Secondhand Sorcery

It took another frustrating hour to get the tube out; getting her conscious had just been the first step in an exasperating sequence the medical types point-blank refused to deviate from. Actually doing it was a disgusting process involving a lot of phlegm. At last, when all that was over with, and the nurse declared in fractured English that her patient was stable enough to interrogate, Keisha chased everyone but her three companions out of the room, over all objections, and leaned over the bed.

“First thing,” Fatima croaked, before any of them could say anything, “is one of you Ballsy Bob?”

A puzzled look bounced around the room, settling on Ethan, who smirked, “Well, I’ve been called ‘ballsy’ a time or two, but my name ain’t Bob.”

Fatima wasn’t amused. “Talking hurts. Shitbird. Get Ballsy Bob.”

Abruptly Keisha got it. “Your sister Nadia knew me as Beelzebub. Is that what you mean?”

“Yes.” She winced. “Ice chip.” Keisha spooned a chip out of the cup on the table, and shoved it in her mouth; Fatima sucked on it a second, then said around it, “I’m in. What are you offering?”

The puzzled look returned for a second trip. “Offering for what, Fatima?”

“I’m defecting,” she rasped. “Done with Russian crap. Let’s deal.”

“You just killed an awful lot of our people,” Hamp told her. “It’s not going to be that simple.”

Fatima rolled her eyes. “This is war. You need warriors.”

“That might be true,” Keisha interjected, “but we also need information, before we decide whether to take you on or not. Is that fair?” Fatima hesitated, then nodded. “All right. Who roughed you up like this?”

The battered face on the bed froze, for a barely-perceptible instant, then said, “Ice chip” again. Another chip was duly supplied, which she sucked on for a full thirty seconds, rolling it around her mouth. Finally she said, “Hit on security went bad. Took down half, got second thoughts. Russians didn’t like it. Mister Higgins had me pissed … turned him on the Russians. Dumb idea.”

Ethan opened his mouth, then winced as Keisha kicked him hard in the ankle. Fatima frowned at him, then turned her gaze on Keisha as she said, “How did you survive, and what happened to the Russian or Russians who attacked you?”

“Don’t know. Got my ass kicked. Probably ran for it.”

This was all vaguely plausible, but there were problems … aloud, she said only, “What happened to the rest of your family?”

“I dunno. Got my ass kicked,” she irritably repeated. “God, this hurts.”

“Can you tell us where your team were hiding out before the attack? We’re going to need proof we can trust you on this, and aren’t just lying to keep us busy until you can escape.”

“Maybe. Don’t know much.” Abruptly she broke into a lengthy coughing fit, and Hamp dispassionately shoved the plastic suction tool in her mouth to catch the spit. The nurse poked her head in the door, and refused to be deterred by Keisha’s shooing motions. Eventually Fatima took a few deep breaths, said, “I know where I lived. I can tell you that much.”

Keisha already had paper and pen handy. “Go on.” Fatima croaked out an address; she wrote it down, confirmed it, and ran it through her phone’s GPS. It was, at least, a real apartment building. Meanwhile, the nurse elbowed her way into the room, looking obstinate as she hissed Turkish imprecations under her breath. Ethan hurried to keep three officials from moseying in behind her. “Okay, we’re going to check this out, then decide where to go from there. You stay and rest up.”

“I ain’t going anywhere, girlfriend,” Fatima said, with a smile that looked like it hurt.

“So what do you think, Ballsy Bob?” Ethan asked, as soon as they were out of the door and away from all the suited eavesdroppers.

“I think we need to check out this address right now, and get our story and approach straight before we talk to that girl again.”

“Yeah, she looked like she was lying to me,” Hamp said, limping down the hall beside her as quickly as he could. “I can believe Ivan was keeping somebody nearby to waste her if she went off-script. I can maybe believe she had enough of a conscience to do it with her familiar out. What I can’t believe is that they only left her half-dead.”

“It’s more than that. I didn’t want to bring it up with the suits hanging around—and definitely not in front of her—but supposedly witnesses saw her get in a fight with a second girl around the same age. Who then ran away.”

“Nadia, huh?” Ethan said. “She already turned once. She could do it again. So they tried to put her with a friend to keep her steady, but … hold on, Mister Higgins and Ézarine? The Queen of Hissy Fits and Captain Ragequit, working together? Whose genius idea was that?”

“They would have had competing and incompatible goals,” Dr. Gus pointed out. “To execute the operation as quickly as possible, to cause maximal chaos, damage, and dismay, and to compel all five to act, thus making them complicit in their crimes and presumably more loyal. Thus they placed Nadia with the sibling she feels closest to, and gave them one of the less critical targets.”

It made sense. Ruslan was also unreliable, and had a poor familiar for causing mass casualties with, so he ran psyops at Ataturk’s tomb. Destroying state security services was more important, but still gravy compared to killing the president or top ministry officials, or getting out their propaganda to the whole country and then crippling the state’s ability to reply.

Enough of the Americans hovering around Fatima’s door were armed already to form a suitable guard for the time being; Hamp wheedled them into establishing something more permanent. “She is never to be left unwatched, even for a second,” Dr. Gus told them, and they nodded in starstruck agreement.

The address Fatima gave them was clear across the city. Getting there via the streets might have taken hours, in the city’s present state; as she had no intention of personally entering the building, it was simpler to cajole their way onto the hospital’s roof, fiddle with GPS directions for a bit, and send a whisperwing across the city from where they were. It was still a couple of hours till sunset, but she had enough cloud cover to ensure the little bug would survive the trip.

“It’s a bust,” she announced twenty minutes later. “The apartment numbers she told us about are all empty. Stripped bare. We might find some stray hairs and get DNA if we sent in a forensics crew, but that’s about it.”

“We already have DNA on all five, and fingerprints too,” Hamp said. “We don’t need DNA for the handlers, that can wait for the UN tribunal phase.”

“I don’t suppose, uh, Snowdrop would have left a couple of skin cells in there,” Ethan added glumly. “Wouldn’t be much use if we had, the sumbitch won’t let us take him alive.”

“It was still worth trying,” Keisha said. “They’ve lost at least one agent, and they have more than one brain cell each. Of course they bugged out. But it seems likely that Fatima was telling the truth about them, at least. Unless they had her memorize the locations of a couple of empty apartments in preparation for this.”

“Doesn’t seem likely,” Ethan said. “She’s what, fifteen? Even if they planned for that—and I don’t think they would—ain’t no way she’d bother memorizing that so well she could rattle it off right after waking up from a cracked skull. Seems to me she was telling the truth about that.”

“So … does she really mean to defect?” Hamp scowled. “And what the hell do we do with her if she does? We know she’s feeding us bullshit. And that’s leaving out the part where she’s a mass murderer!”

“The only way she could know the name ‘Beelzebub’ is if Nadia told her,” Keisha said. “I can see why she wouldn’t want to begin a relationship with us by telling us she tried to hurt or possibly kill our mutual acquaintance.”

“And instead she fudged it so she looks like the good girl with a conscience,” Ethan added. “Bet you anything that Nadia was the one who turned, unless I’m reading this all wrong.” He shrugged. “Well, I can’t see as it matters, for the present; she’ll be in that bed for another month.”

“Meanwhile, I believe the lack of followup has been sufficiently explained,” Dr. Gus said. “Their strike force has suffered thirty-three-percent attrition in its initial operation, and virtually all of that force consists of, in effect, conscripts. I would expect grown men to refuse to cooperate further under such circumstances.”

“And where does that leave us?” Keisha wondered out loud. “Waiting for the next shoe to drop?”

“I’d say we’re what they call ‘consultants,’” Ethan said. “Sit tight and wait until something happens or somebody asks for help. Pretty sweet gig. Although of course I still deplore such a blatant waste of public funds—”

“Har har. You’re still the only emissor in town on our side that I know about. Though I’d be surprised if they didn’t bus in at least a couple of heavies on the down low.” Hamp sounded resigned about the last part.

“Naturally. They’ll have more than just us on the case now. The only thing we have to offer, that we ever had to offer, is my personal familiarity with the kids—one of them in particular. I’d like to focus on that.”

“You mean, hunt down Nadia?” Hamp looked doubtful. “If she’s got a bit of sense, and it sounds like she does, she left town Saturday night or Sunday morning. We’d be leaving at least three loose ends behind us, four if you count the professional, and frankly Yuri and Hamza scare me a lot more than the one runaway. She’ll be trying to lay low, won’t she?”

“Yes, but … “ Keisha found she didn’t have the words to complete the sentence, and turned away instead. For a long time the four of them stood in silence on the hospital’s roof. The sun was sinking, but there were a few hours of daylight left. She was about to suggest they go find dinner—lunch had been a couple of bites from the hospital’s cafeteria while they waited for Fatima to wake up—when Hamp’s phone went off again.

“What now?” he grumbled, looking at the screen. “Just Danny Simmons again—hmph. Guess I’d better. Gimme a second here.

“David Hampton speaking. What’s up, Danny? Okay. Yeah, I get—anonymous? An anonymous tip? Get real, you get a hundred of those a day and half of ‘em are UFOs, for chrissakes.”

His face took on the guarded, wary look Keisha knew so well. She thought he might wear that face when he slept.

“All right, fine, fine, you know your job, I got it. Sorry. What’s our response so far?”

His shoulders tensed.

“Are you serious? No backup, no confirmation, just local pogies and their pop guns, is that the shape of—aw, shit. Double shit! Who ordered that? No, no, wait, never mind, I don’t want to know that now, just tell me: what part of Ankara is that?”

He turned to Keisha as he said it, gesturing furiously, but she already had her phone out and firing up dowser mode. Ethan put a hand over the screen before she could use it, nodded towards Dr. Gus when she started to protest. Their mentor had their eyes shut and was taking deep breaths. In two seconds, he raised an arm to point—eyes still shut, Hamp still ranting in the background—to the northwest.

“Five to seven miles,” he said calmly. “Three hundred meter radius, epicenter well above ground, essentially static. Single emissor.” His arm wavered, then swerved west. “No. Second halo emerging now, rapid expansion, ground level, substantial marginal infringement. Expect ambivalence.”

“The old boy’s still got it,” Ethan said. “Hope it ain’t that POS Usman he’s picking up—but it probably is. You ready?”

“I’ll have to be,” she told him, shaking her head. She only had her pic’ on her, though it was at least nearly full. There was little she could do but move civilians out of the way. “How are we going to get there?”

At almost the same time, Hamp put his phone away, a disgusted look on his face. He turned to look at Ethan, and disgust gave way to panic. “Don’t tell me you’re—”

It was a late August day in the southern half of Louisiana, so godawful humid it did no good to sweat, and you could feel the air stick in your windpipe halfway down with every breath. Old Man Dupree sat on his porch on his rocking chair, his shotgun resting across his lap. Keisha and her friends hid in the woods and watched the car drive up, because it was late summer in Louisiana, and it was too hot to play sports, and there was nothing but reruns on TV.

It was a nice car, too nice to be driving up Winston Dupree’s soggy lawn full of overgrown weeds. Even the driveway was overgrown, where it wasn’t full of ruts, and the chrome bumper was spattered with dark mud before it was halfway there. The old man sat on the porch of the rundown shack he called a house, and watched it struggle through until it was close enough for the two men to get out and tiptoe through the mess.

He waited until the first of them set foot on the first step—which was half hanging off—before he said simply, “Private prop’ty.”

The men told him that they had a second, more generous, and very much final offer to make, before they took the matter to the courts. The old man didn’t answer. They told him they were good friends with the judge. He raised an eyebrow, said nothing. They said they could easily have the building condemned, and Dupree nodded, but kept his mouth shut. Then they started talking about the ongoing need for quality affordable housing in the area, and Old Man Dupree snorted, deep back in the spot where his nose met his throat, and spat a giant tobacco-colored gob on the first man’s already soiled shoes. The man asked him if that was his final answer, and he said no.

Then he told them that he had been born in this house, that he was seventy-eight years old, that he pissed blood most mornings, that he had no kin remaining, and if they could not wait until he was dead to take his land that was their problem. That he owned very little, and could not afford a lawyer, but had a considerable store of buckshot laid by, and the next man to bother him about this would be making a claim on his expensive company-provided life insurance. The man after that, too, and so on until he ran out of buckshot or he got his very simple wish to die in the house he was born, one way or another. As for the judge, he might be a good friend, and the president too, but murder trials went to jury, and they would struggle to find twelve sympathetic people they could wrestle out of their offensively affordable housing in this whole damn parish. Not that he intended to see the inside of a courthouse in the first place, mind you. A Dupree would no more bother with a courthouse than a church. He had no time for any of that.

All of this was given in the thickest accent and slang the south end of Louisiana could offer, a Frenchified slur that truly earned the label ‘patois,’ and neither visitor got much out of it. But they did understand when he picked the shotgun off his lap and swung it around. They got back in their car very quickly, without saying anything, and somehow got it out in reverse. Dupree watched the whole thing from his rocking chair, then turned his head and looked right at Keisha and her friends in the woods. All her friends scattered; Keisha stayed, looking the soul of America in the face. By and by she left, and the housing project fell through. Winston Abelard Dupree died in bed two years later, and the woods reclaimed his land.

Then it was a winter’s day in Ankara, Turkey, and Tantrum Song loomed overhead, a white-bearded giant all covered in rags and patches. Parts were grey that might have once been blue, others a dingy off-white, with here and there a patch of reddish-brown. Every bit of it seemed to be loose ends and trailing scraps, all a-flutter in the wind that blew around him. The hat could have been a wizard’s, or simply a tramp’s. He tilted back his solemn, craggy face, and opened his mouth to let out a whoop, the whoop that called his hounds, and the winds came running all around them, invisible but very audible, howling for the hunt.

There were rules about familiars; they could not use their powers against their own emissors. But Tantrum Song had never cared about rules. So his hounds bore what he needed up from the street: a very small two-door coupe, with its indignant elderly driver still inside it. She was not inclined to give up her ride, or make room; she had her groceries in the passenger seat. Then Tantrum Song bent down with a courtly bow, and looked her gravely in the eye, and though she spoke no English she understood that the defense of a free people was at stake. She took her groceries, and stepped out—Colonel Hampton gallantly taking her arm—so Keisha and Ethan could get inside.

The wind howled again, and the car leaped up off the roof. Tantrum Song took a leap alongside it, keeping pace, and his hounds caught him up, baying in a circle about his feet. Falcon-like they plunged toward the ground, Ethan cackling out the window all the way, but long before they hit the winds picked up, and they were flying through the air into battle, all screaming their war-cry together.