Secondhand Sorcery

Over the years, Keisha had spent a lot more time in Washington, D.C. than she cared to. Her first visit, way back in the Nineties on a school field trip, had been impressive; as an adult, trying to navigate the mad crosshatch of streets under the ever-rising towers of government buildings, the experience had lost most of its charm.

With every visit the city got taller, darker, and more crowded, with endless mobs of people trying to justify jamming themselves in under Stillwater’s protective aura. Even now, with the system spreading out for tens of miles in every direction, and construction booming on as fast as the onerous approval and permit process allowed, and smaller projects starting up in fifteen other metro areas, D.C. was the single most expensive city on the planet.

A crummy townhouse in Anacostia would set you back about a million dollars. Even a studio apartment was dear. Same story for hotel rooms, cab fees, Metro tickets, and fast food. It wasn’t even a ‘city’ anymore, so much as a cluster of federal departments, military contractors, corporate headquarters, and (where space allowed) mildly cramped apartment complexes catering to people who weren’t quite as wealthy as they were paranoid. The army of service people who kept it all running commuted in from the suburbs every day, and left the masters of the world to sleep through the evening in peace and safety.

And squatting in the center of it all, in an extravagantly wasteful swath of plain green grass, were the old museums, the Supreme Court, the Capitol, and off to one side, the White House, a pretty little doll’s house brushing against the knees of the fifty-story tower on the other side of the street. It took a lot of the mystique and grandeur away from an official visit.

She made her way through the Metro without too much trouble, arriving at the checkpoint at 1027. They showed her in to the Red Room, where Dr. Gus was already waiting, sipping coffee from official presidential china.

“Miss Sarah Lawrence,” he said, saluting her gravely with his teacup. “Or is it something else now?”

“Yeah, but I can’t even remember what. It doesn’t matter. You know what all this is about?” He looked perfectly comfortable—but then, this couldn’t be his first invitation to the White House.

“Oh, it could be many things,” he said, with aggravating good humor. “The world is a busy place. Do try to relax. It will be some time before you see this place again, so you might as well enjoy it.”

She looked around. The Red Room was, as the name suggested, very red, with tasteful matching furniture. One wall was dominated by a huge painting of Jack Kennedy shaking hands with Ho Chi Minh. It looked familiar; she leaned in and saw Norman Rockwell’s signature in the lower right corner. The Treaty of Thanh Hóa was inscribed at the bottom of the frame. Old Norman had made “Uncle Ho” look pretty good, considering the circumstances. Just being magnanimous, she was sure; that genial, silver-haired grandpa had probably died of shame well before the painting was finished.

The door opened again, and Colonel David Hampton limped in on his cane, followed by General Tyler Green. For once, Hamp looked pretty chipper; you couldn’t say the same for Green, who might have aged five years since she first met him a couple months ago, in the hospital room in Thessaloniki. “The President will be with us shortly,” was all he said before sitting down in an armchair, well away from Dr. Gus.

Hamp, on the other hand, hobbled over to meet her with a big smile on his face. “Been a while, stranger,” he muttered. “Hanging in there?”

“As well as I can. You?”

“Giving the rehab people hell. But I’m finally getting results. Might get to ditch the cane, in a little bit.”

“Really? That’s great!”

“Yeah. And I was just starting to get bored with paid leave, so … hey, it all works out. You reckon we’re chasing The Little Rascals again?”

“I don’t know. But I also don’t know why else he’d want the three of us here.”

“I’ve got a better question, then: do you want to go back to that?”

She peeked out of the drapes, to see if she could catch a glimpse of the Rose Garden. Not really. “I don’t know. I’m not going to say I haven’t worried about them. But then … you know. The way we left.”

“Yeah.” He joined her at the window. “I wasn’t the one to notify Major Honoré’s family, but I did go to see them. They’re doing well.”

“I probably should have done that myself.” It hadn’t even occurred to her, and she wouldn’t have had the heart to do it if it had. She’d been spending a lot of time moping. “He had a family? I’m jealous.”

“Parents, two siblings, a couple of nephews and nieces, six or seven cousins, assorted dogs and cats, and one old uncle. All very proud of their boy, even though only … oh, half of them knew what he could do.”

“Half, huh?” She made herself smile. “He never did have any respect for security.”

“Well, the dogs didn’t know. That’s something.” They all turned to look as the door from the hall opened and two more men in uniform came in. One was a fresh-faced blond kid who looked too young to be there, the other was a grizzle-haired black man closer to Hamp’s age, and Keisha didn’t recognize either. Both immediately introduced themselves to General Green. “I wonder how many more we’re expecting? This room’s not that big.”

The door opened again, and a third stranger appeared, a thirtysomething Asian woman in Numenate dress greys with dark glasses on. A staffer helped her over to the couch beside Dr. Gus; she winced as she sat down, holding her head. “Maybe it’s not about the kids after all,” Keisha said. “Or not all about them, anyway.”

A minute later more staff came in with trays of sandwiches and coffee. The younger officer was wandering around the room inspecting the artwork, while Green and the old guy talked and Dr. Gus tried to comfort the ailing woman. Keisha got a sandwich and a drink, then hung back by the window with Hamp, talking about anything but the Marshalls or Ethan. Apparently, while they were busy chasing Yuri across Anatolia, the Steelers had beat the Bears in the Super Bowl. Falcons hadn’t even made the playoffs.

The blond kid overheard them, made his way over, and was starting to talk some smack about the Jets (like anybody gave a damn about the Jets!) when Arthur Daniel Dawes came in from the State Dining Room, accompanied by none other than Senator Katherine Arnold. The latter gave Keisha a little wave as she, along with every military man in the room, came to attention. The woman in glasses tried, only to fall back on the couch, shaking.

“At ease,” said the President. His Jersey accent wasn’t quite as bad as she remembered it being, but still pretty thick. “I apologize for my tardiness as your host—but, in my defense, I did just move in.” Polite chuckles. “Hm. I usually get more than that. Guess it’s time to retire that joke. Thank you all for coming in on short notice.”

He went on to do the introductions, which Keisha felt free to pay little attention to; one of the few perks of being an emissor was that you weren’t expected to get to know people too well. She’d be addressing all these people by rank, if she said anything at all. He introduced her as ‘Lieutenant Monique Jackson,’ which she was pretty sure was what it said on her current ID. Everybody had to realize it was a pseudonym anyway.

Art Dawes clapped his hands. “So. To business. Jake?”

The grey-haired general stood up. “Good morning, ladies and gentleman. As you may or may not have heard—hopefully not—Moscow appears to have a new and disconcerting weapon, capable of disabling clairvoyants at range. At least, that’s our working assumption. So far, all we know is that an unknown paraphysical phenomenon manifested in Kuban Oblast, just east of the Crimean Peninsula, around 1300 local time yesterday. Roughly thirty hours ago.

“We don’t know what it was, but it lasted less than an hour, and as long as it was active it had a crippling effect on clairvoyants. The severity depended on distance; sensitive parties within the Oblast—ours or theirs, it seems—suffered prolonged grand mal seizures. At least one allied agent died as a result, and possibly some Russians as well. Clairvoyants in adjacent regions were likewise disabled, but seizures were intermittent or localized to specific parts of the body. We’re getting scattered reports of hallucinations as well.

“Those more than three hundred kilometers from the apparent epicenter, such as Captain Park“—he nodded to the miserable woman on the couch—“did not lose consciousness, but did suffer severe, debilitating migraine headaches. At four to five hundred kilometers, the headaches were milder and more temporary. Beyond five hundred kilometers, symptoms were extremely mild and ceased within minutes of the phenomenon’s termination.”

Dr. Gus raised his hand. “Pardon me. Were all of these individuals in active trance at the time?”

“They were not,” said the general. “Mental state does not seem to have made a significant difference to the consequences. Captain Park?”

The woman sat up a little, with obvious effort. “I was sleeping at the time, sir. Off-rotation, after an eight-hour overnight shift. I don’t recall sensing anything in particular in my sleep before it woke me. I could tell what direction it was coming from—that was obvious. But it wasn’t anything like a halo. Much more violent, less controlled.”

“And no effect on emissors or VRIL specialists, that we’ve heard of,” put in General Green. “If it’s a weapon, it only works against clairvoyants. But that’s bad enough.” Hamp raised his hand. “Yes, Colonel?”

“Did I hear you say it hit their eyes too, sir?”

“You did,” said the other general. Keisha was pretty sure he was the JCOS Chairman, Green’s boss. “We’re running under the assumption that this was a kind of field test, and they didn’t expect a result of this magnitude, or that something went wrong. Alternatively, it could be an accident, or an unsanctioned firing. Or they might just be that desperate. Circumstances in the region are not favorable to the Moscow regime at present, to put it mildly.”

“They just lost a second boss in the region, didn’t they?”

“Yes, Mr. President. Two oprichniki in as many days. From what we can tell, Ardent will recover soon, but the Lamprey might be out of commission for good.”

“Damn good work,” said the President. “Which brings us to you, Colonel Hampton—do you have any news for us?”

Hamp shook his head. “We haven’t had any contact with the Marshall children in some time. They’ve discarded their phones. As far as they’re concerned, they’ve broken contact for good. Independent agents.”

“That might not be true,” said the blond guy. “Brussels says they have somebody on the ground who’s made contact with them in the past several days.”

“Made contact?” said Keisha. “How? When? Are they doing all right?”

“I’ve asked, ma’am,” he said, “but they’re not being forthcoming. They don’t know much more to report, apparently. Their intelligence network in Krasnodar went down with the Lamprey, and they’re not having much luck getting useful information out. All four are alive, one’s injured, and they have at least one EU operative babysitting. That’s what they’ve got.”

Thank God. But a lasting injury? Either Nadia was being stubborn again, or …

“We might not be their highest priority, right now,” Kitty Arnold put in. “And I can’t blame them. General Parris, where’s the Ghost, last you heard?”

“As of this morning, somewhere around Hanover,” the older general said. “It’s not moving in a straight line, it’s not slowing down, and they’re having no luck catching it.”

President Dawes cleared his throat. “Could someone explain to me how that works? How is it dodging the whole country’s surveillance network?”

Dr. Gus answered for Parris. “As I understand it, detecting the Ghost itself is not the problem, Mr. President. Every emissant yields evidence of two things, which a sufficiently skilled clairvoyant can detect and distinguish: itself and the center of its Tetzloff Field. From these two it is a relatively simple matter to deduce the location of the emissor. The technique is not much more complicated than drawing and extending a straight line. But, in the case of the Ghost of Leipzig, the two points seem to overlap perfectly.”

Dawes frowned. “Meaning what?”

“Difficult to say, but there are only so many possibilities. I can think of three. One is that the Ghost is capable of hiding or shielding its own emissor within its body. This would seem to be precluded by all established precedent; an emissant should not be able to exert any paraphysical effect on its emissor. Another possibility is that its abilities include a knack for deceiving surveillance. This is less unlikely, but still doubtful to my way of thinking.”

“So, what’s the third?” asked Parris.

“The most absurd of all: there is no emissor to find, because the Ghost is a unique example of a self-sustaining emissant. I have no notion how this would work, but it would make the creature astonishingly difficult to destroy.”

“And nobody has even seen this thing?” demanded the President.

“Nobody who survived,” said Parris.

“You’ll pardon me for saying that all this strikes me as a little improbable,” said Kitty Arnold. “The Ghost, however it works, is one totally new kind of Russian weapon. Whatever happened in Kuban, if it’s a weapon, would be another. Do they really have that kind of research advantage, that they could develop two such devastating new tools simultaneously, while we don’t even know the theory behind either? And if they do, why are they only unveiling them now, when we’ve been at open war for a year?”

All eyes turned to Dr. Gus. “I am far from convinced that the Kuban phenomenon is a weapon,” he said. “But it is true that the new Russian regime moves aggressively, even recklessly in some respects, to acquire new emissors. They have pursued certain avenues of research we neglected for very good reasons—primeval or subnarrative emissants being the most famous such example. It is possible that they have had a breakthrough by such dubious means. That would be one explanation for the Ghost.”

“It’s also possible,” General Green said, “that they’re only breaking out their shiniest new toys because they’re desperate. We’ve put them in a very uncomfortable position lately, and the Knyazya don’t want to lose face. They might have had both weapons in development for some time, and decided to deploy them in spite of inadequate testing, in an unfinished state. That would explain why the Kuban weapon is so indiscriminate, wouldn’t it?”

“If it is a weapon,” Dr. Gus allowed.

“It would be a sensible weapon for them to develop,” said General Parris. “Russia relies almost exclusively on emissors, since the Revolution. No VRIL at all. They do have clairvoyants, but they don’t use or train them to the same extent we do, for political reasons. They depend on their oprichniki to keep the peace across their empire, and there’s a limited number of people they’re willing to trust with the ability to watch the watchmen. If they have a means of disrupting surveillance in a broad area, for a sustained period of time … well, imagine if they’d had that in Texas. Or if they used it here. It’d cripple Stillwater, easy.”

“Shit,” said President Dawes. “You all realize why I’m a little concerned here, don’t you? That you’re telling me Ivan might have found two game-changing weapons within a week?”

“If it would have been useful in Texas,” said Dr. Gus, “it seems to me very curious that they did not choose to employ it in Texas, less than twenty-four hours earlier. The Marshall children, as we know, seem to be waging a private war in southwestern Russia. To detonate a sort of ectenic bomb on that scale, thereby blinding whatever clairvoyant assets they do possess in the area, seems to me a very stupid decision.”

“Which is why we assume it was an error or miscalculation,” General Green retorted. “They might have believed it would cripple the Marshall children as well. And offensive operations in enemy territory would be a very bad place to test an unproven weapon. If nothing else, it could have fallen into our hands—”

“All right, that’s enough,” said the President. “Whatever you say, it looks to me like Moscow’s got the winning hand right now.”

“I do not agree,” replied Dr. Gus. “The events of the past week speak to the strength of the American system, and the weakness of the Russian.”

“It’s true that they’ve taken a lot of damage,” said General Parris. “But that was almost entirely because of the Marshalls, over whom we exert no control, acting with a degree of aggression we would never countenance in our own operatives. And it bought us the largest reprisal to the homeland in more than a decade. We can hardly take credit for that.”

“Precisely,” said Dr. Gus. “Children. They are taking terrible loss from undirected children. Why? Because they use only half of the available tools, because they rely on coercion, because they are too afraid of insurrection to deploy a proper defensive network. The attack in Texas was rapidly foiled by the local Minuteman network—a vast array of lightly trained volunteers, an offshoot of the National Guard, not even properly military. Such a thing could never exist in Russia; they would not have the courage to trust their citizens with such power. No less an authority than Niccolò Machiavelli himself said that a prince’s best defense against his enemies is not to be hated.”

“That’s an interesting point, Doctor,” said the President, “but I didn’t call you all here to discuss political philosophy, or overhauling our whole … strategic doctrine, or whatever you want to call it. Our country is faced with a series of crises, one after the other, in a short period of time.

“I’m reasonably pleased with our response in Corpus Christi; they can’t afford to take those kinds of losses for that kind of result, no matter how fast they train them. Did we bag the third one yet?”

“No, sir,” said Green. “The third emissor has likely left Mexico by now.”

“Can’t have everything. But that’s the past. Problem one: we’re getting the credit, or the blame, for underage rogue actors, over whom we have no influence. We need to either control the actors or clear our name, and I don’t know which is easier or better.” He looked at Hamp, who nodded.

“Problem two: whatever the hell just happened in Kuban. Now, I’ve never served a day in the military, and I’m willing to yield to your expertise, but it doesn’t sound to me like we even know what that thing was, and it seems to have bit Ivan pretty hard on the ass. This, to me, seems more like something we look into real close, not a reason to go straight to shitting our pants in a panic. Any argument there?”

Parris pursed his lips. “Sir. I’m not comfortable allowing anything with that kind of disruptive potential—“

“You’re not? Fine. What do you propose we do about it, right here, right now? What are our options? You’re the soldier, you tell me.”

“We’re already shifting deployment patterns to cover blind spots. Beyond that, there’s not much else we can do, unless and until it happens again.”

“Agreed! Moving on, problem three: our Ghost of Leipzig. Attacks on the homeland are serious business—but we took some scalps there, and public confidence is recovering. We’ve got the Alamo spirit now, and I don’t think they’ll try it again in a hurry. Also, not to sound like a heartless prick, but isolationism just went right out of style. Very convenient, seeing as we couldn’t walk away from this fight if we wanted to.

“But as for letting the bastards run wild through the heart of the EU? I kind of like having NATO be a thing. How about you guys? NATO, it’s a good thing to have around, am I right? Western Europe, not a heap of rubble? Yes?”

“I would agree, sir, that the Ghost is the single most urgent threat we face,” said General Parris.

“Very good. We’ve already sent what we can spare, in terms of clairvoyant muscle. Europe’s drowning in that kind of talent anyway. They’ve got more eyeballs than we do. But if you don’t mind, Doctor, I’d also like to send you over, to see what you can tell us about the situation. I want a top-notch theoretical mind on the problem.”

“I am honored by your confidence. Very well, sir.”

“Good. Lieutenant Jackson, you’re his escort. You and Colonel Hampton. Keep him out of trouble.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You know why, don’t you?”

“It’s a dangerous area, Mr. President.”

“No, I mean why I’m sending you specifically.”

“Then no, sir, I don’t. I assumed I was here to help with the Marshalls.”

“Not really. You’re here because you’re my fourth problem.”

“… sir?”

“Nothing personal, and I understand why it happened, but the Belvedere question hasn’t really gone away, has it? It’s not up there on the surface anymore, it’s not on the front page, but it’s one more thing to worry about. It’s a problem. Well, I started in this business working for Lou Farley, in Trenton. He always said, ‘never solve one problem at a time.’ You can’t afford to; the problems just come too fast, you’ll get buried alive. If you’ve got a chance to tag two at once, you take it. This is my chance. I want that man in Europe, I want him safe, and I want to be able to tell the public that, whatever the Ghost of Leipzig turns out to be, I’ve got our super-scary unaccountable secret weapon on the other side of the ocean, hunting it down to turn it into fuckin’ ashes and smoke, on my orders. Are we clear on that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got other matters to attend to, and you’ve got a plane to catch. Thank you all for coming. Let’s get to work.”