Death Magic wotl-8 Page 5

  She started to speak, then shook her head—not denying his assumption, but refusing to comment on it.

  “Now think about the fact that you are a single agent. One who has proved a nexus for the enemy’s attempts, perhaps, but only one.”

  “You’re saying she’s made more attempts than the ones I know about.”

  “Oh, yes. Think about it. There are one hundred seventy-nine full Unit agents, forty-one groups or individuals we contract with for their special skills, six hundred and five agents in the Magical Crimes Division, and just under fourteen thousand regular FBI agents. Did you think you were the only one who has had to deal with potentially explosive situations involving unusual magic or beings? Situations that could not be resolved through traditional law enforcement methods?”

  “I haven’t heard of any cases where our people were coloring outside the lines.”

  “Neither has the news media, fortunately.” He paused. “Increasingly, I’ve seen a choice before me. If the enforcement of the law remains my chief duty and highest priority, I will have to accept a high rate of casualties—both in Unit agents and in the civilian population. If protecting the people of this nation is my greatest priority, I will be forced to allow and tacitly encourage more and more extralegal activities on the part of Unit agents.”

  “Every officer of the law faces that decision,” Lily said.

  “Would it be easier if we didn’t have to read some murdering asshole his rights? Sure. Would that protect some of his future victims? Probably. That doesn’t make it right. There’s a reason cops don’t get to be the prosecutors and judges of the perps we arrest.”

  He nodded. “You’re right, of course. And yet for the last several months I’ve had an increasingly strong feeling that there needed to be an organization that was separate from the legal institutions. I began thinking about how such an organization might be established, how it would function, what kind of personnel it would need, how they would communicate, how it could be kept secret. I didn’t envision myself running such an organization, but as helping establish it, then cooperating with and sometimes assisting it covertly.”

  Slowly Lily nodded. This wasn’t as bad as she’d thought. Ruben had no business organizing such a group while he was head of the Unit, but at least he planned to step aside once it was established. She could keep her mouth shut about that. “If you want my word I won’t speak of this—”

  “Not yet. I may not have planned to run the Shadow Unit, but three things happened to change my mind. First, Robert Friar was given an immensely powerful Gift by the enemy. Second, I began receiving calls from the Rhos of every lupi clan in the world.”

  “Those calls—” She broke off and looked at Rule. One of those calls had been from him. The clans had been told by their Lady they were to ally with Ruben—with him personally, not with the U.S. government.

  Rule wore his blank face, the one that gave her nothing back. She hated his blank face. Was he shocked? Pleased? Determined not to influence her? Determined to hide his reaction from Ruben? Whatever the hell that might be. She couldn’t tell, and he wasn’t speaking. Lily faced Ruben again. “I know about the calls.”

  He nodded. “Originally I thought the clans would provide much of the manpower for the Shadow Unit, and therefore a lupus should lead it.”

  That made sense, actually. Lupi weren’t exactly invested in the human legal structure. They were invested—hearts, minds, lives, clans, everything—in stopping her. Helping such an organization covertly . . . yeah, she could see that. Could even see herself doing just that. But for Ruben to go from there to establishing himself as the leader of a covert organization that operated outside the law while using agents and other resources of the Bureau . . . no. No and no and no. “You changed your mind.”

  “I consulted with the Rhos. With others, as well.” He nodded at Fagin. “I had information you lack—a deficit I will partly make up tonight—but what the Rhos told me played a part. Their Lady’s instruction was that they ally themselves with me. There was no compulsion that I offer alliance in return, but I needed to understand what it meant if I did so. Also, they provided a good deal of information about our common enemy. I realized that to go up against an Old One—even one unable to act directly in our realm—required assets and information only the government possesses.”

  “You consulted with the Rhos.” Slowly she looked at Rule. “All of them?”

  Rule spoke. “He consulted with me, yes.”

  “You’ve known about this—this Shadow Unit. For maybe a month, you’ve known. And didn’t tell me. You made sure I didn’t know.”

  “Because we knew you would react precisely as you have—with anger, a sense of betrayal, and the burning desire to arrest people.”

  Something was burning, all right. Her eyes were part of that heat. She couldn’t look at him right now. She could not. She didn’t want to look at Ruben, either, so she stared at her lap, fighting to get control.

  “Lily,” Fagin said gently, “consider the possibility that you’re wrong. You know us. Me only slightly, I suppose, but you know Ruben fairly well. You certainly know Rule. Would they take this step if they weren’t convinced it was absolutely necessary?”

  Her hands clenched. He was too old to punch, but God, she wanted to hit someone. “Consider the possibility,” she said through gritted teeth, “that a group of people who operate outside the law is going to abuse that. They won’t mean to. They’ll tell themselves they’re only doing what they have to do, but that’s just another version of the ends justifying the means. Sooner or later—especially when the stakes are so high—they’ll be hurting people to protect themselves, because if they get exposed, why, that’s going to strengthen the enemy, isn’t it?”

  Now she looked up, right into Ruben’s eyes. “Power without accountability corrupts. Every damn time.”

  He looked tired. “Do you think I haven’t considered this? Law enforcement in this country is designed to operate openly. We hold power over people’s lives. That power must be tempered by accountability. By establishing a shadow organization, I eliminate that accountability, making abuse more likely. It’s my hope that there won’t be time for corruption to set in.”

  “If you think you can stop her in a month or two—”

  “A month or two. Interesting that you chose that interval. Without the Shadow Unit, the United States has approximately two months left before it collapses.”

  He stopped there. Rule didn’t speak. Neither did Fagin. Lily sat motionless, her mind skittering away from his words while her stomach clutched up tight, as if it could tie a knot in the silence, hold on to it, so she didn’t have to hear . . .

  It didn’t work. She had to ask. “All right. All right. Tell me.” “The third thing that happened to change my mind was a series of visions.”

  Ruben’s Gift meant he had the best hunches ever. He knew, without knowing why, that he needed to take a certain action, or avoid an action. He’d proved his accuracy time after time. But he didn’t normally see the future. She knew of one occasion when he had, though. When a three- or four-thousand-year-old being who could not die was about to manifest herself and her power fully on Earth, dragging California and God only knew how much of the nation into chaos and nightmare.

  Because of those visions, he’d been willing to hold back, to trust Lily, even when she couldn’t tell him anything. Because he trusted her and his own hunches, in the end he’d exerted his authority in the only way that would help.

  Now he wanted her to trust him—and his visions.

  “Without the Shadow Unit,” Ruben said quietly, “in approximately two months, perhaps one-third of the Gifted in the country will be dead. The Unit will be gone, its people dead or imprisoned or in hiding. The president and possibly the vice president will be dead. The nation will be in a panic, with mobs killing anyone suspected of magic. Some Gifted will strike back, killing large numbers of civilians and police alike. In one scenario, the surviving lu
pi retreat to Canada. In another, they pull back to their clanhomes, but after the military coup—”

  “The what!?”

  “I’ve seen five detailed scenarios. One of them results in an enormous physical cataclysm on the West Coast, the nature of which is unclear. Four of them end in a military coup a few months from now. It supplants civilian government in the West, Midwest, and Central U.S., and succeeds in restoring order at the cost of martial law and the end of elective government. The South descends into anarchy. Canada and Britain send troops to support the remaining fragment of U.S. government in the Northeast, but the world economy is in shambles due to the collapse of the United States. The dominant power that emerges in the new world order is the military dictatorship that arises from the coup, which is run by religious zealots who—some wittingly, some not—are her agents.”

  Lily’s hands were cold. She wanted to disbelieve him. He was so certain, so damnably certain . . . “You said that’s without your Shadow Unit. With it? What happens then?”

  “We have a decent chance of averting the incidents that precipitate the crisis.”

  “What . . .” Lily’s mouth was too dry. She had to pause and summon enough spit to speak. “What incidents?”

  He shook his head.

  He didn’t know? No—if that were true, he would have said so. He meant that he wasn’t going to tell her.

  Fagin spoke, his voice dreamy. “We know what Gift Friar received from the enemy.”

  Dazed, Lily looked at the older man. Belatedly her mind caught up with what he’d said. Robert Friar had been imbued with some sort of Gift by the Old One he worshipped—the one Ruben referred to as their enemy. The one lupi often called the Great Bitch because it was dangerous to speak any of her names. Lily and Rule had been present for part of the ritual that invested Friar with his new power, but unable to stop it . . . Rule because he was in a cage. Lily because of all those elves trying to kill her. Soon after that, the node used to power the ritual turned unstable, bringing down half the mountain, burying Lily’s SIG Sauer and presumably Robert Friar as well.

  Lily had never believed that. “How could you know that?”

  Fagin just smiled. “Patterning. Friar is a new and incredibly powerful patterner. Ruben discovered this soon after Friar supposedly died.”

  She looked at her boss. She’d placed her life on the line based on his hunches more than once. But to take his word—unsubstantiated, unsupported—for everything . . . he could be wrong. He was good, but he could still be wrong. “How do you know? Another hunch?”

  “My knowledge is subjective, but not a hunch. Lily, you know that normally my Gift grants me knowledge of events in the near or very near future. More distant events are too fluid for a sense of them to emerge.”

  “But you’ve seen some pretty damn specific events this time. Events that are more than a month away.”

  He nodded. “That’s what raised my suspicions. My visions started after the node collapsed.”

  “I don’t see why—”

  “If you’ll stop asking, you’ll get your answer faster. I have to explain a bit about how my Gift works. I seldom receive hunches, much less visions, about events more than a few days in the future. Even a week away, the future is usually too fluid for me to pick up much.”

  He’d spoken of this before. “Too many decision points, you told me once. Too many possibilities, choices, and people are involved in determining events, and the more distant a possible event is, the more these multiply, until it’s all static.”

  He nodded. “Yet suddenly I was having explicit visions about events that were, at that point, three months distant, and some of them six months or more. I could only find one explanation for this abrupt explicitness. The future had been artificially constrained. I realized that an extremely strong patterner was manipulating events, forcing a single channel through which events flowed. Once I understood this, I consulted Sherry. You know that her coven observes node action throughout the nation through a simulacra map.”

  Lily did know that, even if she was fuzzy on what a “simulacra map” might be. She nodded.

  “We’d hoped she could reconstruct what was done through the node used to imbue Friar with his Gift. So far she hasn’t been able to. In the process, however, she discovered that virtually every node in the nation is being drawn upon by what appears to be a single, albeit untraceable, source.”

  “Every node? But that’s not possible. That’s . . . don’t practitioners have to be in physical proximity to—”

  “So we’ve always believed. But it would take a great deal of power for a single patterner to influence events across the entire country.”

  Fagin spoke up suddenly. “They call it the Gift of the gods, you know. Patterning is the most subtle and dangerous of Gifts. I think you encountered a patterner once.”

  Lily shot Ruben a hard glance. Apparently he’d been sharing a lot with Fagin, some of it highly classified. “I’ve run across a couple of them, actually.”

  “Oh?” Fagin’s bushy brows shot up. “The one I was thinking of was named Jiri. You had some difficulty overcoming her.”

  “I didn’t overcome her,” Lily said dryly. “I managed to stay alive. She didn’t, but that’s because she only cared about one thing. And she got that.” Her daughter’s life. Jiri had not been a good guy by any means, but she’d given her life so her daughter would live. The child had been adopted by the Leidolf Lu Nuncio.

  Fagin steepled his hands on his belly. “You have some understanding of the Gift, then. Patterners are rare, for which we can thank the good God. When the Gift does appear, it’s almost always in the weak form. A weak patterner senses event patterns unconsciously. He may learn how to control his Gift so that his effect on events is less haphazard, but he doesn’t sense the patterns directly. A strong patterner does. A strong and experienced patterner can manipulate those patterns in subtle ways to bring about what he or she wants.”

  “I thought all patterners did that.”

  “They all affect events, though the weak ones affect them only slightly and often unpredictably. A strong but inexperienced patterner . . . I descend into theory now,” he said apologetically. “Strong patterners are so rare we have no hard data on how their Gift operates, but there is anecdotal and historical evidence. A strong but untrained or inexperienced patterner will generally be adept in one application of his Gift, but not others. Napoleon is a good example.”

  She blinked. “He is?”

  “Certainly. He’s often lauded as a military genius, but his real genius—and the way he used his Gift most effectively—lay in the social interplay of politics. He was eventually defeated on the battlefield, after all, but never politically. Had he taken the time to become more adept at patterning before plunging his nation into war, he might never have been defeated at all. I suspect Jiri was both a strong patterner and fairly experienced. She was not, however, a fraction as powerful as Friar now is.”

  That was so not good news.

  Fagin smiled gently. “Patterning is called the Gift of the gods because we believe—and by ‘we’ I mean fusty old academics like me—that some of those who once were worshipped as gods were real beings, adept-level patterners of great power. They were able to influence such a multiplicity of events simultaneously that no single unraveling of their weaving could defeat them. Friar has power an adept would envy. He does not yet have the experience to wield it in a godlike way. That’s one advantage for us. The other—”

  “The Shadow Unit,” she said wearily. “You’re going to tell me it’s needed to catch Friar.”

  “No, I’m going to tell you that Ruben is needed to run that Unit. There are two Gifts that can confound a patterner. One is ours. Sensitives can’t be affected by the patterner’s manipulations, which makes us the large rock in their artificial stream.”

  Rule spoke for the first time since admitting he’d deceived her. “As are lupi, at least as far as Friar is concerned.”

 
; Fagin nodded agreeably. “So you stipulate. Your fiancé,” he added to Lily, “says that lupi are immune to her magic. Since we believe Friar’s Gift comes from her, they would likewise be barriers to his patterning. You and I and the lupi form, ah . . . call us dead spots in his manipulations. He can mobilize events that affect us, but it takes more power because his magic can’t touch us. But there’s only one Gift that can truly act against a strong patterner. Precognition.”

  Lily frowned. “Because that’s like patterning? A precog is sensing patterns, I guess, when he gets a hunch.” Or sees visions of the Apocalypse.

  Ruben shifted slightly in his chair. “I don’t think so.”

  “No?”

  “Fagin and I have discussed this.” A smile flickered over Ruben’s thin face. “At length. He would prefer to believe that my Gift picks up patterns from the future, much as a patterner senses patterns in the present. My input is subjective, of course, but it doesn’t feel that way to me. I’ve discussed this with that young woman you sent me for training.”

  “Anna Sjorensen.” The other patterner Lily had met.

  “Yes. Her Gift is quite weak, so she doesn’t sense patterns directly. This means her experience of her Gift should correspond to what I experience with my hunches if I’m also receiving patterns. Based on our conversation, this doesn’t seem to be the case.”

  Fagin snorted. “Which could mean that the future’s patterns are experienced differently than those from the present. Or that you’re two different people and your minds interpret things differently.”

  Ruben’s smile returned. “It could. But patterns are a space-time construct. I have a strong feeling that the information my Gift provides is not so bounded—that it comes from elsewhere and elsewhen, a state for which words are unsuited because it lies beyond space-time.”