Doorways to Infinity (19 page)

“That was all she heard, apparently, and she only heard it once.” He lowered his voice even more. “But it’s the same voice she heard before, so it must be you-know-who.”

Terry studied the little slip of paper in her hand. “No date mentioned, or what’s happening at this place?”

“Not as far as I know.”

“Any idea where this hotel is?”

“I did a quick search on my phone and found at least five with that name, and they’re scattered all over the world.”

She continued to stare at the short message, working her mouth from side to side. “I’ll show this to Eric and see what he can make of it.”

Jamie was putting on his running clothes in his dorm room on Saturday morning when his phone chimed with a message. He read it quickly and called, “Hey, Bryce. Terry just texted. She and Eric want to hang out, and she used all caps again.”

Bryce poked his head into Jamie’s open doorway. “They want to see us right now?”

“Looks like it.”

“We gotta be in the gym in less than thirty minutes.”

Jamie rubbed the back of his head with one hand and stared at the floor. “I know. Coach is gonna kill me if I miss practice.”

“We haven’t run in almost a week ’cause of the rain, and this is the only time we can use the gym.”

“You don’t have to remind me.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’ve got to go see what they want. Maybe it’ll only take a minute.”

“What if it takes longer? What do you want me to tell Coach?”

“Tell him, uh…no, don’t tell him anything. I don’t want you to have to lie. Just say you don’t know why I missed practice.”

“He’s gonna be ticked off.”

“I’ll just have to deal with it.”

Jamie stepped into Eric and Terry’s house and closed the glowing doorway. “This better be good. I’m in trouble with my track coach.”

“I think I figured out which Hotel Amira this is,” Eric said, “and why it matters. It’s the one in Istanbul, more than likely. It took me a while to check everything out, but it’s the only hotel with anything going on right now of any significance. There’s a meeting of four lower-level OPEC oil ministers today, which starts in a little over an hour.”

“At ten o’clock in the morning on a Saturday?”

“It’ll be five in the afternoon in Istanbul. But we need to go and warn their security. Can you make a doorway for us?”

“Uh…now?”

“As soon as possible. And can you or Fred come with us, maybe both?”

“That’s pretty short notice. She’s busy this morning, working on a class project.”

“Do you think we could borrow her Stupefyin’ pendant?” Terry said. “That would be some help, at least.”

“I can ask.”

“Will you come?” Eric said. “Maybe we can surprise Cage and apprehend him today. But I think we’ll need as much magical help as we can get.”

I can kiss track practice goodbye
. “I guess I can come.”

“We’ll have to do something about your appearance. You need to dress like an agent. Do you have a black suit?”

“Back home in Hendersonville, in my closet.”

“Can you get it?”

“Maybe, if I make a doorway to my bedroom and sneak in and out real fast so my parents don’t know. My mom might not like it if she knew what I was up to.”

“We’ll also have to do something to disguise you a little bit,” Terry said. “We need to keep your identity a secret, especially from Cage. Do you have a spell you can use?”

“Not really. I can change my hair color, but I have to maintain the spell constantly and won’t be able to do much else.”

“I’ve got a dark wig you can wear,” Eric said, “and some tinted glasses that’ll make your eyes look less blue.”

“Just follow my lead, Jamie,” Eric said as they headed to the stairs that went to the conference rooms of the Hotel Amira in Istanbul, Turkey. The lobby they had just passed was luxurious, with a bubbling fountain in the center and guests and liveried staff going in every direction. Terry walked beside Jamie, and she and Eric both had handguns in shoulder holsters under their dark coats. Terry’s expression was as serious as Eric’s — all business.

Jamie felt uncomfortably warm in his black suit and tie, and his scalp itched under the brown wig. He caught a glimpse of his reflection in a mirror in the foyer and frowned to himself.
I look funny with these glasses and hairpiece on
. He held Fred’s Stupefyin’ necklace in his left fist, the end of the thin silver chain looped around his index finger so that he could spin it at a moment’s notice. All three of them wore the cheap woven bracelets that served as counter charms to the pendant’s hex, though Eric was skeptical when he put his on. “Not government approved equipment, that’s for sure.”

“If you don’t have it on when I twirl this necklace, you’ll get stunned, too,” Jamie replied.

They started up the stairs and Terry said. “Does the pendant work anything like a Taser?”

“You don’t feel a thing. You just get really stupid and unaware of things. Fred used it on me once, just so I could see what it’s like.”

“How long does the effect last?”

“Until I stop twirling it.”

“Well, get ready to twirl it now,” Eric said as they reached the second floor, where a powerfully built man waited, stiff and challenging. “I think this guy is head of their security.”

The man they approached was big, like a refrigerator with legs, and he wore a black suit and a hard expression. “ID, please,” he said, not a request but a demand.

Eric and Terry showed their CIA badges, and Eric gestured toward Jamie. “This is our intern, Grant Harris.” He nudged Jamie with his elbow. “Show him your ID.”

Jamie released the Stupefyin’ necklace so that it dangled from his finger. He pulled out his wallet, flipped it open and offered it to the man, even though there was no identification in it but his driver’s license. He began spinning the pendant in a slow circle, and the man’s eyes glazed over immediately. Eric said, “See? His credentials are in order.”

“Yes,” the man mumbled.

They walked past the stunned man and Jamie put the necklace in his pants pocket. Terry whispered, “I’ve
got
to get one of those.”

The upper landing opened to a beautifully paneled lobby with tall gilded doors spaced at wide intervals. Standing at the entrance to the first conference room were two more beefy men in dark suits, and several others were stationed down the hall. Jamie waited with Terry while Eric spoke with the one of the guards.

Jamie leaned closer to Terry and whispered, “What are we looking for, exactly?”

“Anything out of the ordinary. Eric is telling that guy that we’re expecting trouble, and he’ll probably alert the rest of their team.”

Eric rejoined them and said, “The meeting is about to start inside, and they have six armed guards with them. There’s only one other entrance to the room and it’s got two men on it, too. They have a security camera monitoring the space above the ceiling, and I suggested that they station someone in the adjoining rooms.”

“So what do we do?” Jamie asked.

“We wait here and keep our eyes peeled.” He lowered his voice and said, “And if you have any special ways of looking, this would be a good time for that.”

“What do you mean by special?”

“Infrared vision or X-ray, or whatever it is you wizards can do.”

“I can’t do either of those, but I have super-hearing, and sometimes I can see in slow-motion. How about that?”

“Anything you can do that might give us an edge is helpful.”

“We didn’t have time to get much of a plan together,” Terry said, “or get any other agents here, for that matter.”

A blue-uniformed man appeared from around the corner, holding a German shepherd on a leash. When they passed by, Jamie said, “What’s that for?”

“Bomb-sniffing dog,” Eric said.

“I thought this was a low-level meeting.”

“It is. You should see what it’s like for a meeting of the top ministers of OPEC. A gnat couldn’t get in without proper clearance.”

“I’m beginning to think that Cage could,” Terry said. “Speaking of whom, we need to pay attention.”

The two agents moved near the closed double doors of the conference room, squared their shoulders and crossed their arms behind their backs. Their eyes glanced about, searching the hall to their left and the stairs to their right. Jamie tried to adopt their stiff professional pose, standing next to Terry. He checked his watch. It was already five o’clock, Istanbul time.
If anything’s going to happen, it should be soon
.

He began contemplating what course of action he would take if they encountered the mysterious Phillip Cage.
If he tries to blow a powder at us or fling it, I can throw my shield around him. That’ll contain it. If he has a pendant like Fred’s, I can translocate it somewhere out of reach
. Jamie knitted his brow.
What else?
He tried to remember the countless spells that Fred had discussed with him over the last year.
There are so many. I wonder if my shield would protect me from a pendant’s magic. I’ve never checked, for some reason. That would be a good experiment
.

He began to imagine ways to test his magic against Fred’s and soon became lost in thought, daydreaming.

He was jerked back to reality when he sneezed, and his throat suddenly felt itchy and dry. He glanced at his watch again and his heart jumped. “Is it really almost six o’clock?”

Eric and Terry both blinked hard at him and Terry said, “No way. We just got here.”

Eric checked his own watch and his eyes flared. “Uh oh.” Without another word, he dashed to the closed conference room doors and threw them open. Jamie and Terry followed.

Inside, they saw men in fine suits sitting around a large table with confused looks on their faces. Assistants stood nearby, wearing equally puzzled expressions. The security team appeared dazed and disorganized. Eric hurried over to the closest guard and began conferring with him, while Jamie stood with Terry, who was scanning the room anxiously.

She whispered to Jamie, “What do you think just happened?”

“I think we got hexed.”

* * *

On Sunday afternoon, Eric and Terry requested another meeting of everyone who could come, including Carl and John Paul. Because of the size of their crowd, they decided to hold it at the Rivershire School again.

Once they were all seated, Eric leaned back against a desk and crossed his arms loosely over his chest. “As far as we can tell, everybody at the hotel was affected yesterday by the same mental blackout that Terry, Jamie, and I suffered. Staff, guests, visitors, you name it.”

“Was anybody hurt?” Melanie asked.

“Not seriously. All of the dignitaries were fine, but a chef burned his hand in the kitchen, and a maid tripped on the stairs and sprained her shoulder.”

“Some guests were angry when they tried to check in, near the end of the episode,” Terry said. “They complained that the clerks just stood around like they were on drugs or something. But so far, no traces of any drugs or noxious gases have turned up.”

“It was probably a magical powder,” Fred said. “Whoever used it could’ve put it in the ventilation system, but nobody would be able to identify it unless they knew about witch’s magic. Did you get any samples?”

“Couldn’t find any concentrations that were substantial enough. What little we scraped up was mixed with the usual dust and pollen that you’d expect in a hotel of that size.”

“Have you checked the surveillance videos to see if anyone entered the building or was moving about while everyone was dazed?”

“Video won’t be much help. There’s a gap of about fifty-five minutes in the footage from every camera, corresponding to the time of our mental blackouts. It’s like somebody either turned the system off or edited it. And one camera was turned off several hours before the episode.”

“What did it monitor?” Carl asked.

“The entrance in the back, the one for the hotel staff.”

“That must be how Cage came in.”

Bryce sat up in his chair. “Could he have had an accomplice? They could’ve been working in the monitoring room and turned off the cameras.”

“He might’ve corrupted someone in that department, but it doesn’t seem likely. All of them have been thoroughly interrogated, and nothing suspicious has come out, but there was only one on duty at the time. He seems to be as bewildered as the rest of us, and he passed the lie detector test.”

“Fred?” Terry said. “Is there such a thing as a witch’s truth serum?”

“Yes, but we call it a potion, not a serum. Though it wouldn’t be useful if someone thinks they’re telling the truth. Nova wouldn’t be much help, either. I think it’s likely that Cage got to one of the people who works in the monitoring room before they started their shift, and then he hit them with a compulsion spell. Cage could get them to do something as simple as turning off a camera, and they wouldn’t even know they were doing it, and they wouldn’t remember, either.”

“If that’s the case,” Terry said, “he could get someone to do most of his dirty work for him, like the actual hits.”

“I’ll ask Momma Sue about it when I see her,” Fred said. “Me and Nova and Sammi are going over there right after this.”

“I doubt Cage would leave the hit in the hands of someone else,” Eric said. “Too much chance of something going wrong. He’d do it himself.”

“But why did Cage do this if he didn’t hurt anybody this time?” Nova said. “Did he steal something, instead?”

“There were no reported thefts in the entire hotel during that time,” Eric said. “Those oil ministers have watches that cost more than my house, and they weren’t stolen. Neither was any of their jewelry. No wallets, rings, nothing. It’s a puzzle.”

Rollie scratched his head and stared at the top of the desk where he sat. “Maybe Cage needed the time to do something…something no one would notice.”

“Like copy the oil ministers’ cellphone data,” Melanie said.

Eric stoked his chin and nodded slowly. “So maybe none of the people there were his real target. Maybe he needs to get to someone they know.”

“Four cellphones of important officials can have a lot of contact data and schedules,” Carl said. “Eric, how are you going to get access to those to find out who or what his potential target might be?”