Black Magic (10 page)

From inside the shop, Lyle had a perfect view of Reverend Rusty, the sanctimonious bastard. He’d seen his type over and over through the centuries. Whether following Jesus or Osiris, they were all the same. He was just the kind of pinprick that tended to become infected. If the old man began to act on his convictions, Lyle would need to respond.

The mayor, on the other hand, would be no problem at all. Her dim
whapna
wasn’t worth his worry. She had the eternally sunny disposition that blinded her to the kind of work Lyle liked to do. She’d blithely smile as the whole world collapsed around her.
 

Lyle couldn’t wait to watch her do it. But for now he had to gather one more unwitting recruit for the Grand Adventure.

Chapter Twenty

An hour later, Lyle pulled his long black convertible up to the front door of Ferrer Motors. He could feel that the
whapna
he sought was inside.
 

The four boys in town would only wage half the battle to come. They would generate the magic his plan needed. But if experience told him anything, and he had thousands of years of it, a little defense never hurt. When he was deep into the incantations, he had no time to man the gates against any do-gooder town folk. Ah, for the days when mercenary knights were a dime a dozen or brown-shirt storm troopers were free. Why in the Dark Ages, he could spin a whole village of peasants into loyal defenders. He’d need nothing so grand in Citrus Glade. By the time they sensed he was a danger, they would be too preoccupied saving their own lives. Lyle would not need a large quantity of minions, just high quality. The
whapna
of Shane Hudson had that dark powerful quality. The man now walking out the front door of Ferrer Motors had it as well.

Vicente approached with a broad, fake smile that Lyle truly appreciated. He flashed back the same empty grin and stepped out of his car.

They introduced themselves and shook hands. Lyle could feel that this was his man.

“1975 El Dorado,” Vicente marveled as he eyed Lyle’s car. “That is one fine ride. Don’t get me wrong, technology has advanced since then, but for its time, wow. I can make you a great deal on trading it in.”

Right to the high pressure,
Lyle thought.

“That newer Cadillac caught my eye,” Lyle said. He pointed at a glossy Escalade SUV with enormous chrome wheels.

“You have great taste. This car is here for you and you alone. Low mileage, one owner. Decent on gas. A real head turner.”

All lies. Centuries among mortal humans had enabled him to spot a lie the way a hawk spies a mouse in a wheat field. But the prevarications rolled off Vicente’s tongue with impressive conviction.
 

They walked over to the vehicle. Lyle feigned interest and ran a finger along the top of the fender.

“I need to cut my inventory and I’m ready to make a deal today,” Vicente said. “I can take two thousand off this baby this afternoon to get it to move. I’ll also do right by you on your trade.” He offered Lyle less than half the El Dorado’s value. “I can even finance you right here at a competitive weekly rate.”

“This will be a strictly cash deal,” Lyle said. “And I’ll need you to leave the title paperwork blank for me.”

Vicente nudged Lyle in the ribs with his elbow. “Say no more. The taxman makes more than his fair share anyhow. I sell you the car and what you do with it then is none of my business.”
 

Lyle liked his ethics. But his
whapna
was too black, too rich to be sustained with mere cheating of customers. This business fronted something much more sinister. Trafficking illegals. Trafficking drugs. Prostitution. Perhaps all of the above. Whatever it was, it earned a place on Lyle’s team, whether he knew he signed up or not. Lyle clapped him on the shoulder.

“That sounds interesting,” he said. “I’ll give it some thought.”

As he pulled his hand away he pinched two hairs from the shoulder of Vicente’s shirt. Vicente did a poor job at masking the disappointment generated by his escaping pigeon.

“Sure you don’t want to drive her? Is there anything else I can tell you about the car?”

Lyle clenched the hairs in his palm. “I’ve got everything I need, thanks.”

When he pulled away, he watched a faded red truck pull in behind him, a real rust bucket beater with Lake County tags. Vicente pounced on the new victim and steered him straight to the Escalade that moments ago had been the car for Lyle alone.

Lyle slipped the two black hairs into an envelope with the two silver strands from Shane Hudson. He began to hum a song he learned as a boy, about excited hoplite soldiers approaching battlements on the eve of war.

Chapter Twenty-One

Autumn returned to the Everglades, but to the next spot in her rotation, a few miles south of where she had been before. She pulled off CR 12 and through the rotting fence that had once enclosed acres of Apex sugar cane. She particularly liked this location. A flat patch of white concrete surfaced where some building had once stood. The RV fit perfectly on it and she never feared that rain would mire her tires in the muck.

Oscar manned his co-pilot position. Back paws in the passenger seat, front paws on the dashboard. He swayed with the motion of the RV, as if his head was gyroscopically leveled. Though, or perhaps because, his previous life had been with a homebound senior, the big boxy tabby had taken to travel, provided that Autumn didn’t make him leave his home on wheels.

“Damn it,” Autumn said. She jabbed the brake and the RV crunched to a halt on the gravel road well short of the concrete pad.
 

A brown and black Burmese python stretched out on the sunny pad. The snake had to be a dozen feet long. The middle of the snake bulged like the weak spot in a garden hose. This snake had just eaten something big.

Autumn loved all animals, but she loved the Everglades more. The python was an ocean away from where it belonged in southeast Asia. Stupid people bought them as pets, unaware that the little reptiles would grow to eight feet within a year. A snake that could wrap around your wrist was cute. A snake that could wrap around your waist was scary. Panicked owners released the snakes into their backyards and they found their way to the Everglades, where an absence of natural predators and an abundance of prey created a population explosion. Wildlife officers killed hundreds a year, but the consensus was that the genie was out of the bottle.

“Keep an eye on things, Oscar.” Autumn pulled on some blue latex gloves, grabbed a square-tipped shovel and exited the RV. The humidity draped her like a hot, wet blanket.

The torpid snake lay motionless as she approached. Its scales reflected the sun and fostered an illusion of wetness. Like a guest at Thanksgiving dinner, the snake had seriously overeaten and was resting through the digestive process, recharging its internal heat pump with solar power. With the ability to unhinge its jaw, there was little limit to what the big snake could swallow after it crushed the creature to death.
 

The python could strike with speed when it hunted from its coiled ambush. In its current bloated state, that wasn’t going to happen. Autumn approached from the rear. The snake was bigger than she had thought, at least sixteen feet, and the bulge in its midsection was easily three feet around. This snake was a pig. It had to go.

She raised the shovel over her head, sharpened edge pointing down. The snake flicked out its tongue to give her a sensory once over. Too late. Autumn brought the shovel down like a guillotine. It caught the snake a foot behind its head and severed it. The snake’s jaws made one spastic snap and went still. Blood puddled in the gap between snake parts.

She reached down and inspected the head. It was so large it took both hands to lift it. This one had been years in the Everglades. She tossed the head aside and pulled a large knife from her belt.

“Let’s see what damage you have done.”

She rolled the snake over on its back. Female. At up to thirty-six eggs per clutch, this one had probably added over a hundred invaders to the struggling Everglades. Autumn pierced the lower end of the snake and slit the skin up to where the head had once been. She peeled away the scales like she was shucking a huge ear of corn.

“Well, I’ll be damned…”

Curled up inside the snake, as if ready for the reptile to birth it, lay a deer. The snake’s digestion hadn’t fully kicked into overdrive and the deer was complete. Autumn yanked it out and guessed its weight at seventy-five pounds. She had heard that a python could take down a deer, even alligators, but hadn’t seen it herself. All the more reason to eradicate these invaders.

She stood and surveyed the mess. It looked like an Animal Planet crime scene. She could bury the two pieces, but why do what Nature would better take care of? Scavengers would be on this feast minutes after she left, starting with ants and working their way up to vultures. Even buried, the scent would draw all sorts of creatures that would skew her observations. There were other waypoints she needed to check, anyhow.

She reentered the RV. Oscar peered around the side of the passenger seat, round head like a giant creamsicle tennis ball with whiskers.

“Hey, puffball. Did you catch all that action?”
 

She extended a gloved hand to Oscar. He sniffed the glove and then gave a violent shake to eradicate the scent. He bounded onto the dashboard. Autumn snapped off the sweat-filled gloves and tossed them in the trash.

“You said it,” Autumn said. “Snakes give everyone the creeps.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

The NSA tower rose from the abandoned Apex plant parking lot. Vicente Ferrer sat on a folding chair in the stripped-out cargo area of an idling, windowless white van beside the tower. Piles of computer components and assorted other electronic junk littered the rusting floor. The sliding door was open. Sweat made his silk shirt stick to him in the oppressive humidity. He wouldn’t even be out here for this, but he’d learned years ago, if you wanted something done right, you might not be able to do it yourself, but you’d damn well better supervise the person who did.

An open manhole yawned close enough to the van that Vicente could have stepped into it. Squirrelly Wilson stuck his head out. His tangle of long blond hair gave the young man the aura of a 1970s rock star, but a mouth full of crooked, stained teeth put any teen-idol impression to rest. He tossed a handful of plastic connectors onto the pavement.

“That should do it,” he said. “Spliced and diced and checked on twice.”

Even at this distance Vicente could smell Squirrelly’s breath, a rank combination of cigarettes, coffee and tooth decay. He wrinkled his nose. A man should have standards.

“Then get back in the damn van before someone drives by,” he said.

Squirrelly climbed in and Vicente cleared a way so he could get to the driver’s seat. He rolled the door shut. Blessedly cooler air blew across his arms from the front vents.

“There’s no way to track what we’re doing, right?” Vicente said.

“Can’t see how,” Squirrelly said. He gave his head a shake like a dog trying to dry itself. “We aren’t rerouting any of the information. We’re just reading it as it passes. Data mirrored on the fly as it goes by.”

Vicente was about ready to punch Squirrelly in his mismatched teeth if he uttered one more moronic rhyme. But the loser had been arrested for just this kind of scam, so he’d endure his jabber to access his skills.

“Then we send the info wirelessly to your computer,” Squirrelly said. “Even if someone finds the skimmer, they don’t know where the data’s going.”

Data flowed through the NSA tower like water through a fire hose. The project was supposed to monitor overseas communications, but there was a healthy flow of domestic information as well. Bank transfers, credit card purchases, cell phone call records, airline reservations. All the little details that NSA supercomputers would piece together to create the mosaic of future terrorist attacks. Vicente needed but a trickle from that information torrent. Credit cards and social security numbers would be more than enough. A few tapped from one bank’s data stream, a few tapped the next day from another’s. Never enough to warn of a major security breach, but cumulatively enough to sell for a good price. His connections in Colombia had connections in Kiev and the connections in Kiev had cash. Who knew a thumb drive of zeroes and ones would be worth so much money?

“And to review,” Vicente said. “If anyone finds out what you’ve done?”

Squirrelly’s face went dark. His earlier skimming scheme he’d been caught for had earned him some lengthy prison time. “Violation of probation,” he said. “A bad situation, a hallucination.”

“Probation will be the least of your problems,” Vicente said. “Our Ukrainian friends will make sure you never see the inside of a cell. Trust me.” He rolled the door back open. He stepped out and around the open manhole cover. “Now put this cover back on and then get the hell out of here.”

He turned on a heel and left for his car. Squirrelly’s usefulness was about to run its course. Once the system proved out, his Ukrainian friends might need to tie up that loose end early. Someone like Squirrelly wouldn’t be missed.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Later that evening, oil dripped on the bridge of Vicente Ferrer’s nose and splattered into one eye. He spewed a stream of curses and rolled out from underneath today’s old Dodge pickup trade-in. He groped until he found a rag and wiped the stinging liquid from his eye.