Sleight of Hand (32 page)

I shook my head. “I’ve held it off, but it’s advancing now. I might have a couple more months left.”

That got the colonel’s attention. His head jerked up.

Morales looked shocked. He got up and paced behind his desk. The wear of the carpet showed it was something he did often. “Nothing can be done? Colonel?”

The colonel gave a small shake of his head. Morales touched his shirt unconsciously, right over where a small cross on a chain would lie. “I’m sorry,” he said to me.

“Like the falling man, it feels okay so far,” I replied. This was the opening I’d been hoping for. “Captain, do you still trust me?”

Morales frowned. “Sure, I trust you, Farrell. Always have. You’re bug crazy but—”

“But in a couple of months, I’ll be a vampire. Still gonna trust me?”

Morales sat down again and thought that through. “Yes,” he said finally. “And if I can trust you, why would I assume another vampire would necessarily be any different?”

“Thank you, Captain. I went through that to make my point on how I’d like to take this forward—a citizen remains a citizen whether they’re vampire or Were.”

The colonel stirred, but didn’t say anything. He’d been very quiet today, and it was worrying me. For his part, Morales continued to look thoughtful, but didn’t challenge me.

“Okay. First things first, they don’t call themselves vampires. They call themselves Athanate.”

I told them everything Diana had authorized me to say, which was pretty much everything I knew, right down to the tense political situation. As agreed with her, I made no mention of the Athanate Assembly next week, or the complication that Skylur had to be kept out of the loop in dealing with them. I also didn’t tell them I already knew where House Altau was.

“…and so, she’s asking for a meeting with the colonel to lay down a protocol for how this is going to be handled.” There was silence as I finished.

The colonel broke it. “I’m flattered but I’m not senior enough,” he said. “I’m not even in the right area. I’m only involved because of what happened in the unit.”

“She knows that, Colonel. She’s not expecting you to come up with a treaty. She trusts me. I trust you. We have to find someone we can all trust in the administration. Grow the group carefully until we reach the president.”

We all shut up for a while. It wasn’t that we didn’t know where we were aiming for, or that we didn’t realize who had to become involved in negotiating a compact between humans and vampires in America, but saying the name ‘president’ has its own magic.

“And until then?” said the colonel.

“Until then, I’m the go-between. Hopefully I can hold off the problems that new Athanate have. If I think I won’t be able to, I’ll tell you. And I’ll say this at the start: I may not tell you everything I know, but I won’t lie. And I’ll do the same for the Athanate.”

Morales was okay with not being in the meeting as long as he got a briefing. He was less happy about an open commitment not to tell anyone else until we said it was time, but he understood.

I flipped open my laptop and took some possible dates from the colonel to discuss with Diana. He leaned across and pointed them out. His finger passed over a Sunday, with one of my dark jokes—it said NAVY.

“What have the Navy got to do with it?” he asked.

“Nothing. That stands for Not A Vampire Yet. I’ll change it to Not Athanate Yet—NAY.”

He smiled a little. Not that I expected belly laughs from him, but my jokes obviously weren’t as good as they used to be. He continued to stare at the calendar, probably looking a couple of months ahead.

“The scientists are wanting you to come back in for a checkup,” he said.

“They’ve had their chance, Colonel. I’ll never get out if they get their claws into me now.”

He didn’t reply.

“Tell you what,” I said. “I understand you can’t study this thing accurately without a full-time test subject. I can arrange that.”

“How?” he looked at me, frowning.

“Bring one of the scientists here, and I’ll arrange for him to get bitten.”

The pair of them just looked at me. I gave up. I wasn’t going to get a laugh today. Back to business. I pulled the Krantz letter out and put it down on the table.

“This worm has just discussed the case with one of my clients. I think that may be illegal. Thanks for getting him off my case, but he’s interpreting that kinda loosely.” I put the VA letter down beside it. “And for the record, I don’t want these payments.”

The colonel wouldn’t have missed the thought behind that. I couldn’t resign from the army because I wasn’t in it any more. I was doing the next best thing, telling him I didn’t feel he had control over me; I didn’t work for him.

He ignored all that and picked up the letter. “If he spoke to a client of yours I can have him reprimanded and reassigned,” he said.

I shook my head. That would be to descend to Krantz’s level. Anyhow, he’d tried his worst and it hadn’t been much. “He might be onto something with the rest of it. He can’t do anything more to me. Leave him alone.”

We finished up. I wasn’t satisfied with the way the meeting had gone. I had a definite requirement on the meetings with Diana, and I hadn’t gotten a response yet, but the colonel wouldn’t be pinned down until he’d had time to think it through. Morales was trying to help and behave normally, but when he thought I wasn’t looking at him, he was looking at me as if he could see the fangs. I might have more trouble coming on that side.

He walked us down to the lobby and shook both our hands. I couldn’t decide whether he’d let my hand go quicker than normal, or what I should think about it if he had.

There was a moment when the colonel was a few paces away and Morales leaned in and muttered to me. “You’re going to have to explain to Ms. Kingslund that you screwed up with Hoben.”

I just nodded. Of course I would and I wouldn’t blame her if she fired me.

Outside the building, the colonel and I paused in the cold autumn sunshine. I closed my eyes and held my face to the light. Up in the hills, the aspen would be turning. Hillsides would look as if they’d caught fire. I wanted to forget this shit and go walk through the woods, fill my lungs with clean air and my ears with the rustle of wind in the leaves.

The colonel took my arm, bringing me back down with a bump. I don’t think he’d ever touched me before.

“Farrell, I should have said this when you called on Monday. It’s Top.”

My stomach clenched. Master Sergeant Gabriel Luther Wells was a touchstone for me, a reference point that I could turn to whenever I felt lost. If I was unsure, ‘what would Top do?’ was the question I asked myself. But special ops wasn’t a safe posting, and Colonel Laine’s tone was bleak.

Dear God, not Top.

“He’s in Rooks. He hasn’t got long. He asked to see you.”

I stood there, wanting to scream. Rooks wasn’t the combat injuries hospital, it was the veterans’ terminal care hospital, where soldiers lost their last battles against enemies within.
Not Top, anyone but Top.

“How are you getting back?” I said, blinking. My voice was calm. It felt detached from the rest of me.

“I’ve got a ride on a Gulfstream carrying brass in an hour. There’s a seat on that. I can get you a lift to Rooks. I’ll try to swing you a flight back if there’s one tomorrow.”

I nodded, not trusting my voice, and let him guide me to where PFC No-name was waiting in a car. An hour later, we were in the army’s Gulfstream. A couple of generals sat in the big central seats and ignored us.

The colonel worked on his laptop. I stared out the window.

Top was indestructible. There’s no way something like cancer could kill him, would even dare to attack him. I knew that this had to be a trick to get me on the plane. An escort of Ops 4-10 were waiting for us to land and would haul me off to a padded cell where the Obs team could keep me forever.

Chapter 40

There was no group waiting to arrest me on landing. Just a soldier tasked with taking a civilian to Rooks: the army’s impersonal efficiency offered politely to an outsider. I must have said something to the colonel before he went off in the other direction towards the base. I hope I thanked my driver as I got off at Rooks. I must have gotten directions to the room. I can’t remember any of it.

It wasn’t him. There was no way Top would fit into that hospital bed. His huge frame should have been sprawled across it like an over-delivery of ebony timbers, badly stacked. The man in the bed was shrunken, fallen in on himself, seemingly suspended from gray monitors by tubes and wires. He was asleep. The lights were soft, the room was warm but antiseptic.

The first time I’d seen him was the evening I arrived at Ops 4-10, with twenty other raw recruits. We’d gone through nine months of a hellish training course. We’d been whittled down from over two hundred. We were fit, we were tough, we were sharp, we were the best damn recruits in the whole damn country. And we sat rigidly to attention at the back, as the remainder of the room, full of five-year and ten-year veterans from every branch of the services, mingled, swapped unlikely stories and cast a not unkindly eye over us. They were debating what to call the master sergeant who was due in. They voted for Gunny. At the back, we abstained, which gained us some nods for knowing our place. Voting rights needed to be earned in this mess.

The room went quiet when he entered. He wasn’t seven feet tall, but he looked it. He probably couldn’t lift a truck on his own, but no one would have bet against it. He wasn’t the only African-American in the room, but it was as if his skin sucked light out of the air.

Shit, it’s the Dark Lord of the Sith,
I thought.

He stood at the front in parade rest and smiled. To our credit, no one smiled back.

“I understand you’ve just taken a vote,” he said. “That’s nice. We live in a democratic country, the greatest on earth. God bless America.” The floorboards creaked as his weight moved to the balls of his feet.

“You are my unit and you will call me Top,” he said.

“What’re you smiling at, Fire-all?” His words, in a thin imitation of his voice, snapped me out of my happy memory and back to the stark reality.

I quoted his phrase back at him, and told him what I’d thought when he’d come in that evening. He chuckled, a movement of his chest.

“And you’re not allowed to call me Fire-all anymore,” I said.

“Oh, still sensitive?” he said. “Names like that live forever.”

I’d once been put on the spot by him about which weapons to use when entering a hostile building, and had answered with the first thing that came into my head, an apparently immortal phrase—‘fire all of the guns at once.’

I cranked his bed up so he was sitting a bit higher, and puffed his pillows. The how-are-you type of greeting seemed a waste of breath, so I said nothing and sat beside him.

“I’ve been putting my house in order,” he said. “Got to say that’s the advantage of this.” His hand waved at the room and the monitors. “You sure know when your train is coming.”

He took his time looking me over. His eyes were red and tired, but I didn’t fool myself that he would miss anything, any more than he had back in the unit. “Tell me,” he said. “Why did you come?”

“Top, I had to! When the colonel told me about you. And he said you’d asked.” I rubbed my forehead. “I guess with the colonel arranging the transport for me, I must have a dispensation.”

“What are you talking about, a dispensation?” He frowned.

I realized that he must not know. There would be no reason for him to know once I was transferred out of his unit to the Obs unit. “I had to sign an agreement before they let me out. I’m not allowed to contact anyone in 4-10.”

“Who…” the monitors bleeped at him and he relaxed with a visible effort. “Who made you sign this agreement?”

I had to think for a while. “His name was Major Petersen. I guess he was from some legal department.”

A nurse came in, glared at me, and took a look around. “If his signs go like that again, you’ll have to leave,” she said to me, before returning to her station.

Top lay back and I could see him willing the readings back down to their resting levels.

“That’s all bullshit, not being able to speak to us. That’s not legal department crap. That’s someone making a play. I’ll tell Colonel Laine. He’ll clear it up.” He lay silent, while the realization of what had been done sank into me. No one in 4-10 knew about the agreement I’d had to sign. Everyone would have thought I had walked away from them, assumed that I didn’t care, that my life in the unit had been a lie. I felt sick with anger. No wonder I had spent a couple of years thinking the colonel was disappointed in me.

“I’m sorry, Farrell. We all thought you just wanted to cut us off. We—
I
—should have known better. Long before you said something to the colonel and he spoke to me.”

I frowned. What was it I had said that the colonel had queried at the last meeting? It came to me. “I said I would come back in a heartbeat, but things have changed.”

“Such as…”

“I’m a goddamn vampire, Top, near as.”

“And? They’re allowing you to walk around in Denver. You tapping people who don’t need it?”

“No one who didn’t need it.” I sighed. “It’s not 4-10, but it’s a job. I just wish I could see the lines clearly. I wish I could be certain about what’s happening to me.”

“Tell me,” he said immediately. When I hesitated, he went on, “Not as if I’ve got anything else to do. And I promise to take it to the grave.” His chest fluttered with his wheezy laugh.

My head felt overstuffed with things I couldn’t tell people. So many things I had to remember, each one labeled who I could tell it to. Some of those labels were lies, if Top was right. If not Top, then who? I knew I shouldn’t, but I began to speak. As if a dam had broken, as soon as it started, the words just flowed out of me. I went through almost everything that had happened in the case and personally.

We took a break when his dinner came. I texted Tullah, explaining I was visiting a sick friend.