Nightwise (23 page)

After the presentation, I stood and stretched. “So, if it is not too much trouble, the doctor wanted to look around a bit down in the archives, if that isn't too much trouble, Liz.”

“No,” she said, smiling, “not at all.” By now her smile was an utter lie.

We took another elevator after leaving the land of the engravers. It took us down, deep. The doors opened into a vast warehouselike room. It was temperature controlled. There were steel wire cages, each with its own lock, which stretched as far as the eyes could see. Each cage room contained different items—chests, drawers, lockers, and who knows what covered by canvas tarps. I figured the Ark of the Covenant and the formula for KFC were down in here too. Two BEP cops were stationed at a guard desk with a bank of monitors, showing security cameras all over the faculty and across the archive as well. One of the cops, a burly black guy, stood as we got off the elevator. He said hello to Liz.

“There is a conference room down here where we can bring most of the items in the archives for Dr. Isaku to examine,” Liz said.

“Terrific,” I said to Liz. I turned to Ichi and said, in Japanese, “Ready, Doc?” Ichi nodded. “Nonlethal please,” I added. Ichi looked at me with mild disgust, as if I had just passed wind in his presence.

Liz directed us to a large leather ledger next to a set of clipboards on the guard desk. I offered the pen to Ichi, and he took it, looked at it, and frowned, and then looked at the ledger and frowned. He was as good at that as Liz was at fake smiling.

He leaned over the ledger and seemed confused about where exactly to sign. The other cop behind the desk grunted as he stood. He was white with a thin mustache and had a bit of a gut. He leaned over the desk to show Ichi exactly where to sign. Ichi grabbed his head and smashed it down onto the desk, hard. As the guard went over, Ichi reached over the desk, turned the guard's arm over, and pulled his pistol free of his holster in one smooth motion. As he was bringing it up, he fired a round at the burly guard, who was just now beginning to resister what this little old Japanese man was doing. He began to draw. Burly's head snapped back and he fell to the ground, a pool of blood forming on the concrete floor about his head. The guard whose head had been smashed into the desk received another powerful blow to the head from Ichi, who used his own gun to pistol-whip him. He slumped over too, onto the floor near his partner. Liz was just beginning to scream at the sound of the gunshot.

It's okay!” I shouted. “Liz, it's okay! Goddamn it, I said nonlethal,” I said to Ichi, gesturing toward the burly cop's still form.

“It is a scalp wound,” Ichi said in English. He was already moving over to the two cops and gathering their guns and ammo. “He will bleed a great deal from it, and he will have a concussion, but he will not die. Question my craftsmanship again in this endeavor and I will shoot your eyelids off.”

Liz had gotten hold of herself and stopped screaming. She was pale and obviously frightened but was keeping her shit wired tight. Alarms were going off now. The cameras in the archives had caught what just happened, and already the building was being locked down.

“Liz, we're not going to hurt you, I promise,” I said. “I need to know, are there any other ways down here other than this elevator? Stairs? Loading bay?”

She rubbed her face and looked at me with a mixture of fear and anger. “Yeah,” she said in an even voice. “There is a stairwell in the northwest corner, and there is a cargo elevator about halfway along the southern wall. What are you guys doing? What do you want?”

“If I told you, you wouldn't believe me,” I said.

“Elevator coming,” Ichi said. “They will endeavor to flank us at the stairs as well. My guns, please.”

I slapped the briefcase on the desk and clicked it open. The concealment enchantment I had laid upon the case had worked perfectly, and now I pulled out the false panel, grabbed Ichi's two pistols, and handed them to him. The guns were custom-made modern variants on weapons used during the Civil War, called LeMat revolvers. They were .44 Magnum pistols with a 12-gauge shotgun barrel under the pistol barrel.

I also handed him his speed loaders for the two guns and a handful of 12-gauge shotgun shells. He put the bullets and the shells in his pants pockets. He stuffed the guards' pistols in his belt.

“You'll be able to handle the stairs too?” I said. He nodded curtly.

I took the Altoid tin out of the case and opened it. I popped a small, powdery white mint into my mouth. I offered one to Ichi. He made a sour face, then opened his mouth and allowed me to pop the mint in.

“Bah,” he said.

“What the hell are you two doing?” Liz asked.

“We like to have fresh breath while we violate federal law,” I said. I looked at Ichi. “Mine's working. Is it working for you?”

Ichi, a LeMat in either hand, nodded and then turned to face the elevator.
Get to work,
his back said to me, silently.
I will give you the time you said you needed.
I took Liz by the arm and led her into the rows of cages.

I heard the elevator doors begin to creak open, as Liz and I lost sight of the old man.

“Come on,” I told her. “Let's leave him to his work.”

 

SIXTEEN

Liz and I ran down the corridor of cages. I led her by the arm, but she seemed okay with getting away from the sounds we were hearing behind us. There was shouting. A man's booming voice, “Drop the guns now, or we will fire.”

There was a barking of gunfire, like a cannon firing as rapidly as a machine gun. The whole archive echoed with the rumbling. Liz looked back and then ran faster. People tend to do that with gun battles.

My so-called third eye, the Ajna chakra, was opened wide, in part because of the enchantment on the mint in my mouth. Didgeri and I worked pretty hard to come up with a working that would function the way we needed it to through the candy. I slid part of my awareness toward Ichi and was rewarded with a view in my mind of what was happening. A cloud of gun smoke drifted around Ichi. The elevator doors were closing. BEP cops were screaming and shouting as the doors thudded closed and muffled their excitement.

I disarmed them,
Ichi thought to me, and I heard it in my head. He was moving and reloading his pistols as easily, as thoughtlessly, as someone would swallow.
You understand that when the soldiers arrive, I will not be able to be so merciful.

Yeah,
I thought back to him.
I hope we will be out of here by then.

I could perceive that Ichi was moving quickly, in a shuffling run, down a hallway toward the stairwell. He turned the corner just as the fire door to the stairwell began to open. Ichi slid like a baseball player rounding third and headed for home, toward the door, a gun in each hand. The LeMats roared with cordite-laced thunder in his hands. More BEP cops began to swarm thought the door and were greeted by a curtain of exploding lead.

A few of the cops returned fire until their guns were shot out of their hands. One cop stepped into a bullet, and his shoulder exploded. His partners pulled him back as they slammed the fire door shut. Ichi stood gracefully, rising as if gravity did not own him. He shrugged the empty casings from his hand cannons and reloaded them. His breathing was even and normal. His mind was calm as oil on water.

I shifted my awareness again and called out, “Didgeri, you in position for evac? Any problems?” In my mind's eye I saw Geri and Miss Magdalena on a sandy beach, near the water. An immense bearded giant made of cast iron was struggling to arise from the sand. His massive arms, legs, and head were all erupting from the ground. Didgeri stood looking at his face, studying it. From her point of view, I could see that the sculpture, called
The Awakening,
was actually moving, shifting somewhat. The Initiated Man's perceptions were slippery, bright, and distorted.

Magdalena's thoughts, clear and sharp, came through to me.
“We're at the National Harbor in Maryland, just over the border from D.C. Didgeri said that this was the spot where it was easiest to slip into the Dreaming. She's already started her meditation. She took some stuff too, drugs maybe, I'm not sure what.”

“This giant is the metal shadow of the Wandjina,”
Didgeri thought. Her thoughts were vibrant, full of swirls of matter, mind, and energy blooming like erupting stars, novas of association, power, and beauty. Breathing cave drawings, spiral trails, and black suns with white triangular rays.
“This place is good for stepping between the three worlds; it is a realm of fluid hypertime,”
Didgeri thought to us all,
“the spider web, the frame upon which the worlds were thought-born in the Dreamtime. We are ready for you, Laytham. I begin to walkabout. Find you on the path,
balla.
Bring you home. Magdalena is my anchor stone, my fire to lead us back out.”

“Walk safe,
thurdu,” I thought back to her, but already her bright kaleidoscope of thought and perception was diminishing into an unknowable darkness, like a light on a raft drifting away into the ocean at night, growing smaller, fainter as it was carried on dark waters.

“She … oh, my God … she just walked between the statue's head and arm and just faded away.”
Magdalena's thoughts, bright and real, and tinged with panic and disbelief. “
It looked like she was walking on the ocean, then she was … gone … How…”

“Don't ask how,”
I thought. Liz was talking to me, and I heard more gunshots. We were running out of time.
“Never ask how! Believe what you see, trust your senses and your gut. Didgeri is traveling, and she needs you to be her lifeline, her way back. We all need you, Magdalena. Focus, feel her. Reach out to her thoughts through the link we are sharing. Call to her, sing to her. Be her beacon.”

I turned to Liz. “What did you say?”

“Are you on something?” she asked. “I said, what was it you wanted to steal? There's a lot of stuff in here.”

“I'm just high on Thoughtoids,” I said. “Minty fresh. I think I'm looking for some old dies and engraving plates, the earlier the better and moving forward. Also any old writings related to the founding of the Treasury and the original federal script.”

“You don't sound like a terrorist or a counterfeiter,” she said. “Why are you doing this?”

She led me to an intersection of four corridors. There were columns that had small plates on them denoting archive location numbers. She studied them for a moment, and then we turned left. I switched my brain-cam to Ichi. He had repelled another elevator assault and was now headed toward the cargo elevator, reloading, trotting, calm, like a machine.

“I'm trying to find a man for a friend,” I said as we walked briskly down the hallway and Liz scanned the lot numbers on each cage's tag. “That man is very hard to find, and he came here about a decade back to research something, something occult and having to do with currency.”

“Oh, my God, you are some kind of militia conspiracy nutcase,” she said. We stopped in front of a cage and she opened the door with a loud click.

“Yeah, I am,” I said. “I'm a member of the Leprechaun Liberation Front, here to uncover the secret magical formula George Washington created to make fluoride into a mind control substance. This the right cage for what I told you I was looking for, right?”

“Yes,” she said.

I ushered her in and then followed. There were large, older wooden cabinets with dozens of different-sized drawers in each of them. Some drawers had labels; others had pieces of old peeling yellow masking tape with dates or code numbers on them.

I opened my senses, as I had done upstairs in engraving. The chests in front of me dripped with power, eldritch and a flavor that was unknown to me. I knew what was coming next, though, due to the spells woven around the chests. They were primed to alert whoever had placed these wards on them to sound a silent mystic alarm if they were tampered with or even sensed to be magical in nature. The bells and whistles were going off somewhere. I slid open one of the drawers and looked inside. There was a very old, worn engraving die for a continental note, the precursor to the dollar bill. The die was what was used to make the actual printing plate. This one was from 1775. It had a few odd markings on the edges of the die that emanated a very faint magical charge. The really odd thing was that the style of the marks bore no resemblance to any form of occult or magical system I had ever seen.

“What the hell,” I muttered. I reached into the briefcase and pulled an old Kodak Brownie camera from the hidden compartment. The camera was a thick black box with a fixed lens. I set the plate on the edge of the chest and began to snap pictures.

“What is with that camera?” Liz said.

“It's a very special artifact,” I said as I opened another drawer and removed another die, this one from the first production of the U.S. dollar coin in 1793. The unknown mystic symbols were on the edges of the die too. I took another picture. “It belonged to Philip Jones Griffiths.”

“Who?” Liz said.

“He was a famous photojournalist that chronicled the Vietnam War,” I said. The camera has a very special ability. It shows truth, pure, objective truth. It can't be blocked by obscuring spells, illusionary glamours. You can't hide things from it.”

“Like what, exactly?” Liz said. “Secret satanic scribbles on the dies?”

“Look,” I said, “I am a bit of a nutcase, I'll grant you, but I am also a fucking Encyclopaedia Britannica when it comes to the occult, and I have never seen symbols like these before. The dies are marked with occult power channels that are holding a magical charge more than two centuries after being made.”

I opened more drawers, took out more dies: the first dollar bills from 1811 and then the first “greenback” bills from 1862. The odd mystic symbols continued on the dies, becoming more intricate, more complex, but still unknown. The enchantments were worked into the plates, leaving a residual charge. This was old, powerful magic, and it was completely unknown. I couldn't even fathom its purpose. I snapped pictures of everything and tried to piece it together.