cassie and Tara sat down on the couch. Tara felt the day’s exhaustion settling into her. The radiation sickness seemed to be wearing off, but a tiredness that made her bones and teeth ache was left in its place.

“C’mere.” Harry beckoned for her to follow him. With effort, she dragged herself to her feet and followed him down the short hall of the trailer to a tiny bathroom. Harry clicked on the light, revealing a small, clean space with a plastic shower curtain decorated with fish and nonskid turquoise flower decals strewn across the base of the shower. The Formica counter with gold flecks was clear of clutter. Harry opened the medicine cabinet and rummaged about.

“Let me see that arm.”

She protested. “It’s fine.”

“You don’t get to eat until I take a look.”

Reluctantly, she pulled off her ruined coat and dropped it on the shower floor. Tara extended her arm toward Harry. She looked away, knowing what he saw: Jack Frost patterns of scars disappearing under his makeshift bandage.

Harry, to his credit, didn’t comment on the old wounds. He gently unwrapped the tie, peeling it from the clotted fresh injury, turning her arm over to look. Tara stifled a hiss. The bullet had sliced through the upper part of her biceps. It ached, but it had run clean through.

“I’m sorry about passing out in the car.” She bit her lip, embarrassed. It wasn’t a big wound, but it had triggered a series of fears that caused her to shut down, like a machine with a rock caught in its gears. She seemed to be apologizing a lot lately, and she wasn’t good at it.

“Quit apologizing. You lost a lot of blood.” Harry swabbed the area with cotton soaked in hydrogen peroxide, and she tried not to react.

“Does it need stitches?”

“A few.”

“Great,” she groaned, leaning against the countertop.

“I can take you back into town to get it done.”

She shook her head, trying to shake the disinfectant smell of hospitals free of her mind’s eye. “The hospital will have to report any gunshot wounds, and that’ll lead whoever is after Cassie to our doorstep. We can’t let her be found. Besides,” she shrugged, “I’m not winning any beauty pageants. As long as it doesn’t get infected, it’ll be okay.”

“It needs to be sewn up, or it will,” he persisted.

“We can’t take that risk.”

“I can do it, or you can let Martin do it. But I warn you, Martin’s got early-stage Parkinson’s.”

Damn, he was stubborn. She looked into his serious brown eyes. “You can do it.” She would trust him.

He nodded. “Okay.” His quick assent made her think he had done this before.

As Harry investigated the medicine chest again for more supplies, she blurted out, “Look, I’m afraid I’m not being much use to you on this case.” She let her hair fall over her face, hiding behind it.

Harry gently brushed her hair back from her face. His gaze was intense. “Stop it. You saved that girl’s life and found Magnusson’s laptop. I don’t care if you’re squeamish or claustrophobic.”

She ducked her head, didn’t answer.

“Hey. Look at me.” He turned her chin toward him with two fingers, forcing her to look at him. “We’re good, okay?”

She nodded, swallowing. She refused to admit to herself that some forgotten part of her thrilled at that small touch, his gentle concern. She buried that part deep in her chest.

Harry had located a needle, thread, a bottle of isopropyl alcohol, and a paper cup. He deftly threaded the needle and placed it in the cup. After pouring the alcohol in, he dug around in a counter drawer, grinning when he found a tube of Orajel. He dabbed the tooth desensitizer on the edges of the wound

Tara looked away as he fished the needle and thread out of the alcohol bath.

“Ready?”

She nodded, closing her eyes as the needle slipped into her skin, dragging the shock of pain and memory with it. She concentrated on her shallow breathing rattling quick in the back of her throat. Sweat broke out on her brow, and she tried to concentrate on not passing out, locking her knees.

“Sit down.” Harry let go of the needle, picked her up, and set her on the counter as carefully as if she were a broken doll. He turned back to his work, picking up the needle that bounced against her elbow.

It seemed interminable. She propped her head in her hand, bracing it with her elbow against her knee.

“Trust me,” he muttered, irony dripping through his tone. “I’m from the government.”

In spite of herself, she laughed.

A
S THE NIGHT WORE ON
, T
ARA SLIPPED AWAY. SHE SLIPPED
away from Li trying to crack the password on Magnusson’s computer, sitting cross-legged on the floor, hunched over it with a furrow deep in his brow. She slipped away from Cassie and Martin, sitting beside each other on the couch, soaking up the remnants of their venison stew with warm, baked bread. Maggie stretched over their feet, the dog’s belly warmly distended with stew. Cassie and Martin held a quiet discussion about music, and the light conversation seemed to draw a curtain of normalcy over the exhausted girl.

Tara slipped into the bathroom and showered the dried blood from her body. The hot water made her lightheaded and she sat on the plastic floor of the shower, among the turquoise flower decals. She let the water sluice over her scarred skin, over the old wounds and the new stitches Harry had set in her arm.

Such a small wound, this, in comparison to all the others, thousands of stitches making their white tracks over her skin. But this new one had jolted her awake, terrified her. Deep down, she yearned to run, yearned to flee back to her safe nest in the forest, to hide under her blanket with Oscar’s purr under her chin. This morning’s shooting had elicited a deep sense of panic she could feel vibrating in her bones, chasing away that soft, numb lassitude she’d wrapped herself in with the sharp, real edge of pain.

Perhaps this fear was a sign she was still alive, she thought. Perhaps her instinct to protect Cassie, her claustrophobia in the radiation suit, how her stomach twisted at the smell of her own blood. . . perhaps these were signs she was waking up to life once again. Perhaps the knight in effigy she’d seen in the Four of Swords card had cracked, letting some painful light into her prison.

She shook her head, slinging water against the shower curtain. Her mind fixed on the tiny thrill of Harry’s gentle, unquestioning hands on her as he sewed her wound. Despite the sting and nausea of the procedure, some small part of her craved that touch. . .

She shied away from the thought. Harry was a practical man, the Knight of Pentacles. He didn’t know the full extent of her physical and mental injuries. . . No grounded, sane man could want a broken woman. And if he knew her methods, if he knew that her way of profiling was not a strict science of probabilities and statistics, he would surely think her mad. The magic of synchronicity, the shadows of coincidence, didn’t exist in his bright world. Her world and his were like Magnusson’s dark and light energy: one visible, open, and the other hidden. At the root, they were polar opposites. Tara had concealed her talents with the cards for years, from everyone she’d worked with, even before she’d gotten hurt. Especially Corvus.

She scrubbed her hair, willing thoughts of Harry to be rinsed from her mind. Besides, he was one of Corvus’s men, no matter how hard he seemed to try to shake off Corvus’s leash. As such, he could not be entirely trusted.

Corvus. Her wet brow wrinkled at the thought of seeing him again. After all this time, he still elicited a gut sense of distrust, an unreasoning reaction. But it remained. And Tara, if nothing else, had learned to believe her feelings.

Tara pulled herself from the bottom of the shower, bracing herself on the wall against a wave of dizziness, and reached for a towel and clothes. Martin had generously given her some of his clothes: a blue flannel shirt, a T-shirt, thick socks, a pair of jeans, and a belt.

“I apologize for not having more feminine clothes at hand, Miss Tara,” Martin had said over her protestations at his generosity. “But the lady of the house is a bluebird. She lives in a little nest in the branches of that tree.” He pointed through the living room window to a lush pine tree. When he pointed, Tara saw his hand shake slightly. “And I’m afraid she’s an unrepentant nudist.”

Tara had laughed. She’d found herself taking an immediate liking to Martin, to the old man’s concern for their basic needs: food, clothing, shelter. He asked no questions and asked for nothing in return.

“Thank you for your hospitality,” she’d said. “Having strangers on your doorstep in the middle of the night is—”

“Is no trouble at all,” he finished, waving away her concerns. “Harry is like a son to me. His friends are my family, too.”

“How long have you known Harry?”

Martin’s eyes crinkled. “I’ve known Harry since he was a tadpole. His mother was killed in a car accident. No father around. Very sad.”

Tara had glanced down the hall at the intense man perched over the computer, his lips working silently over combinations of passwords, lost in his own world. She tried to imagine what he would have been like as a child.

“Harry came to live with me when he was nine. Of course, at that time, we lived in Chicago. He used to play street hockey with the neighbor boy, Tom, who lived across the street. . . Harry’s been like a son to me.”

Tara had looked at Harry, a bubble of sympathy swelling in her throat. Though Tara had lost her mother as an adult, Harry had barely known his. But it was clear he’d made Martin proud.

She dressed quickly in Martin’s clothes. They were too big for her, but she managed to cinch the waist of the pants tightly with the belt. Conscious of the steam pulsing against her skin, she cracked the tiny sliding window open an inch. The cold air against her face braced her, seemed to cleanse her lungs of doubt, fused her breath with clarity.

Back to work.

She wiped her wet footprints from the floor, checked to make sure the door was locked. Unzipping her purse, she took out her cards and little notebook, thankful she hadn’t left them with her luggage at the motel. Experience had taught her to keep them close at hand while working a case.

Sitting cross-legged on the linoleum, she spread out her mother’s scarf. She wouldn’t ordinarily do a reading on a bathroom floor, but she’d done readings in stranger places. Serious questions called for serious measures, and as long as she treated the space and the cards respectfully, she’d always gotten good results. Closing her eyes, she focused on the investigation and shuffled the cards.

Where do we go from here?
She exhaled, breathing the question to the universe. In her mind’s eye, she imagined it leaving through the open window into the darkness.

She drew nine cards, laying them facedown on the scarf in three rows of three cards, starting from the top: left, center, right, and repeating twice more. This was a spread she’d used in the past to shed light on decisions. Though the decisions to be made in this investigation were wide-open, this felt like the best spread to use. Tara always used the layout that first flashed before her mind’s eye, even if she made one up on the spot.