Owl and the City of Angels (13 page)

Fish demon? No, not pale enough and shouldn’t have hair. Turnip demon then?

“Hunh?” I said, as Nadya broke my train of thought.

Nadya had started perusing the files, both the dig and the surveillance package. “What the hell is this?” she said, holding up the photos taken of me out on various recent jobs.

“The IAA tracking me for the last two to three weeks?” I said.

Nadya gave out a low whistle, followed by something in Russian as she flipped through.

“Told you they’d gotten more organized,” I said, and glanced back up at the bar. The man with the tuft of white hair was still there. Was it me, or were his arms too long?

Nadya shook her head. “No—I mean, yes, this is much more extensive than I’d expect from them, but I was referring to the theft. This? Infiltrating dig sites, lifting artifacts right under the IAA’s nose? It’s got your signature all over it.” She held up the list of recent heists the IAA had attributed to me, some of which were mine, and others that weren’t but could have been. “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear these were all you.”

“Apparently the IAA agrees with you. Though I’m starting to think I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time . . .”

Nadya frowned. “Perhaps,” she said, picking up one of the photographs of the dig itself, then switching to the notes. She had a knack for cross-referencing research and would pick up anything I’d missed. “But regardless, I think someone is trying to make it look like you did it.”

The same thought had occurred to me too, though it didn’t sit well that someone in the underground antiquities community would purposefully try to throw me under the bus.

Yes, there is such a thing as honor amongst thieves.

“That reminds me—” I pulled out my phone and typed out a quick message to Hermes. Hermes was a courier who specialized in delivering stolen goods under the radar of customs and other authorities. He was one of the best working in the continental US, and the only one who specialized in antiquities. If he hadn’t delivered the items himself, he’d have a good idea who had.

Hermes—info on Daphne Sylph L.A. purchase? Some asshole’s setting me up.

I attached the article and accompanying video footage from an entertainment channel showing the three stolen items at the charity party to the email. No sense giving Hermes more than needed. He might take the whole honor amongst thieves thing seriously, but that didn’t mean I wanted to let the fox into the chicken coop. The pictures would generate enough questions as it was.

The busboy had finished at the bar and was heading back through the service door. “Daikon demon?” I asked Nadya, nodding at the busboy.

Nadya glanced up from the folder, frowned, and shook her head. “No. Frog. Good guess though,” she added.

It was not, but Nadya was encouraging me to get better at picking them out. You know the kind of people you’ve surrounded yourself with by the lies they tell. Good friends lie about the little stuff and tell you the truth when it’s important—regardless of what you want to hear. Bad friends either always tell the truth or always lie. Either way, it ends up being pointless noise.

I’ve come to terms with the fact that some supernaturals, like Carpe and Rynn, are OK, but those are extreme exceptions, not the rule. Most supernaturals hate humans. The majority of humans don’t know supernaturals exist, so they have no opinion one way or the other . . . except about vampires. They still don’t believe in them, but somehow everyone’s convinced they’re romantic, immortal creatures who have nothing better to do than spend their days trolling high schools for teenagers in need of rescuing from a boring, uneventful life and parents who just don’t understand them. . . . Well, vampires do troll for high school kids, but trust me, it’s not romantic, it’s convenient. Like fast food.

“Alix,” Nadya said, still leafing through the pages, “I think this is more serious than you realize.”

“Because the IAA finally got their shit together?” I said it as cavalierly as I could, but in all honestly just the thought of my near brush in Alexandria still sent my heart racing.

“No, because I think there is more to this than Mr. Kurosawa is letting on.”

There was that slow set of chills riding down my spine. Nadya was good when it came to archives and data pushing—better than me. Where I saw a collection of papers and data on a site depicting sporadically connected events, Nadya saw patterns. Again, that’s why Nadya avoids trouble, and I stumble in headfirst . . . “I got the impression they were being pretty damn transparent when Lady Siyu suggested I be lunch.”

Nadya shook her head. “Something smells very wrong with all this, and I think it begins with the IAA, not the thief.”

Nadya began arranging the data into piles. “Start going through these and find me everything you can on the dig teams—take notes on each one, what they worked on, which notes were theirs . . .” She handed me the set of notes from 1950 and took the more recent ones for herself, opening up her laptop at the same time. “And Alix?”

I looked up from my pile.

“Do a bar run first. We’re both going to need more than one drink.”

The pool had gotten crowded as people settled in around us for post-gambling sun and alcohol, mostly for drowning their sorrows, though a few looked celebratory. I pinched the bridge of my nose and tried to drown out the background noise as I crossed off another set of dig notes on Dr. Caitlin, one of the first 1950 grad students to fall ill. They’d sent her farthest into the tunnels, either because she’d presumably been smaller, or they’d figured the least senior grad student got to play canary. Fifty-fifty on those odds.

Over the last two hours, Nadya and I had pored over the three IAA excursions and, for the most part, had accounted for all the dig team members. The only one we couldn’t find any information on was the current dig team, including the postdoc who would be running it.

I glanced over at the bartender, wondering what my chances were of wrangling another Corona as a bachelorette party, led by a trio of girls with a gradient of blond shades of hair sidled up to the bar. Unfortunately, Rynn was still hiring, so the bar was short staffed.

Speaking of Rynn, there’d still been no sign of him . . . I couldn’t decide if that was a good or bad thing.

“More than I expected, less than I hoped for,” Nadya said, putting down her folder. “The good news or bad news first?”

“Bad news please. I refuse to delude myself with false hope.”

“The Syrian City of the Dead is a cursed place, one of the few real ones.”

I frowned. “We knew that already.”

“Yes, but you’re not seeing the bigger picture.” She picked up the most recent dig approval forms for reopening the Neolithic dig. “In order to open up a class-five restricted site, which supernatural plagues fall under, you need the entire IAA Board of Directors’ approval.”

“Which is right there on the bottom of the form,” I said.

“The stamp is there, but I can’t find any signatures.”

“I’ve never seen a signature on one of these. They’re kept under some clandestine fortress, aren’t they?”

She nodded and pulled out what looked like another form. The paperwork was something I sure as hell didn’t miss about the IAA. They might rival the Illuminati and Masons for most clandestine, but they were sticklers for a paper trail.

“But in order for the board to approve even a class-three restricted site—which, by the way, because of skin walkers and genies includes every site in Russia, so I am very familiar with the paperwork, especially since my professors couldn’t be bothered to pull themselves out of their vodka bottles long enough to fill out a form when there was a sober graduate student hanging around—they require every individual on the dig to be listed with the stamp.”

“It’s to make sure if a skin walker gets out, they know who the possible victims are, right?”

Nadya nodded gravely and handed me back the copy of the permit. “No names means this is either forged or the IAA doesn’t want a record of them having been there. Alix, I know restricted sites—we had enough trouble with our class threes. The director would never approve this project. It’s too dangerous.”

On that hand, Nadya was right. Every IAA dig on the planet went through an approval committee, whose sole purpose was to make sure nothing was crawling around the site that they couldn’t hide from the general public. The word
curse
should have been enough to put a stop to the whole thing.

“Maybe the treasure is just that damned good,” I said.

She shook her head. “The IAA is a lot of things, but treasure hunters they are not. Either they were leveraged to approve it, or someone managed to bypass their approval completely.” She paused. “The professor who is funding the dig is absent from the dig site itself. You saw who it was?”

I shrugged, determined not to make a big deal out of it. My old supervisor, Dr. Orel Sanders, was the one who’d signed off on the grant and was funding supplies. Unfortunately it didn’t mean a hell of a lot. “That’s not unusual for him. He never works on site. He doesn’t even run the research, just hands it off to the next postdocs in line. Honestly, I’m not sure he even proofreads the papers and grants anymore. I only ever met the man twice; once for my interview, and then when I was kicked out.” Though I wasn’t in the mood to rehash getting screwed over by my supervisor and research committee, I still remember the exact conversation word for word, as if someone seared it into my mind . . .

“Don’t worry, Alix,” Dr. Sanders had said after I’d reported my run-in with the mummy. “Happens all the time. Just sign off on the retraction and we’ll get you to a dig. No mummies this time, promise.” He’d even had the nerve to smile and pat me on the back. Made me furious just thinking about it . . . my God, have I ever really been that stupid and naïve?

Sensing my mood change, Nadya switched tactics. “He might not be involved or even know about the dig, but his signature didn’t get on the paper by itself. It’s a lead. All we have to do is determine where all his postdocs are, and we should be able to figure out which one is running the dig.”

“Except there’s no guarantee the thief is using an IAA contact.”

Nadya shook her head. “They have to have some connection with the IAA, otherwise they’d never have kept the theft this quiet. We just have to find it—”

“And hope to hell they’re not as good at burying their past as I am.” Still, a needle in a haystack was better than no lead at all. And Sanders’s postdocs wouldn’t be hard to find—all the university websites listed them.

“I will do my best from my end and see what more I can find out—both from these files and ones that might not be so obvious.”

“I’ll see what I can dig up about the sale from Hermes before I go to L.A.,” I said. Needles in haystacks, but you work with what you have.

Nadya gathered up the papers—none of the maps or diagrams, mostly notes and references about the researchers involved. “There were some prominent Russian professors who wrote on the city and the plague. They should still be on the server—I’ll see if I can dig them up.”

The Russian university servers were notoriously unsecure due to staffing. They didn’t have a budget to wipe old access codes, a fact Nadya exploited every chance she got.

“They’re going to plug that hole eventually, Nadya.”

“You don’t know Russian academics. The loophole will be fixed, just not soon. My nose will tell me when to stop.”

She might have an uncanny ability to sniff out trouble, but I doubted it would warn her about the servers. Then again, it had warned her to get out of archaeology six months ahead of me when it’d still been a smart idea.

“I also have some contacts in Japan still who might be able to help. They keep their eyes out for new digs like this—for their clients. I’ll see if anyone has been trying to offload pieces in their networks.”

Speaking of offloading other artifacts . . . I rifled through the folder and pulled out the list of thefts the IAA had attributed to me. If Hermes turned up nothing on Daphne Sylph’s purchases, I’d shoot these by his way too.

I handed it to Nadya. “See if any of your Japanese contacts know anything about these thefts—the ones I didn’t do,” I said, and gathered up the remaining files.

I don’t know whether it was the way she glanced back at her computer screen or how she fidgeted with the stem of her cosmo—both uncharacteristic for Nadya, who was a tyrant of etiquette—but there was something she wasn’t saying.

“Spit it out, Nadya.”

“Why are they sending you?”

I shrugged. “Because I’m their resident thief and they expect bang for their buck?” I’d been running over my meeting with the two of them. The more I thought about it, the less I was convinced Lady Siyu really believed I was the thief. This was just her sick and twisted way to get around the fact that Mr. Kurosawa wouldn’t let her kill me.

Nadya shook her head. “That just proves my point. All they need to do—all you need to do, for that matter—is send those files to the IAA, find out who is in charge of the dig, and forward the tip to them. They could have an agent walk in five minutes later and confiscate her entire collection. That would be the simplest solution to the problem. Why send you?”