Immortal Twilight (11 page)

Chapter 10

While he could wait on an enemy for hours or days, Kane was not known for his patience. As soon as he left the medical suites, he made his way straight to the operations room and called a hasty meeting to bring all staff up-to-date regarding what had happened to Grant and Shizuka. Brigid Baptiste joined Kane just as he began to outline the situation, and she was genuinely concerned. Like Kane, Brigid had partnered with Grant for most of their time with the Cerberus operation, and the thought of his being wounded while out there on what should have been a standard recon upset her greatly.

“Seems we’re taking too many hits lately,” she told Kane as he brought up a map of the Panamint range on the main screen.

“And we always recover,” Kane stated in his no-nonsense way. He was here to buoy the spirits of Cerberus, not to dampen them; his natural leadership quality was once more coming automatically to the forefront.

“This is the area where Grant got slugged,” Kane said as the map flashed up on screen. The staff of the operations room watched as Kane indicated the specific spot where the arms factory had been. “Grant estimated this would have been three to four hours ago. I want someone to backtrack through the satellite logs and see if we can identify the departure time of these mysterious people he met. I’ve been to that factory and it’s an unforgiving journey at the best of times, not something people would choose to walk ’less they had to. My guess is they traveled through there via vehicle.

“Which means they also had to get there in the first place,” Kane concluded. “Let’s get a second team looking into that, see whether we can discover how and when they arrived and how long they’ve been waiting in those ruins. The window is thirteen days, people, that’s how long it is since my team blew that place to rubble. Odds are that our mysterious quartet appeared after that. Track them, then track back from there—see if we can find out where they originated from. And, crucially, if there are more of them.”

“That’s a big ask, Kane,” Brewster Philboyd said, peering over from the communications hub.

“We have a very close friend of ours lying in a coma in the infirmary,” Kane said, addressing his point to the amassed operators in the room and not just to Brewster. “Shizuka came through for us when Cerberus was at its lowest ebb, when the world was turned against us and Ullikummis had come and ransacked and almost destroyed this place. Shizuka and her Tigers of Heaven stood by our side, not as benefactors, but as equals. We will turn over every rock on the planet if that’s what it takes to find out who did this to her and why. Do I make myself clear?”

A rumble of assent bubbled through the room, surprise mixing with shame at Kane’s passionate words.

“And what if they don’t want to be found?” Donald Bry proposed, a worried look on his face.

“Then it’ll be that much more satisfying when we do find them,” Kane told him.

From the back of the room, Lakesh nodded in admiration. He had slipped into the room during Kane’s rallying speech and remained standing by the doors throughout. To see Kane in action like this reminded him what an asset the man was. With Kane, it seemed, nothing was impossible.

* * *

T
HEIR
FIRST
LEAD
came two days later. The Cerberus satellite teams had backtracked through countless hours of time-lapse footage, while Kane and the other field agents had put feelers out to whatever contacts they possessed beyond the hidden walls of the mountain base.

Forty-eight hours after Grant had first arrived back at Cerberus with the comatose Shizuka, a call came through via the comms desk asking to speak with Kane. The caller represented an old friend, a trader called Ohio Blue who operated out of what had once been the Louisiana-Tennessee region and was now known as the barony of Beausoleil. Blue was a black-market trader who had a hand in various schemes and scams across the Midwest. Quite how large her operation was Kane had never determined, but she was well connected enough to prove a useful contact, despite the questionable morality of her occupation.

As always, Blue elected to meet Kane in person, refusing to discuss anything over a radio network, no matter how secure. He met her in a tumbledown boathouse poised on a backwater stream off the Tennessee River. Constructed of aging wood, the boathouse looked rotted with a patina of green, seaweedlike mold clawing up the side that touched the waters. Kane had brought Brigid Baptiste with him, the two of them traveling together via interphaser to a convenient parallax point about a quarter hour’s march from the boathouse itself.

“Kane, my sweet prince,” Ohio Blue trilled as he stepped through the rotted door and into the low-lit boathouse. “You look as handsome as ever.”

Kane looked at the trader where she waited in a dark corner of the structure with guards standing to either side of her. Somehow, she had found a grand, velvet-backed armchair with gold gilding running across its beautifully tooled frame and legs. The chair was wildly out of place in the otherwise decayed shack, and Kane wondered if the rotted floorboards could take its weight. Evidently they could—or at least they were hanging in there for now.

The windows were fogged with mold, and candles lit the room with wispy trails of white smoke.

Blue herself was a striking figure. Languishing in the seat, she was a tall, slender woman in her mid-thirties with long, thick hair the color of molten gold that was styled to hide her right eye in a peekaboo cut. She wore a tight-fitting gown of midnight-blue that shimmered silver with each breath she took, cut low to reveal the tops of her breasts, with a hip-high slit that revealed one long, smooth leg. She sat with legs crossed, extending the grand length of bare flesh that was her exposed left leg.

“You’re looking pretty healthy yourself,” Kane said, passing into the room and striding toward her.

Brigid Baptiste followed a few steps behind him, her right hand open and poised close to the low-slung hip holster she wore openly. Ohio Blue had an understanding with Cerberus that stemmed mostly from a moment when Kane had saved her life during an intergang war. However, she was still a black marketer. It wouldn’t take much for her to turn on Kane and Brigid, especially if there were profits to be made.

The glamorous trader laughed. “‘Healthy’? ‘Healthy’? Oh, I do so hope that’s a euphemism, Kane, my sweet prince.”

“You said you had some information for us,” Kane said, ignoring the woman’s teasing. “Something that might help us on a case we’re investigating.”

“Oh, my poor, sweet Kane,” Ohio replied, “always so serious. Don’t you ever feel your talents are—” she stretched the word out for a moment, brushing some imaginary speck of dust from her décolletage “—wasted where you are?”

“My friend was hurt, Ohio, and his girlfriend’s in the infirmary just now,” Kane said, striding closer to the female trader, an imposing bearing to his swagger. “I don’t have time to play games. Tell me what you know so we can get our asses out of this—” he gestured vaguely to the rotting walls “—rat hole and get on with cleaning the whole mess up.”

Ohio raised the one perfectly arched eyebrow that could be seen, the whisper of a smile on her painted lips. “I find forcefulness a desirable quality in a man,” she cooed. “Perhaps someday soon you’ll take a position with me, be it for business or pleasure.”

Kane held his tongue and waited. This was the game they played, Ohio Blue and himself; she waving her desire before him like raw meat before a lion, he resisting despite her obvious charms. Perhaps they would make a good team, were their circumstances different, if she could only see beyond her selfish profit margins.

“Two men came to me a month ago,” Ohio said in her throaty, rich voice, “with an offer of some artwork and ancient treasures. They were known to me, these men—their names were Jake and Milo, and we had traded before. They were corpse turners, grave robbers, dress it up as you will. They were successful enough in their chosen profession. Jake had a knack for rooting out the right sites.”

Kane nodded. “There are a lot of them about since the nukecaust redrew the maps.”

“Jake had acquired a map to a site some way from here, out in the region once called Nevada and now known as Luilekkerville,” Ohio continued. “It was a military place, I didn’t get all the details.”

“What did it hold?” Kane asked.

“Now, that, my prince,” Ohio answered, “is a very insightful question. The short answer is, I don’t honestly know. The map that my freelance associate had acquired was a copy of a copy of a copy—” She rolled her eyes as if to indicate the sentence could continue forever. “You get the picture. It contained the royal seal of the House of Hanover—British care of old Germany.”

Kane glanced over to where Brigid was waiting in the shadows by the door, and he watched as she shook her head with uncertainty. “What does it mean?” he asked, turning back to the trader reclining in her gold-trimmed chair.

“Hard to say for certain, sweet prince,” Ohio admitted. “One thing I can confirm is that Jake and Milo never came back. These were good operatives, adept at tracking down the kind of items clients will pay good credits for. They knew how to survive in the rough-and-tumble world of grave turning.”

“You think they were killed?” Kane asked.

“By whatever they found down there,” Ohio told him with a nod of her head.

Brigid spoke up from the doorway. “Couldn’t they simply have been scared away?” she suggested. “What you— What they do is hardly the most reputable of occupations.”

“It’s a reasonable assumption,” Blue accepted, “but if they had been scared away, I would have heard from them by now. Jake was getting a little edgy for financing. His income stream had dried up.”

“There are other streams,” Kane pointed out.

“Yes, but they’re not open to dead men,” Ohio said.

“You sound pretty sure they’re dead,” Kane said.

“One doesn’t survive long in this business without developing something of an instinct for these things,” the blond-haired trader told him, reaching into her bag. Kane watched as she pulled free a tiny paper scroll tied with a ribbon. The scroll was no wider than three inches. “I retained a copy of the map for safekeeping, a little insurance for part-funding their expedition.”

Kane reached for the scroll. Ohio stroked the back of his hand before she handed it to him, squeezing his fingers with hers. Unfurled, the map was just six inches by three, and the ink was a muted gray where it had been reproduced too many times. Kane could make out some handwritten notes down the side that stretched across portions of the map, frustratingly obscuring details.

“This it?” he asked.

“That’s all I have, yes,” Ohio assured him.

Kane tilted the map to better catch the low light in the shack. “Out west, you say? Luilekkerville territory?”

Ohio admired him, saying nothing.

“Your friends could have just got bumped off by a competitor, you know,” Kane said, striving to keep the irritation from his voice.

“They could,” Ohio agreed.

“I’m not your errand boy, lady,” Kane growled. “I don’t go to places for your amusement.”

“Kane,” Ohio said gently, “my sweet, sweet prince. If it was for my entertainment, I would not be asking you to dig graves. I wouldn’t have shown you if I didn’t feel it might be important. There are no guarantees with this, no, but I don’t think you expected any.”

“So what you’re asking me to do is check out a hunch,” Kane confirmed.

“A very credible hunch, my sweet prince,” the trader told him. “The kind worth flexing your muscles for.”

Kane gritted his teeth in irritation, biting back a curse. “Yeah,” he said finally. “I can play a hunch. You need this back?”

“The map? Oh, heavens, no.” Ohio laughed. “Bring me whatever’s inside that place and we’ll call it even.”

Kane shot her a fierce look. He was never quite sure if the alluring trader was kidding him or not. Together, he and Brigid left the tumbledown boathouse, knowing full well that they were being observed by at least a dozen of Ohio’s scouts hiding in the foliage. Once they were out of sight, Blue would leave the shack and all trace of her existence there would be removed, leaving just a rotting boathouse sitting on a pondweed-covered tributary of the Tennessee once more.

Chapter 11

Twin Mantas cut the afternoon skies over Luilekkerville, their graceful bronze outlines like the marine creatures that they had been named after.

Luilekkerville’s towers shimmered in the afternoon light, a walled city rebuilt just a few months ago. Once, it had been called Snakefishville, named after its ruler. But Baron Snakefish had long since disappeared, and the ville itself had been leveled by a subterranean attack, leaving it little more than a smoking crater. Religious zealots had constructed their new settlement on the ruins of the dead ville, bringing a new peace to the region. Now it was a bustling ville once more, home to an estimated three thousand people.

The thought of that transformation left Kane cold as his Manta overflew the ville’s golden spires. He had been among the forces that opposed those religious fanatics, had seen firsthand how their indoctrination could warp and change people beyond recognition. One of their victims had been Brigid Baptiste, who sat behind him in the Manta’s tight cockpit. During Cerberus’s darkest hour, she had all but lost her mind to the intrusive teachings of the religion’s figurehead, the vengeful Ullikummis.

“Quite amazing what they’ve done down there, isn’t it?” Brigid commented as Kane brought the Manta around in a swooping arc.

“The stone-heads rebuilt a lot of things,” Kane said noncommittally, “some better than others.”

Brigid understood Kane’s bitterness. While she had been in the thrall of the Ullikummis cult, it was Kane and his allies who had been striving to stop them in a conflict that had brought the two friends to blows. Brigid had shot Kane in an encounter not far from this site in an act that must have seemed like the ultimate betrayal.

Sitting up front, Kane continued to pilot the Manta, urging it toward the point indicated on the ancient map that Ohio Blue had given him.

The map showed a region of old California/Nevada roughly ninety miles from the Pacific coast. The reproduction was faint, and Cerberus operatives had run it through enhancement software to divine as much detail as they could from the aged parchment. The map was three hundred years old, and one problem that that created was in the way the landscape had changed between then and now. Landmarks that may have been obvious at the time it was drawn were now nothing more than distant memories, whole towns turned to dust by the onslaught of the nuclear war that had punctuated the start of the twenty-first century. Even the coast had changed, a great chunk of California shearing along the San Andreas fault, leaving whole regions submerged.

Cerberus was manned by some of the smartest scientific minds and they had pieced together the map’s details, translating them into modern landmarks that might possibly represent the same area. It had taken three and a half days of comparing satellite footage and archived maps to triangulate the area in question; Ohio Blue’s suggestion that it was somewhere in Luilekkerville had at least given Cerberus an indication of where to focus the search.

The trouble that they had gone to had made Kane wonder how Ohio’s grave robbers had managed to locate the place, or indeed whether they really had. When he raised that question to Brigid, she had shrugged. “They’re seasoned professionals,” she told him. “I guess you get good at reading old maps when your next meal depends on it.”

Now Kane, Baptiste and Grant were heading to a location close to Boundary Peak, Mount Montgomery on the forgotten border of California and Nevada.

Grant followed Kane in his own Manta, playing wingman to Kane’s lead. His chest still burned from the heat blast he had taken a few days earlier, but the ache had turned to an itch which Reba DeFore had provided lotion to soothe. Grant sat alone in his Manta cockpit, the all-encompassing bronze flight helmet over his head. Shizuka was still at the Cerberus infirmary, where she remained in a coma. She was stable and had shown no signs of decline at least, but it was considered too risky to move her while she was in this state, much to the frustration of the Tigers of Heaven, who had wanted their leader returned. A compromise had been reached that saw a unit of twelve Tigers of Heaven guards keeping a round-the-clock vigil over their leader’s bed, running in shifts, six on and six off. The Tigers had a fine relationship with Cerberus; they had even protected the Cerberus operatives during the religious purges that came with the rise of Ullikummis and his campaign against the Cerberus rebels. Even so, the situation left things tense, and more than once Grant had found himself almost coming to blows with one of the guardsmen as he went to check on Shizuka’s progress.

Even now, Grant was tense and angry, his rage just barely restrained. Whatever they found out in Luilekkerville territory, he could only hope it would lead them to the strangers who had done this to his lover.

Though they originally hailed from Cobaltville, which bordered Luilekkerville and incorporated some of Nevada, neither Kane nor his companions knew this area especially well. Brigid had read up on the immediate area surrounding the location in question, concluding it had remained a sparsely populated region since the time that the map had been drawn.

Kane weaved the Manta through the cloud cover wafting over Mount Montgomery before beginning his descent. His instruments indicated the location that was shown on the map, a running heads-up display feeding Kane with additional information as he brought his aircraft lower. Behind him, Grant followed, acknowledging the maneuver with a brief exchange over their linked Commtacts.

They were six miles out from Mount Montgomery itself, in a kind of no-man’s-land situated on the forgotten border of the states of California and Nevada. Kane scouted for a suitable location to land, settling on a gently undulating slope that was brushed with grass and a smattering of trees. The Mantas were enviably maneuverable and, with their VTOL design, could land on the proverbial dime. The engines of Kane’s Manta were powering down as Grant brought his own craft in for a landing, turning the nose around in midair as he circled an unspoiled spot between the trees.

“We’re a little exposed out here,” Kane said as Grant threw back the hatch on the cockpit. “Let’s try to make this quick, in and out.”

Removing his own flight helmet, Grant raised his index finger to the side of his nose in the friends’ private 1 percent salute. “Roger that,” he said. The 1 percent salute was an acknowledgment that no matter how much one might plan for a mission, there was always that 1 percent factor of chaos that could throw things out of whack. Being prepared for that eventuality, however it manifested itself, could mean the difference between staying alive and taking a bullet.

Brigid followed as the two men began to scout the area, checking for hostiles. She scanned the space with emerald eyes, searching for landmarks that she might recognize from the satellite surveillance that Cerberus had put on this place once they had located it. To the west, the orange ball of the sun was drawing slowly toward the horizon, casting elongated shadows behind them as they strode across the grassy scrubland.

* * *

T
HEY
FOUND
THE
TRAPDOOR
in a copse of trees, exactly where the Cerberus techs had triangulated it. Kane wasn’t surprised. “Eggheads came through for us again,” he said. While they weren’t infallible, the Cerberus support staff had proved invaluable time and again in locating esoteric items across the globe.

Brigid brushed a stray red-gold lock of hair over her ear as she peered at the trapdoor. It looked like an manhole or the entry hatch to a submarine, the metal frame buried a few feet into the soil with an open door poised upward on its hinges like a flap. The door, like the hole, was circular, and it looked wide enough to allow more than one person to pass through it at once. “That’s it,” she said, a little overwhelmed.

“Looks old,” Grant muttered, idly working the safety on his Copperhead assault subgun. He was dressed in a new duster coat, black like his old one and with a Kevlar and Nomex weave, making it both bulletproof and flame retardant. Beneath this, he wore a new shadow suit, fitted snugly to his body like a second skin.

The Copperhead was a favored field weapon of Grant’s. It featured a two-foot-long barrel, with grip and trigger in front of the breech in the bullpup design, allowing the gun to be used single-handed. It also featured an optical, image-intensified scope coupled with a laser autotargeter mounted on top of the frame. The Copperhead possessed a 700-round-per-minute rate of fire and was equipped with an extended magazine holding thirty-five 4.85 mm steel-jacketed rounds. Besides his magistrate’s Sin Eater, Grant would defer to the Copperhead, thanks to ease of use and the sheer level of destruction it could create.

Brigid crouched down beside the open manhole while Kane and Grant covered her, alert to danger. Kane had brought his Sin Eater with him in its wrist sleeve, and he popped it out from beneath the black denim jacket he had elected to wear over his own shadow suit.

Brigid, too, was armed—a TP-9 pistol strapped in the low-slung hip holster that clung to her right leg. “It’s wet down there,” she said as she ran the beam of her flashlight down into the hole. “A puddle or pool, by the look of it.”

“From what Ohio said, the place could have been open for maybe four weeks now,” Kane said. “Guess it caught a little rain.”

Automatically, Brigid’s thoughts turned to the average precipitation figures for this area, yet another jot of trivia stored in her capacious eidetic memory. Luilekkerville was a relatively dry area in a temperate zone, but it did have rainfall, sometimes torrential. Something glinted in the beam of Brigid’s flashlight, bringing her focus back to the present. “There are handholds down there,” she said, “secured to the wall like ladder rungs.”

“Then that’s how we’re getting down,” Kane said, his eyes still fixed on the Mantas where they stood at the foot of the slope. No one seemed to be about; the only movement came from birds swooping overhead and insects buzzing in the long grass.

Without argument, Brigid moved her agile form fluidly over the lip of the opening and dropped down onto one of the ladder rungs, descending to the pool of water in a few swift movements. It was twelve feet to the floor of the underground chamber, and when she reached it, Brigid discovered that the shallow puddle came barely over the sole of her boots. “It’s empty down here,” Brigid called up to her partners. “All clear.”

Kane followed Brigid down the ladder, while Grant clambered down last of all. The area below was just a few feet square, and Grant had to wait halfway down the ladder rungs while they discussed what to do next. There was really only one option open to them—the square lobbylike area had just one opening, which led to an inclined tunnel that went deeper into the hillock. Kane and Brigid led the way while Grant followed a few paces behind them, waving the Copperhead in a sweep fore and aft to make sure nothing popped up to surprise them.

The initial tunnel was narrow, with sketches drawn on the walls in faint pencil, each one a perfect study of the naked female form. Brigid ran the beam of her flashlight over them and Kane smiled. “Looks like someone’s been having a time of it,” he said.

Brigid glared at him. “Men.” She
tsked.

But beside her, Grant’s attention was held by the illustrations and he reached for Brigid’s hand as she pulled the beam away. “I know this woman,” he said, leaning in a little to get a closer look. “She was one of the ones who attacked me. Tossed a bullet at my kneecap.”

Brigid and Kane took another look, examining the illustration that Grant indicated. It showed a curvaceous blonde woman in repose, nude, with her legs angled in such a way as to protect her modesty, her hair teased up in a coif.

“Cecily,” Grant said, “that’s what they called her.” His eyes roved over the illustrations, searching the other figures who had been added onto the tiled wall until he found a study of another woman, just her head and torso, peering back at the viewer from over one naked shoulder. “And this one’s called Antonia.”

“Good,” Kane said. “Then we’re in the right place.”

Together, the exploration party moved on, following the narrow tunnel until it opened into a broader one with a high arched ceiling and an elaborate painting dominating one curved wall, gas lamps lit and illuminating the whole thing. The painting showed beautiful sea nymphs emerging from the waters, and it was clear to all three Cerberus exiles that they were based in part on the same models as the two studies of Cecily and Antonia that Grant had pointed out.

“Seems that somebody had a lot of time on their hands,” Brigid observed.

“How so?” Kane asked.

“The detail and artistry here are worthy of Michelangelo’s work in the Sistine Chapel,” Brigid told him. “Though appreciably a colossal undertaking, Michelangelo was an incredibly accomplished artist—it took him close to five years to decorate the whole chapel with artwork that went down in history as one of the greatest achievements of any man.”

“You think this took five years?” Kane queried.

“I think someone was down here with nothing better to occupy them,” Brigid rationalized. “How long it took depends on the individual artist, I guess.”

They walked past the vast mural, striding three abreast down the wide tunnellike corridor. The gas lamps flickered slightly, creating a warmth to the light they cast.

“Any ideas what’s powering the lights?” Grant asked.

Brigid shook her head. “Self-sustaining gas supply of some kind,” she suggested. “Which means that there must be an efficient ventilation system to this bunker, perhaps hidden among the trees up there.”

They moved into another corridor, this one running in a shallow curve that took it down deeper into the hill. There were several rooms branching from the corridor, some of which were filled with what appeared to be junk: yellowed manuscripts with handwritten alterations, paintings, sketches and statuary both large and small.

“Looks like an art dealer’s paradise,” Kane said as he glanced into the third of these storerooms.

“Yet there’s a similar sensibility to all of it, do you notice?” Brigid pointed out. “It’s all harking back to a specific time period—the Italian Renaissance as reinterpreted through Victoriana.”