A Creature of Smokeless Flame Read online

  “The… music?” Harrison now looked completely lost.

  Lensky found it in himself to be sorry for his boss, and not just because of the torment of losing – possibly losing – a child. This was Harrison’s first experience of topologists’ ability to miss the point and go galloping off into the distance focused on some minor detail. He hoped the man’s sanity would survive further contact with his mathematicians.

  “Just before the pepper spray they were trying to torture us with obnoxiously loud music,” Thalia murmured to him. “But one of their selections just happened to be Wagner.”

  Lensky felt a smile growing. “Don’t tell me. Not—”

  “The Ride of the Valkyries,” Thalia nodded, and Lensky laughed outright. “Steve, you need to start reading Thalia’s informal reports; you’re missing all the good details. You’re lucky Miss Thorn wasn’t inspired to retrieve her favorite new fashion accessory to go with that music.”

  “Who says I wasn’t?” Ingrid put down the doughnut, reached down beside her chair, and pulled something out of nothing. She twirled it around her wrist and Harrison flinched away from a bright circle of sharp-edged steel. “An authentic Viking axe,” Ingrid explained. “Well… authentic in style, anyway. I don’t think the Vikings had quite such good quality steel.” With a startling thunk, she buried the axe in the top of the battered table. Harrison edged away from her.

  “Where did that come from?” Torres demanded.

  “It was an engagement present from Jimmy. Oh – you mean literally? I got it from my apartment in Austin. Where else?”

  “No, I mean right now. There wasn’t anything beside your chair.”

  Ingrid looked down her nose at him. “It was camouflaged, naturally. I recently worked out how to remove the camouflage open cover from myself while leaving it over objects in my possession. I had intended to demonstrate for you tomorrow… today?” she turned to her colleagues, “before these louts interrupted.”

  Torres frowned at the table top. The axe looked very real. So did the damage to the table.

  “That camouflage thing could be very useful,” Harrison said thoughtfully, “if we needed to bring weapons in somewhere unobserved.”

  “I think a metal detector would still pick them up,” Lensky said.

  “I can think of some variations on the algorithm that might help with that,” said Ben.

  “A lot of the places we infiltrate don’t have metal detectors,” said Torres.

  “The original camouflage works like this,” Ingrid said, and vanished.

  For Lensky, she hadn’t so much vanished as become very difficult to see; he’d become used to this topological effect, and so he registered the wavery blur of Ingrid’s chair as evidence that she was still sitting in it. Harrison and Torres, though, jumped and started looking around at the door, under the table, even behind the vending machines. Lensky sighed.

  “Don’t tease them, Ingrid.”

  She reappeared in her chair, as calm and collected as if she’d never left it. Which, of course, she hadn’t. That would have been teleportation, which Thalia had just demonstrated.

  Lensky contemplated trying to explain the differing properties of teleportation, camouflage and telekinesis to his colleagues. The thought lent conviction and persuasiveness to his argument that everybody would do better if they took the rest of the night off and reconvened in the morning. There was a decent hotel in Eden….

  “I’d rather just go home,” Thalia said under her breath.

  “I think that’ll make them nervous.”

  “They don’t have any more control over us here than they have in Austin.”

  “I know,” he muttered, “but please don’t explain that. They’ll feel better if we stay right here in Concho County. And if they really understood your abilities and limitations, you’d be handcuffed to the walls and we’d all be much more unhappy.”

  Thalia glowered and made sotto voce remarks about Riemann surfaces and people’s pants catching on fire, but she went along with the negotiated decision that the topologists and Lensky would stay at the Paradise Inn for what remained of the night. Harrison, Dean and Torres, of course, already had rooms there.

  ***

  The good thing about Greek hair is that if you keep it just long enough to fall into its natural curls, your hairstyle is virtually indestructible. Even after a twenty-minute hot shower to wash off the last of the pepper spray, all I had to do was rub my head with a towel and run my fingers through the curls a couple of times to look good as new.

  Hair-wise, anyway. In other respects, what I saw in the mirror was not totally encouraging. My eyes and nose were still red and the bruise on my cheekbone was darkening. Worse, I looked fragile. Shaken up.

  Which I was. For all my insistence that Brad would get us out of there, I hadn’t been able to repress the thought that it might be too late when he found us. That he would find us and would free us, you understand, I never had the slightest doubt. The only thing I hadn’t been sure of was whether I had the strength to hold out until he came.

  If they had broken me – if I had given in, agreed to serve them regardless of what they wanted – I wouldn’t have been the same person any more. The person Brad had married. I would have been — oh, something less. Something not worthy of him.

  I needed to talk to him, to reason it out logically and unsentimentally. So, of course, when I opened the bathroom door and he held out his arms to me, I threw myself at him and wailed and wept into his shoulder like any idiot sentimental female. And he just held me close and tight and safe and never even suggested that I use the hotel’s box of Kleenex instead of turning his shirt into a sodden rag.

  “I’m sorry,” I said when I was too dehydrated to cry any more.

  “No, I’m sorry,” he said, “for not getting to you sooner.” He patted my back gently. “You’ve never cried on me before, even after Sandru Balan tried to blow you up. What aren’t you telling me? Was it very bad?”

  “N-no, it wasn’t that bad, not yet. I had a feeling they were just getting started, though.” I pulled back enough to look at his face. Nobody had ever accused Lensky of being smooth or handsome, although to hear him tell it, his big brother Aleksi had possessed both qualities in spades. Lensky looked just what he was: Solid. Steady. Reliable. The kind of man you wanted when you were prone to being attacked by vengeful mages or kidnapped by bullies with a bent for torture.

  “And you came faster than I’d dared hope,” I went on. It was easier — a lot easier — to keep my voice steady when I could look into his dark blue eyes and see the love in them. “I thought Dr. Verrick would see my note tomorrow and then I didn’t know how long it would take him to get ahold of you and then, well, I was sure you’d find us as soon as you could – not more than a day or two.” But I hadn’t been equally sure that I would hold out that long.

  “Thalia, why didn’t you just do what they asked?”

  “You don’t get it, do you, Brad? They didn’t ask. They grabbed us, drugged us so we wouldn’t be able to apply topology to defend ourselves, and threw us in a windowless van. Put us in separate cells at that place, and started right in with the threats. They could have been anybody.”

  “But you said in your note that they were CIA. So they must have told you something.”

  “Your boss, who by the way did not impress me as the sharpest knife in the drawer, let that slip. Accidentally. In between threats and general… unpleasantness.”

  “Yes, well, now you know why he was acting crazy.”

  That I did. And being out of his mind with worry about his son was enough to excuse just about any craziness. “Yes. And… well. Tout comprendre is not necessarily tout pardonner, but I’m willing to overlook the bad start and do what I can anyway. You already know that; I wouldn’t have shown off with the doughnuts if I hadn’t been willing to cooperate. I would have from the beginning, you know, if they’d just told us what the problem was and asked nicely for help. Your boss’s stupid ideas
about saving time with a show of force actually cost him half a day. Night. Whatever.”

  “What about the others?”

  “We’ll find out in the morning.” Which was already way too close. “I’m guessing that Ingrid’s Viking axe display means she’s on board too. Don’t know about Ben and Colton.” I didn’t entirely have my mind on Steve Harrison’s heartbreaking problem any more; Brad was investigating the big hotel-provided terrycloth robe I’d wrapped up in after my shower.

  “What did you do, wrap this thing around yourself three times and tie it down with every knot you knew? Both of them?”

  “Only the sash part. I’m not a midget.”

  “Fortunately,” he said, wrapping the sash around one hand as he loosened it and slipped it free, “I was the star of my Scout troop at knot-untying.”

  I faked a yawn. “Don’t you mean knot tying?”

  “That was the official badge. This one was strictly unofficial – and not as rewarding as I’d hoped. Sandra Mae Finney was the model, but she drew the line at being the prize as well.”

  “I love getting these glimpses into your misspent adolescence. Did you even know what to do with a girl after you unwrapped her?”

  “I do now.”

  And so he did.

  5. There are quite a lot of men I’m not married to

  “I don’t think this was a good idea,” Ben muttered at me.

  I really didn’t need him reinforcing my own fears.

  “Don’t worry. We just need to stay long enough to mark a couple of locations to teleport to later. Then we’ll make some excuse and get out of here.”

  “That may be your plan. I’m not sure it’s their plan.”

  He gestured at the cluster of grinning young men who had casually drifted between us and the door.

  “Don’t forget, we can always teleport out of here if we have to.”

  The house itself, a modest structure in a glum Frankfurt suburb, was extremely unappealing: dark, grimy, with mattresses and bags scattered around as though the occupants thought of it as a train station. There was a pervasive smell of inadequate plumbing, overlaid by the scent of beer; not just the beer they were drinking now, but the beer that had spilled on rugs and furniture, soaked into upholstery, and left white rings everywhere. I could imagine some good German Hausfrau incandescent with rage over what her tenants had wrought.

  The young man who let us in had pressed a large plastic cup of beer on me while leaving Ben to find his own drink; then he’d draped an arm over my shoulders and tried to steer me away from Ben. I’d ducked out from under his arm – sometimes it’s an advantage, being short – and he had grinned and said something that Mr. M. told me translated as “Later.”

  I thanked him for the translation and resolved to keep one eye on our host at all times, because as far as I was concerned there wasn’t going to be any ‘later.’

  “You’re going to be a tremendous help,” I told Mr. M. He worked best with copious servings of praise and admiration. “I don’t speak any German and I don’t think Ben does either.”

  The turtle head at the end of the silver snake body gave me a sardonic look. “Clearly. That was Pashto.”

  “Oh.” Mr. M. has never explained how his centuries of captivity to a magic-quelling ring resulted in his being fluent in so many languages. I have always supposed it was the result of extreme boredom; without his magic, he probably had nothing better to do than listen to anyone within earshot. Being removed from the site of ancient Babylon to the Turtle Pond on the UT Austin campus must have been a distinct improvement in terms of the number of people he could eavesdrop on and the varieties of languages they spoke. Still, Pashto?

  Two more young men, so dark that their skin had blue shadows, moved in on either side of Ben and me. I was going to have a hard time referring to American blacks as ‘black,’ after seeing these guys. They were the real, undiluted thing.

  “What are they saying in Pashto, Mr. M.?”

  “They are speaking Somali. Cannot you hear the difference?”

  “Honestly? No.”

  “They have plans for you. Do not allow yourself to become separated from Ben.”

  Good advice, but I wished, fleetingly, that Colton had accompanied us to Germany. He was just the kind of outsize young man I’d have liked to have by my side in this environment. But after the kidnapping – the CIA’s kidnapping of us, I mean, not the terrorist kidnapping of Steve Harrison’s son and the other two children – Colton had announced that he intended to work on the family farm for the rest of the summer while seriously rethinking his involvement with an agency that treated us like enemy aliens. Ingrid had been slightly less upset – at least on the surface – but had decided to take a leave of absence from the Center while getting through the last six weeks of preparation for her marriage to Jimmy.

  “You know what it’s like, Thalia!”

  I did indeed.

  “Now if it were Jimmy they wanted to take overseas, he could have gone traipsing off to Germany or anywhere else and it wouldn’t have made any difference. All he has to do is show up in Britfield on the fifteenth of September.”

  “Rehearsal and rehearsal dinner,” I mentioned.

  “All right, the fourteenth.”

  Mrs. Thorn’s wedding plans were an order of magnitude more elaborate than my mother had been able to foist upon Lensky and me. Worse, Jimmy’s father was aiding and abetting her, throwing his money in with Mama Thorn’s fine Swedish lineage and host of relatives to create the shindig of the century in Britfield this fall. In Ingrid’s situation, I’d have ‘discovered’ that the Center absolutely couldn’t do without my presence in Germany or wherever else our investigation might take us outside Texas. I had to admit she was tougher than me; I was avoiding a far lesser problem by joining Harrison’s crusade, one that Ingrid would probably have taken in her stride.

  So it was just Ben and me following up this lead from Sandru Balan to a Frankfurt suburb. Well, Ben, me, Mr. M., Lensky, and Steve Harrison. Mr. M., of course, was not on the payroll, but he might well be the most valuable member of our team. Now that I’d persuaded him not to harm Harrison.

  Since Lensky seems to have been leaving Mr. M. out of his reports, I suppose a brief explanation is in order. Originally a Mesopotamian box turtle and a mage, Mr. M. had been placed in a sort of magical stasis when Nebuchadnezzar, fearing his power, tricked him into allowing a magic-inhibiting ring to be fitted around his neck. Fast forward through a couple of millennia, some recent wars, and (we surmised) a vet with an unusual taste in souvenirs, and he’d moved into the Turtle Pond on campus. There a bungling idiot had found him and removed the ring by chopping up his body and beheading him; the moron thought the ring, not Mr. M. himself, was the important part. Mr. M. had had a brief, unhappy bodiless half-life until, with the help of the infinite set of stars he had brought from Babylon and a robotics engineering student, he’d been fitted with a prosthetic body originally designed for a robot snake. Since then he’d been a valued, if sometimes difficult, member of the Center team. We’d been reunited after the kidnapping when he descended upon Steve Harrison with the intention of taking vengeance.

  I suspect what annoyed him the most was that Harrison’s goons hadn’t recognized that he was worth kidnapping.

  There. Everything clear now?

  Harrison and Lensky weren’t at this party. Brad would probably not have approved my checking out the house where the terrorist cell was supposedly centered. Harrison had distracted my husband with a long, long transatlantic conference call to Balan’s interrogators before he casually trailed me past the coffee shop where the Afghan students hung out and watched me finagle an invitation to this party. (That had taken all of thirty seconds, and twenty-five of those seconds were taken up by their search for a compatriot who spoke English. I had the feeling they’d been striking out with the local girls.) And tonight, to give me freedom of action, he’d dragged Lensky out for a reunion with some old colleague who’d retir
ed here.

  I still didn’t like or trust Steve Harrison, and with good reason. It was clear that he’d sacrifice me, Ben, or anyone else if it would get his son back. I couldn’t exactly fault that – I’d certainly find Harrison expendable if, for instance, somebody had kidnapped Brad and wanted to trade for him – but it didn’t make for a cozy all-colleagues-together relationship. Still, he had his uses; case in point, detaching Brad tonight so that I’d be free to help Ben with the little chore that would enable us to bug the house later.

  I had been staring at a rather attractive arch between the living room and the beer alcove while thinking all this out. Now I felt I had it adequately fixed in my memory. It was time to move on and establish another teleportation point. When planning a surreptitious entry to someone’s home, I always like to have two or three alternative arrival points to pick from, just in case my first choice isn’t available when I’m ready to use it.

  “Ben, have you got a good mental picture of the arch? Good, me too. Why don’t we see if we can get a tour of the rest of the house?”

  “You want see de Haus?” one of the Somalis said. “Come mit.” He wrapped an arm around my waist – he wasn’t tall either – and hauled me away from Ben. The other one stepped between Ben and me and started haranguing Ben and tapping on his chest, startling him.

  I did not like this turn of events. The two men had moved so smoothly that I felt sure they’d used this maneuver often before. Now I was being strongly urged towards a back room, while the Somali’s hold on me prevented me from simply teleporting to safety; wherever I teleported, he would be with me. And now it was just me and Mr. M., with Ben separated from me by far too many people.

  I tried to dig my heels into the floor, but the guy who’d wrapped himself around me was so strong that I don’t think he even noticed. So I poured my beer on him.

  He jumped, let go, shouted something that I did not ask Mr. M. to translate, and hit me in the face with his open hand. Probably in his culture that was just a gentle reproof and I was supposed to be grateful that he hadn’t used a fist. But he’d hit hard enough to rock my head back and make me dizzy, and the main force of the blow had landed right on my bruised cheekbone.