That’s bad luck for someone, probably me.
Then more cracks appeared, jagged black lightning rents that divided the room into sections.
Could it be an earthquake? Do they have those in London?
The mirror cracked once, twice, a thousand times with a sound like automatic weapon fire. The cracks raced past the edges of the mirrors, streaking across the walls. Chevie finally moved when the lacquered floorboards beneath her sneakers began to splinter and fall in torn chunks through to the hallway below.
“What the hell . . . ?” she cried, picking a safe path to the door.
Overhead the lights flickered, then exploded, showering Chevie with glass and sparks. Through the window, she could see streetlamps exploding all along Bayley Street and around the square itself. Beyond the square the blackout rippled down toward Covent Garden and Soho as though some giant night creature was swallowing chunks of light.
What is happening to the power? Orange will know.
But Orange was out. She was the on-duty agent.
A bulletproof front-facing window cracked, allowing noise in from the outside world. Metal shrieked as cars collided on Tottenham Court Road, and the cry of panicked people rose up into the dark London clouds, which had lost their streetlight underglow.
Whatever is happening, it started here, Chevie realized.
She ran to the wall safe, punched in the code number, and pulled out her Glock 22 in the shoulder holster she wore with an extra strap to pull it tight to her left side for a smooth cross draw. She expertly donned the holster and drew her weapon.
Chevie held the gun straight-armed in a two-handed grip, staring fixedly through the green tritium contrast points of her night sight, hoping that nothing would pop up and force her to shoot.
I don’t even know what the guy looks like who might come out of the pod. If I shoot the witness, they will never let me back into California.
Chevie ran down the upper landing, sticking close to the wall. Around her, bricks grated and plaster fell in chunks.
That chunk looks like Texas, thought Chevie, because you can’t control what the mind throws up.
Emergency lighting blisters flickered on, bathing the interior in industrial yellow light.
Good, thought Chevie. I can see whatever happens, which will hopefully be nothing.
Something else occurred to her.
Agent Orange. He’s probably going to blame me for this.
Chevie rattled her gun and told herself to focus, pulling a tight turn into the stairwell. She made her way carefully down the two flights of stairs. The basement steps before her were relatively intact, but the door had buckled and the central panel seemed to have melted.
What could melt a steel door? wondered Special Agent Savano, and this unspoken question was answered when a bolt of lightning sizzled through the glowing edges of the melt hole and took a good-sized lump out of the wall.
Lightning. Okay.
Chevie realized that she had squatted on her hunkers with her weapon aimed at the door.
That’s right, Agent. You can shoot the lightning.
She gave it a few minutes, until it seemed as though the indoor lightning bolts were over and done with, then hurried down the remaining narrow steps.
There was nothing left of the basement door but its frame; the melted edges had already solidified.
In a move that would have made Cord Vallicose, her Quantico instructor, proud, Chevie dived through the frame, rolled, and came up with her gun pointed down the corridor. She would later realize that the sharp edges of the door had scraped her all down one side, but at that moment she didn’t even feel the scratches.
There was no obvious threat beyond the ruined door, just dust and devastation. The WARP pod itself had broken free of its brackets and was pointing nose-first down the basement corridor. It looked for all the world like a small spacecraft had crashed into the house.
Which would make about as much sense as what is actually happening: a big machine is sucking the juice out of central London.
Chevie swore to herself that when Orange arrived, she was going to hold him at gunpoint until he told her exactly what this 1970s-style pod had to do with witness protection.
The pod usually reminded Chevie of a science museum exhibit, with its retro design and faded metallic finish, but now the machine seemed alive and totally functional, whatever its function might be. The thick power cables at its base hummed and crackled like electric eels, and a dozen light clusters flashed complicated patterns in total unison.
This must be the day the important man comes out of the pod, which is impossible.
“You there, in the . . . er . . . pod,” she called, feeling more than a little silly. “Come out with your hands up.”
No one emerged from the metal pyramid, but a hatch vented gas, then dropped with a loud clang to the floor. Ghostly sheets of steam floated from the interior.
Well, that’s new, thought Chevie, checking with her thumb that the safety on her gun was off.
Inside the pod, orange light flickered, casting weird, shifting shadows on the wall.
There’s something alive in there, Chevie realized.
Riley felt every molecule in his body coalesce, compacting until his senses returned.
I am alive, he rejoiced, until the bitter cold settled upon him, and his teeth chattered with a violence that cracked a molar.
His hand still gripped the murder weapon, which was even now lodged in the chest of the murdered old geezer.
I cannot let go, he realized. My fingers are locked.
Riley tried to take stock of his surroundings, as Garrick had taught him.
He was contained in a metal tank with numerous fairy lights a-flashing on the cold walls.
I have brought this magical gent back to his people with a blade in his body and my hand on the blade. They will see me swing for this.
Escape
, his instincts told him.
Escape before you are in the dock for murder or, worse, Garrick finds a way to find you.
But the cold held him like a boulder strapped to his back; and Riley knew that, like thousands of street urchins every winter, soon he would sleep and then he would die.
Chevie rose on her haunches, then moved stealthily toward the hatch, keeping her gaze pointed through the gun sights.
“Come out with your hands up,” she ordered once more, but again nothing emerged from the pod.
It may have taken three seconds to reach the hatch, but to Chevie it felt like an age. Everything slowed down as adrenaline coursed through her system, stimulating her heart rate, dilating her blood vessels and air passages. She saw sparks tumbling slowly from the conduits and steam clouds seemed to stand still in the air.
Keep your focus, Special Agent
, she told herself.
There is someone in that pod.
She could hear scrabblings inside.
Was it a dog? An animal?
How do I warn an animal?
Suddenly time sped up again, and Chevie found herself in front of the hatch. Cold radiated through the opening and orange sparks moved unnaturally toward one another, coalescing into something solid.
Am I aiming my gun at a ghost?
But there was something else inside, huddled shivering in the cramped interior.
“Don’t move!” shouted Chevie, using her most serious FBI voice. “Freeze, or I will shoot.”
A weak voice came from somewhere inside the orange cloud. “I
am
freezing, miss. My word on it.”
Before Chevie could wonder why the strange accent had her brain singing “Consider Yourself,” the cloud dissipated, revealing the figure of a boy huddled over an old man.
The boy was alive but the man was not, probably because of the knife jutting from his chest. Being dead was not the only thing wrong with this guy: the blood congealing on his torso was yellow, and one of his arms seemed to be that of a gorilla.
Don’t think about it now. Do the job.
“Okay, kid. Move away from the dead . . . thing.”
The boy blinked, searching for the source of the orders. “I never done it, miss. We need to leave this place. He’ll be coming for me.”
Chevie made a split-second decision, reaching into the pod and yanking the kid out by his collar.
Chevie held him on the floor with the palm of her free hand.
“Who’s coming, kid? Who’s coming for you?”
The boy’s eyes were wide. “He’s coming. Garrick. The magician. Death itself.”
Great, thought Chevie. First a monkey guy, and now Death itself, who is also a magician.
Chevie felt another presence in the room and looked up to see Agent Orange in all his gray glory moving down the corridor toward the pod.
“That’s a good way to get yourself shot, Orange. What are you doing here anyway? I never pressed the panic button.”
Orange pulled off his silver sunglasses and surveyed the devastation. “Well, Agent Savano, when half of London blacked out, I guessed the WARP pod might have been activated.” Orange hesitated six feet from the hatch. “Did you look inside, Chevie?”
“Yes. I looked. Am I gonna die from radiation poisoning now?”
“No, of course not. Is there . . . a man in there? Is my father in there?”
Orange’s father? This posting cannot get any weirder.
Chevie returned her gaze to the restrained boy. “There were two people inside. This boy and a man. I really hope the man is not your father.”
But the way this day has been going, I just bet that monkey guy is Orange’s dad.
Chevie realized that she had never really trusted Agent Orange, but at this moment she actually felt sorry for him.
Albert Garrick sat slouched on the cold basement floor, eyes tightly closed, preserving the ghost image of the orange sparks branded on his eyelids.
It was a revolutionary thought in this industrial age of logic and reason. It was difficult to maintain belief in what he’d just seen once the evidence had disappeared. It would be much simpler to dismiss the entire event as delusion, but he would not.
I am being tested, he realized. My night of opportunity has arrived, and I must find within myself the mettle to seize my chance.
Garrick’s faith had always been in bone, blood, and butchery—in things he could wrap his fingers around and throttle, substantial things. There was nothing ethereal about them, but this was something different, something extraordinary.
Garrick had been fascinated by magic for as long as he could remember. As a boy he had accompanied his father to the Adelphi Theatre in London and watched from his perch in the wings as his old da swept the stage and kow-towed to the talent. Even then, this deference had angered the young Albert Garrick. Who were these people to treat his father with such disdain? Hacks, most of them—hacks, hags, and hams.
Among the ranks of the players there was a hierarchy. The singers were top dogs, then the comics, followed by the chorus pretties, and finally the conjurers and animal acts. Albert watched, fascinated, as the petty dramas played out every night backstage. Divas threw tantrums over dressing-room allocation or the size of opening-night bouquets. The young Garrick saw cheeks slapped, doors slammed, and vases hurled.
One particularly vain tenor, an Italian named Gallo, decided that the magic turn was not affording him due respect, and so he decided to ridicule the man at his birthday celebration in the Coal Hole public house on the Strand. Garrick witnessed the encounter from a stool beside the fireplace, and it made such an impression on the lad that he could recall the incident even now, almost forty years later.
The magician, the Great Lombardi, was built like a jockey, small and wiry, with a head that was too big for his body. He wore a pencil mustache that made him seem a touch austere, and a slick helmet of pomaded hair added to this impression. Lombardi was also Italian, but from the southern region of Puglia, which Gallo, a Roman, considered a land of peasants— an opinion he shared often and loudly. And, as Gallo was the star turn, it was understood that Lombardi would stomach the constant jibes. But Gallo should have known that Italian men are proud, and swallowed insults sit like bile in their stomachs.
On that particular evening, having treated the assembly to a raucous rendition of the “Drinking Song” from
La Traviata
, Gallo sauntered across the lounge to the magician and draped his meaty arm across the little man’s shoulders.
“Tell us, Lombardi, is it true that the poor of Puglia fight with the pigs for root vegetables?”
The crowd laughed and clinked glasses, encouraging Gallo to further mischief.
“No answer? Well then, Signor Lombardi, tell us how the women of the south borrow their husbands’ straight razors before Sunday ceremonies.”
