Sleight of Hand (10 page)

I looked at my watch. I had only a couple of hours before the colonel arrived, so I had better put them to good use instead of getting wound up. I knew this meeting with him was going to be difficult.

I dragged over the phone and a notepad and started on the numbers.

Chapter 12

At 2 p.m. exactly, the door opened.

The colonel was a throwback to old-school military. His family had been in the military even before they came to America. Since then, they had supplied sons from the War of Independence all the way to Desert Storm. He walked as if he knew they were all looking over his shoulder.

I once saw an old photo of him from his college magazine: the all-American boy, relaxed and laughing at the camera. I wondered at the process that took that and ended with this steel face and the narrow gray eyes.

He’d been one hell of an officer leading Ops 4-10. After the op in South America, he had been transferred to run the Obs unit. I guess it’s like they say, when it goes bad, the blame goes up the chain. He and I had an uncomfortable relationship now. I supposed it wasn’t surprising, since I was responsible for his transfer.

I was expecting him and this had become a bit of a ritual, so I walked out right away, nodding to Tullah. Colonel Laine held the door open for me like the old-style gentleman he was, when it suited him.

I dropped the shades on my eyes against the glare. The colonel’s thousand yard stare just got narrower.

The van was across the street, with Private First Class No-name in the driver’s seat. I had seen him a dozen times or more with the colonel and so I assumed he was in the Obs team, but I had never been introduced. There were no name tags in these units.

The colonel slid the side door open and we got in the back.

It was cramped inside, with a couple of car seats bolted to the floor, facing each other across a table. The rest of the interior was taken up with medical and computer equipment. There was a blank sliding panel to the cab. The only light came from tubes overhead. It was all bright and white and impersonal.

We slid into the seats and the van moved off.

I dropped my jacket over the seat back. I hated the van. It reminded me of the isolation cell; I felt trapped. I slid the shades back up on top of my head and folded my left sleeve up past the elbow.

“You’re carrying a gun, Sergeant,” he commented, as he checked the battery level and loosened the straps on the little blood test unit.

“It’s gotten a bit heavy in Denver. As part of my last contract, I broke up a drug pipeline and there’s trouble from the organization.”

He strapped the unit to my arm. “Does that include what happened to your face?”

“More or less,” I responded, my eyes fixed on the test unit. I felt the eerie touch of the micro-sensors and the sting of the needle. It didn’t hurt much and it never missed the vein, but I always felt uneasy when it did that.

All the monitoring now came down to these blood tests, and every test the colonel took came out roughly the same. It measured a group of proteins in the blood called prions, rather than a virus or bacteria, as they first thought. A prion is tiny, much smaller than a virus, and isn’t alive in the sense that a virus is alive. These prions were strings of protein that wrapped around each other and combined in various ways. In other types of infections, prions caused untreatable, fatal nervous system disorders. The vampire prions didn’t. The tests were telling me I had a constant level of vampire prions in my blood since the attack. What level they would reach for me to be considered a vampire, the Obs team wouldn’t tell me. All they would say was that, if the levels went up, I needed to be under closer observation, which was a nice way to say “back in your cell.”

The important thing was the readout on top. It reached 0.42 and stopped. The number went up and down a little between tests, with no pattern I could see. This was on the high side, but all in all, I let out a relieved sigh and undid the straps.

“Can I keep this?” I held up the test unit.

“Why?”

“It may be a better way to check.”

“Is there something you want to tell me?” He raised a brow at me.

“Not yet.” I sat back, consciously made my body relax. “I’m having meetings with someone who smells half right and I’d like to confirm using this.”

“I need details, Sergeant. Name and address.” He flipped his laptop open and looked at me over the screen.

“Like I said, not yet. If I gave you everyone who claimed to be a vampire, you would be ass high in fakes.” I pushed his screen down, struggling to keep calm. “Can we be clear exactly what the purpose of all this is, Colonel?”

“What do you mean?”

“The army’s invested a lot in the Obs unit since I got infected. What’s it all for?”

I was pushing him as hard as I dared. Who knew what instructions he had about me? He was silent for so long, I thought I had gone too far, then he sighed and sat back.

“I’m tasked with two main projects—to find out if paranormals pose a threat to the United States and to assess if there is any opportunity for the army to benefit.”

“And the best way to accomplish this is for me to creep around trying to find vampires? And if I find some, are you going to ignore the constitution and grab them off the street, throw them into a cell? And if you do, where does it get you? Obs has had me for two years and can’t even tell me—”

“Enough!” He held up a hand.

I realized I had raised my voice. How had my temper gotten out of hand so quickly?

“Sorry.” I leaned back.

“You have a proposal, Sergeant?”

I tried to calm my racing heart. The colonel was dealing with this much better than he might have. I needed to be calm and make sense for him to justify doing it my way.

“Yes. My contact isn’t a vampire yet, according to him. He’s in the process. If he becomes a full vampire, he’s said he will try and arrange a meeting. They’ve got to realize that they can’t stay hidden forever. I think they might be looking for a way to talk as well.” I omitted that they seemed eager enough to talk to me to warrant four guys chasing me. I just needed to be more in control of any meeting.

He grunted. “That
might
be a good idea. I would need to be at that meeting.”

I looked at him. He was one tough bastard, but age slows you. I wasn’t sure how he would stand up to a vampire if things went wrong. At least he was accepting there might be something in this approach.

“We can try.” I tucked the test unit down by my side. He hadn’t said I could take it, but he hadn’t actually said I couldn’t.

“What I can’t do…” I cleared my throat. My heart was in my mouth. “What I can’t do is spy, any more than I can go back to that cell.”

He was watching me. I waited him out. I’d drawn the line. Would he cross it?

Eventually, he spoke. “You’ve changed,” was all he said.

“I have. It feels different.”

“How do you mean?”

“At first, vampires were the ones in South America, or the ones downtown last year.” My hands felt sweaty. “If we had any like that here, they needed cleaning out. It was simple. But the closer I get to them here, the more I recognize that they’re different.”

He didn’t say anything, so I went on.

“And there’s me. I might be a vampire soon. I’m fighting it, but what if I’m losing? Obs can’t tell me. Everything I report back, they just wave off as post-traumatic stress. They don’t know.” I leaned forward across the table. “What if I go, Colonel? Loyal, patriotic citizen of the USA, served my country proudly, would be proud to still be doing that
and I’m a vampire
. What’s your position then?”

“You ask a hard question,” was all he’d say. But it was a very big thing to me that he hadn’t said I’d be back in isolation.

He knocked on the partition and PFC No-name turned the van back towards the office.

“What about other paranormals?” I said.

“Such as?”

“Elves. Witches. Fairies. Werewolves. Demons.” I was watching him, but his face didn’t flicker once. He was probably one hell of a poker player.

“Anything more you want to tell me, Sergeant?” he said dryly.

I shrugged and waited.

“Yes, we’re investigating all paranormal activity.” He leaned back. “We’ve got credible reports of werewolves, but no hard proof. Obs assessment is that they are extremely dangerous. Extremely.” He watched me. When I didn’t volunteer anything, he shrugged and pulled a note from his clipboard.

“We’ve monitored the internet traffic as before, and we think there’s an illegal rave being organized by ZK next week. Are you still tracking this?”

I sighed. Our early brainstorming on where vampires were likely to be found had thrown up illegal raves as a possibility. I had been to enough of them to discount most of them. The one group I was still concerned about were ZK, short for Zeklesh, derived from the word for ‘snakemouth’ in Navajo. They were a biker gang breaking out in different directions, principally drugs. They organized raves as a cover for other things. There was an edge to them that was unsettling. If there was any connection to vampirism in the rave scene, I would stake my bet on it being through them.

“Yeah.” I took his note. I would need to check my sources for the last minute confirmation of the venue.

“There’s one other thing to note, Sergeant.” He closed his clipboard and I got the full-on thousand yard stare. “I have a report from Morales about Crate & Freight.”

Oh, crap! Morales was going to land me in it.

“He says you acted as you had to, under the circumstances,” the colonel went on. I tried to hide the shuddering breath I let out. “But it was a close thing with Detective Jennings. I have to warn you, if you do infect someone, it’s out of my hands.” He paused. “I’d predict isolation for you
and
anyone infected. The whole thing will be kicked upstairs to the National Security Council as an emergency. Things go in there, like that, they don’t come out.”

He was quiet for a minute while I took that warning on board, with a mixture of dread and relief. Nothing about keeping a low profile. All about Jennings trying to give me mouth-to-mouth.

I nodded. My pulse started to edge down again.

“Did you mean it about being proud if you could still be in uniform? Would you go back to 4-10?” he asked.

“In a heartbeat, Colonel.” I bowed my head and closed my eyes, caught out by the depth of the reaction his words had caused in me. “But you can’t step into the same river twice.”

“Heraclitus?” he said, sounding surprised.

“No academic qualifications doesn’t mean I can’t read.” That came out sharper than I intended.

“Sorry.” I couldn’t remember that he had ever apologized for anything before. “Why didn’t you finish school and do college?”

“Too busy being a soldier,” I said. That hadn’t been it at all, but I wasn’t going to talk to him about the difficulties I’d had, or my promise to my dad.

We sat there in silence for the rest of the trip back, watching each other and thinking our separate thoughts.

As I got out, I told him that we would be moving the office and I would appreciate our next meeting being in the new office rather than the van. I was surprised when he just nodded.

I watched the van go and wondered why I always got the feeling that the colonel was disappointed in me. Was that because I’d screwed up in South America or was it some kind of voodoo management schtick?

In the office, there were three notes from Tullah:

Gone to look at a place with Ma, maybe move tomorrow?

Please call Captain Morales
.

Please eat the food Ma brought you
.

Chapter 13

I switched my cell back on, got past the voicemail from Morales and called him.

“You missed his keys under the sofa,” he said without preamble.

“What?”

“Troy Huber. His keys were under the sofa, Farrell. You did okay on finding the blood and reading the rest of the apartment.”

There didn’t seem much point in denying that I had been there and had briefed Jennifer to report it. “Thanks. That was sloppy on the keys. How are you treating it?”

“Abduction, at the moment.”

“Security footage?”

“Unexplained camera problem that day.”

I chewed that over and didn’t like the sound of it. “You didn’t call me to talk about this.”

“No, I didn’t. I have a couple of things I needed to talk to you about. Firstly, I’m aware you’re working for Ms. Kingslund, obviously.”

“Can’t discuss cases, Captain.”

“I’m not discussing it, Farrell, I’m telling you. I count Ms. Kingslund as a personal friend, and I understand the sensitivity of the issues and the requirement for confidentiality. I’m just saying that we should be in contact on anything that might be pertinent.”

I thought that was a good idea, but I would clear it with Jennifer before I did anything. “You didn’t happen to recommend me to her, did you, Captain?”

“Can’t discuss that, Farrell.”

“Ouch.” It had to be him, but I couldn’t really swear at him for getting me some business when I needed it most. “Okay, so what was the other issue?”

“Crate & Freight. We haven’t found Windler. We got the truck he drove, out on 6
^th
Avenue, near Buckley.”

“How can I help?”

“I’d like you to come downtown and take a look at the evidence files. You were watching these people and there might be something that you think of when you see what we’ve got.”

“I’ll come now.” Checking on Windler was exactly what I needed to be doing for my own sake, so I treated this as a bonus.

“Bring anything you have that might be relevant.”

“Will do, Captain.”

Jennifer’s cell was on voice mail, so I sent her a quick email simply saying that the former employees I had checked seemed to have valid reasons for leaving, unrelated to any other company. There was one that I wanted to follow up. I suggested a catch-up meeting with her the next day.