License to Ensorcell

Table of Contents

 

 

It was until you walked into it, anyway, I thought. He took off his jacket and draped it over the back of the leather chair. Over his pale blue shirt he was wearing a gun in a shoulder holster. I hate guns.

“Do you have a license for that thing?” I pointed at it.

“Of course.” He looked at me slant-eyed. “Why do you ask?”

“They make me nervous, guns.”

“Oh? It’s a deadly business we’re in. You should carry protection of some sort.”

“I can take care of myself. I’ve got a license to ensorcell. There’s only four of us in the entire Agency who do,” I went on. “It’s not a skill we use lightly. I hope you feel the same way about that gun.”

I picked up the two drawings I’d just done, and waved them at him.

“Anyway, your target’s in San Francisco, all right, or he was ten minutes ago. He was at the Cliff House out on Ocean Beach. He’s driving a blue late-model four-door sedan, but I couldn’t see where he was headed.”

He took the drawings, looked at them, laid them down, then picked up the white envelope. “You haven’t even opened this.”

“I didn’t need to open it. That’s not how Long Distance Remote Sensing works.”

The words seemed to burst out of him. “I cannot tell you how much I hate this kind of—of—this psychic bilge.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“Following the orders my superior gave me.” He threw the envelope into my lap. “Open it, will you? At least do that much. Pander to my sense of reality.”

“If you’re not going to believe a word I say, why should I do anything you want?”

He started to retort, stopped himself, then shrugged. “You’ve got a point,” he said. “Very well, would you please open the sodding envelope?”

Also available from DAW Books:

 

 

THE GOLD FALCON (#1)
THE SPIRIT STONE (#2)
THE SHADOW ISLE (#3)
THE SILVER MAGE (#4)

Copyright © 2011 by Katharine Kerr.

eISBN : 978-1-101-47708-3

 

All Rights Reserved.

 

 

DAW Book Collectors No. 1537.

 

DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

All characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

 

 

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First Printing, February

 

 

 

Who understands family

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks to Kate Elliott and Amanda Weinstein, who gave me the kind of information about Israel one doesn’t get from gazetteers—to say nothing of their emotional support. Also, many thanks to Christian Stubø for the data about the sniper’s rifle that appears in the text.

CHAPTER 1

I HAD JUST STEPPED OUT OF THE SHOWER when the angel appeared. It stood in the bathroom door and scratched its etheric butt through its billowing white robes.

“Yeah?” I said. “I’m dripping wet, so hurry it up.”

“Joseph had a coat of many colors.” Its hollow voice echoed through my apartment, although the angel itself turned transparent and vanished.

As I dressed in a tan corduroy skirt and an indigo and white print blouse, I asked myself if real angels itched. It seemed unlikely. Yet I doubted that demons suffered from skin problems either. Heat rash, maybe. Itching butts—improbable. So, the question became: which side was this apparition on in the eternal battle between Harmony and Chaos?

My name is Nola O’Grady. I can’t tell you the name of my agency. You wouldn’t believe it if I did. Let’s just say it dates back to the Cold War, when certain higher-ups became convinced that the Soviets were using psi powers against us. The Soviets thought the same thing about us. Neither side had it right, but the paranoia turned out to be useful. Other people—if you can call them people—have given the Agency plenty of business over the years, which, incidentally, gives me a job. I had come home to San Francisco as an Agency operative, investigating a Chaos breach.

I grabbed an apple for breakfast and ate it while I waited for the N Judah streetcar. I stood on the concrete platform with a small mob of bleary-eyed office workers and college students, the majority of whom were drinking coffee from those fancy insulated paper cups. In a gloomy Tuesday mood, still a long way away from the weekend, most aimlessly watched the cars whizzing past us on the street. A few, like me, studied the weather. The night’s fog was just beginning to pull back from a sky that promised to be sunny later. Although I kept a look-out, I saw no more angels in the silvery mist.

When the streetcar finally arrived, however, St. Joseph di Copertino was holding a seat for me next to a nice-looking blond guy in jeans and a leather jacket. To be precise, the saint was floating with his legs crossed under him above the seat. Although no one else seemed to see him, the other boarding passengers walked right past the empty seat, most likely for no reason they could have voiced. When I sat down, St. Joe obligingly floated higher and hovered over the back of the seat in front of me. The good-looking guy next to me smiled a little and looked at me sideways, waiting for me to break the ice, but saints always come first.

“What are you doing here?” I said. “I’m not an astronaut.”

St. Joseph of Copertino smiled his trademark gape-mouthed grin and disappeared. The streetcar started up with its usual jerk and whine. It’s gonna be one of those days, I thought. The guy next to me had stopped smiling. He was trying to merge with the wall.

“Sorry,” I said. “I see saints now and then. This one happened to be the patron of astronauts, and so I wondered—”

He gave me the blank stare that people cultivate in a city known for its crazies and weirdos. Scratch this one, I thought. I’d learned, over the years, that I needed to let prospective friends and especially interested guys know what I’m like right off the bat. It saved hysterics later. Still, I wondered why St. Joseph di Copertino had appeared just then, until I remembered he’s also the patron saint of fools. Maybe he was making a general comment on my current love life, though the patron saint of zero, nothing, nada would have been more appropriate.

My cover story office, Morrison Marketing and Research, sat on the top floor of a 1930s building south of Market Street, a believable location for a low-level business, and pure WPA—the clunky stone contruction, the neoclassical pilasters, the dark wood interiors. I chose that office partly because the other suites on that floor stood empty, probably because of the view, or its lack thereof. The windows gave you a good look at the on-ramps to the freeway leading to the Bay Bridge.

Still, it offered advantages—its age for one. In my small suite the wood-framed windows opened to let in the outside air and the vibrations the air carries. I had a wood desk and a wood file cabinet, plus a couple of chairs for the nonexistent customers and a big potted plant. The expensive furniture the Agency had provided had gone into the office behind mine, the one for my nonexistent boss.

I wrote up the morning’s two sightings and sent them off to the Agency via e-mail using the Agency site, the heavily encrypted TranceWeb, then took my standard morning walk. I was on Chaos Watch, which means you do a lot of looking around, preferably in as random a manner as possible. Chaos eruptions follow no schedules, no reasons, no logical connections—if they did, they wouldn’t be chaotic, would they?

I used a procedure the Agency calls Random Synchronistic Linkage to determine my route. In laymen’s terms, I threw dice. You take a map of the city and pinpoint where you are, then assign the numbers two through twelve to the surrounding directions. Throw the dice and follow their lead, just so long as the chosen direction doesn’t take you into the bay or onto a freeway without a car.

I set out on foot into a day turned bright and sunny, though still cool from the halo of a winter fog wrapping the horizon. Up the concrete canyon of Montgomery Street, past the new glass and steel towers and the old marble fronts where bankers work their legal mayhem on the body politic, out again into the sunlight. At the corner where Montgomery heads up a steep slope toward Russian Hill, a gray-haired woman stood waiting for me. I recognized her pink and black tweed Chanel suit first—vintage Fifties—with the pointy-toed black patent shoes and matching handbag. She waved.