Spellbound (8 page)

“I was fairly certain it was you from the descriptions, but I needed to make sure. My clients pay me to be thorough. I learned all about your history, Sullivan. Up until you dropped off the face of the Earth last year.”

She knew quite a bit about him; he knew nothing about her, except for an impression that she was crafty, and therefore dangerous. “Why are you here?”

“I’m protecting my current employer’s interest. You knew some mobsters . . . Well, the mob’s got nothing on big companies when it comes to protecting what’s theirs, and we can play pretty dirty too.”

“The Bureau calls it industrial espionage,” Cowley said.

“I would never participate in anything illegal like that, Agent Cowley,” she said. Hammer was a superb liar. “Your name came up at my client’s and it became very important to find you. That’s why they called me. I tracked you down. My client had already asked a favor from the BI so they were looking too. My client suggested I work with them in order to expedite matters. So here we are.”

Sullivan had done his best to cover his tracks, and his ring was spellbound against Finders and Summoners. Whatever Hammer was, she had talent. He should probably get her card and pass it on to Francis. UBF might be able to use her, and Francis certainly loved the industrial espionage angle of the business. “Your client must be an important man.”

“Was. Passed away last year. I work for Edison General Electrical.”

Thomas Edison?
Why was EGE, founded by one of the greatest supergenius Cogs of all time, interested in him?

“Have you heard of the Shelved Projects Branch?” she asked. “We’ve managed to keep it out of the papers, but it’s where we store . . . Well, you’ve probably never worked with a Cog before . . .” Actually, Sullivan had, and now considered two of them friends, but she didn’t need to know about his Grimnoir associates. “Cogs are very rare. Heck, even low-level Fixers are hard to find. What most people don’t realize is that sometimes those bursts of magical inspiration can take a Cog down some very strange paths. Shelved Projects is where EGE stored those experiments. Some of them are downright unnerving.”

“What’s this got to do with me?”

Hammer nearly left some of the Ford’s paint on the bumper of a truck that hadn’t heard the sirens. The driver honked and shook his fist at them. “It’ll be easier to explain when we get there.”

Menlo Park, New Jersey

THEY ARRIVED IN ONE PIECE,
though there had been a few close shaves. Hammer drove like an unhinged maniac. The Hyperion was said to be the fastest factory car ever produced. Safety advocates had declared that the Cogs who had designed such an infernal machine must surely have been driven mad with a desire to kill other motorists. After this particular ride, Sullivan was inclined to agree. Hammer had decided that Cowley’s police escort had been too slow, and had zipped past them once they got out of the city. It was the fastest that Sullivan had ever ridden in an automobile, and that was saying something, since there was an inch of snow on the ground.

There was a faded ege sign and a
No Trespassing
warning on the fence of the industrial park. “This is the place,” Hammer said as they coasted through an open gate and came to a stop in front of a rather plain warehouse.

“Where’d you learn to drive like that?” Sullivan asked.

“Riding horses. Same fundamental principles.”

“No. No, they’re not,” Cowley said, a little green around the edges and glad to be alive. “I can assure you.”

“Sure. Give it the spurs when you want it to go faster; close your eyes and hang on for dear life when you need to stop in a hurry . . . same thing.” She shoved her door open. “Come on.”

Sullivan shrugged and followed the strange woman into the night.

The warehouse was bland and innocuous. For something that was supposed to be housing a bunch of wild Cog inventions, it didn’t look like much. Maybe that was the best protection of all. There were a lot of automobiles parked under a nearby cover. The place was busy tonight.

There were two men in thick coats waiting at the entrance and both had new Pedersen auto-rifles slung over their shoulders. Their hard faces told him that they certainly weren’t regular security guards. Cowley stopped. “This is as far as I go. I’m not cleared for this particular conversation . . . And believe me, I’m glad about it.” He held out his hand and Sullivan shook it. “Good luck, Jake.” The agent turned and walked away like a man who was very glad to be going.

That was ominous. The guards nodded at Hammer as she passed and gave Sullivan the once-over. “This the guy, Hammer?” one guard asked.

“That he is, Arthur.”

“Thank goodness. Every time that thing rings, it scares the piss out of me.” Arthur shivered. “I’m telling you, it’s the work of the devil.”

The other guard spoke. “Unnatural, I say. Mr. Edison should have burned the evil thing when he had the chance.”

Hammer took a small automatic out of her coat and handed it to Arthur. “You packing, Mr. Sullivan?” she asked.

“Of course,” Sullivan said.

“You’ll have to leave it here. Company policy,” Arthur said.

“Your policy stinks.”

“Trust me, buddy. It’s for your own safety. There are some things in Shelved Projects . . . Well, let’s just say that you don’t want to have any big metallic objects on you in case the alarm goes off. Some of our other guests disagreed, too, only they had fancy badges that told me to mind my own business.”

“They’re going to feel mighty stupid if the alarm goes off,” Hammer stated.

“That’s what I told them, but what do I know? I just work here. I’m not a top government man.” Arthur snorted. “I promise I’m not just yanking your chain. It really is for your safety.”

Sullivan pulled out the enchanted M1921 .45 that Browning had given him and passed it over. “Careful. It ain’t loaded with sofa pillows.”

Arthur put the pistols in a lockbox next to the door and closed it. “Well, come on in.” Arthur opened the door for them. “You don’t want to keep Satan waiting.”

They entered the dark warehouse. The door closed behind them and locked. “What was that about?” Sullivan asked.

“You believe in ghosts, Sullivan?”

“I don’t rightly know.”

She groped around on the wall until she found a switch. “Well, apparently they believe in you.”

“You’re making me nervous.”

“Good. Nervous is healthy. Nervous keeps you alive,” Hammer said. The lights came on, revealing a wide space, filled with shelves covered in dust and cobwebs. “This way. We keep it hidden downstairs. Safer that way.”

“I’m not moving another foot until you tell me what’s going on.”

She folded her arms. “Why, Mr. Sullivan, we both know that’s not what’s going to happen. You’re an intensely curious man. You try to hide it. You may act like a palooka, but you just can’t help yourself. You’ve got a dying need to know what’s going on, so you’re not fooling anyone. Now that we’ve lost our Bureau chaperone, I can give you the straight scoop.” Hammer didn’t even wait for his response before she started walking across the warehouse.

The EGE woman certainly had his number. Sullivan sighed and trailed along.

“Have you ever heard of Edison’s spirit phone?”

“Who hasn’t? He said something in passing once, some reporter took it out of context, so a bunch of spirit mediums and frauds started claiming to have one so they could swindle suckers into thinking they were talking to their dead relatives.”

She just smiled and shook her head. “That’s what we want the public to think.” Hammer stopped at the back wall and opened an innocuous fuse box. “Now which one were you? Ahh, there you are.” She played with a few switches and there was a loud click. She placed her hand on the wall and pushed. A secret door hinged smoothly open. “After you.”

There was a flight of steep metal stairs disappearing into the floor. Sullivan climbed down until he found himself at the end of a plain concrete hallway. Two more men were stationed there, and they just nodded politely. Apparently the first guards had called ahead. He noted that these were only armed with wooden truncheons instead of firearms.

Hammer grabbed the rails, slid down like a sailor, and landed lightly.

“Lots of security around here.”

“And you’re only seeing the first layer. People would kill to get their hands on the things behind these doors.” Hammer led the way down the hall. “Mr. Edison was a skeptical man, you know. It started as a lark, an experiment to silence the quacks and charlatans. The reasoning was that if he built a machine sensitive enough that a ghost could talk through it, then surely, if ghosts were real they’d make themselves known. Then that Cog magic got fired up while he was working on it, and he ended up fiddling with it for three straight weeks, hardly stopping for food, sleep, even water. When he finally dropped from exhaustion, it had nearly killed him, and his Power was burned out for a year afterward, but it worked.”

“How?”

“Science isn’t my area of expertise. The thing is, it worked, and we could call out, but nobody ever called in. It was a one-way street. EGE’s best minds don’t know why. We could make a call and occasionally get . . . something from the other side, but it usually didn’t make any sense. Edison had done it. He’d found a way to contact ghosts.”

“Ghosts? Not demons, like from a Finder? They’re bringing in spirits from another dimension all the time.”

“Nope. These were actual dead people from Earth. Many of them didn’t even know they were dead and couldn’t figure out who they were talking to. Edison brought in teams of interpreters and even a Babel, because obviously, just from pure statistics, most of the ghosts who picked up the other end of the line didn’t speak English.”

This was a lot of information to take in. Hammer kept talking as she took him down the hallway. They passed many heavy steel doors, each with a black Roman numeral painted on it. Uniformed security, workers in coveralls, and lab-coated staff passed them, all of them glancing suspiciously at Sullivan. The secret underground lab had far more workers than its outside appearance indicated. The tunnels went off in directions that showed that this facility was much bigger than the building above it.

“Lots of money and work went into running the spirit phone, but they never met George Washington or Julius Caesar or anyone interesting. It’s not like there are switchboard operators in the afterlife. We were spending a million dollars a pop to make a call to some random somewhere, and most of the time nobody answered.”

“Must be busy in heaven.”

“That’s the problem. I don’t think we got heaven. When it did occasionally work, we weren’t getting happy people, and there sure weren’t any choirs of angels singing. After a bit, most people thought that Edison had built a phone line to hell.”

“Oh . . .” Sullivan scowled. “That could be awkward.”

“Try explaining that to the shareholders. We don’t know where we connected to, just that the spirits of some dead people end up there. The conversations were usually screaming gibberish, angry ranting in Chinese, that kind of thing. It didn’t help that a couple of researchers went crazy and there was a rash of suicides on the EGE team. Plus, it was sucking up too much of EGE’s capital to keep it running and it wasn’t like Edison could tell the board that calling hell was a sound investment. The Coolidge administration decided that it should be kept secret because news of the spirit phone could cause—what did he call it?—
anxiety
among the public.”

The theological implications of such a device were . . . troubling. “I can see how people might get a little upset. Might get some folks to behave nicer though, if they thought they really would go to hell.”

“Or have the public go ape-shit and bananas . . . Pardon my French. Coolidge played it safe. He asked that the project be shut down, so EGE powered down, quit making calls, and just gave it enough juice to keep the connection live in case we ever decided to fire it up again. They were worried that if we shut it down completely, we might not ever be able to reconnect.” She stopped at a large steel door labeled XIII and removed a ring of keys from her coat pocket. Another guard stepped aside so she could unlock it. “Three weeks of Power-fueled Cog madness from the greatest mind of our time and”— the heavy door swung open—“we got this.”

Sullivan stepped inside a room that was nearly as large as the warehouse above. A dozen men in laboratory coats were wandering about, checking panels of gauges and flashing lights, while in the very center of the room, cordoned off by protective railings and metal safety cages was a twenty-foot-by-twenty-foot glass box filled with crackling lines of electricity and another, slower, blue energy that could only be the visible manifestation of raw magic. It was a thousand lightning strikes imprisoned in a big fish tank. The air hummed with violence as fat power cables fed the hungry box.

It was frankly awe-inspiring.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” Hammer asked, already knowing the answer. “A one-minute conversation uses more electricity than Newark does in a week. The big partition was left over from the elephant electrocuting days back when he was trying to prove that direct current was safer than alternating current. The room is reinforced, because if that containment was to break, it could flash-fry Menlo Park.”

The last time he’d had anything to do with Cog superscience he’d nearly been vaporized by a Tesla weapon. He wasn’t exactly fond of this sort of thing. “You know, the way you were talking, I was kind of expecting”—Sullivan held his hands out about a foot apart—“a telephone.”

“The original hypothesis was that it needed to be sensitive. Turns out it just needed to be bigger. And it is like a phone; look closer.” Hammer pointed at the base of the massive, flashing death-box, where there was an older two-piece telephone unit, with separated microphone and earphone, sitting on a small metal cradle next to a folding chair.

“Somebody has to sit
next
to that thing?” The amount of energy running through the machine was staggering. “What’s in there?”