"Thank you," I said as I slipped in past him, because all this politeness was cheering me up and I felt like partic.i.p.ating. I thought about my list of questions and how I"d left them at home beside my bed, but that was all right. I remembered what I wanted to know.

Inside the suite the decor was exactly what you"d expect from accommodations that cost a few thousand dollars a night-understated luxury on a taupe palette with maroon and silver accents. The bed was offset by a pair of folding double doors, and a lovely sitting room ensemble was parked off to the side of a full kitchen. A fruit-filled gift basket sat ignored on the granite counter.

"Could I offer you some wine? You preferred white last night, is that correct?"

"That"s correct, and thanks for the offer, but no. I"ve still got a long night ahead of me." And I didn"t add that I was feeling kind of stupid about coming down to see him in the first place. You"d think I"d learn, eventually-panic attacks pa.s.s. They pa.s.s, and I always feel ridiculous for whatever escape measures I took while attempting to rid myself of them.

"Then I hope you don"t mind if I indulge," he said, retrieving a crystal goblet from a track above the sink.

"By all means."

"And won"t you have a seat?" He waved a lovely hand at the settee, and I gratefully-but gracefully-dropped myself into it. The brocade cover was posh and lumpy. I settled against it while he poured himself a gla.s.s. He took the seat across from me, where I noticed a slim white cane had been left propped against the arm. He must"ve gotten to know his temporary quarters exceedingly well for how easily he navigated them. If I hadn"t known, I would"ve never guessed that he was blind.

He said, "You had some questions for me?"

"I did, yes. I mean, I do do. I"ve gone through the information in the packet. I"m still in the process of tracking down a few of the finer points of this project, but I think it might help if you could tell me a bit about what happened to you-and where you were."

He didn"t exactly frown, and he wasn"t exactly upset with me. But he didn"t want to talk about it, that much was apparent. "As I understand it," he said, "the doc.u.ments are not housed at the place where I was...kept."

"That"s true, or it looks like it"s true. But in case Cal didn"t fill you in on the blocking out, more than half of the info in that paperwork has been declared "sensitive" by the feds, so any sc.r.a.p of fact you can throw my way will be helpful."

Ian took a hard swallow and reached for his cane. He fiddled with the end of it while he spoke. "I was kept on a base in Florida called Jordan Roe, on a small island off the west coast. But the base is no longer operational, or so I am led to believe."

"That letter you included certainly implied as much. Speaking of which, where"s Cal? Is he lurking around here someplace, listening in?"

Translation: Does he sleep in here with you? Just curious Does he sleep in here with you? Just curious.

"Cal is in his room next door." Ah. So that"s why it took him so long to deliver the phone call.

"Sorry, I don"t mean to pry. I"m just-" I was going to say "paranoid" as a plausible excuse, but he cut me off by saying, "Careful."

"Careful, sure. I like that word better."

"You can hardly be blamed. It"s a dangerous line of work you"re in. I suppose it must be very exciting."

I saw what he was trying to do, divert the subject from my line of questioning, but I wouldn"t have it. I said, "Sometimes. Sometimes it"s disgusting, and sometimes it"s boring. But sometimes, yes. Exciting. Now tell me, Ian, if you would please. You weren"t alone on this island, were you? There were other vampires there, according to what you gave me-or at the very least, there were other subjects present."

"There were...other subjects, yes."

I noted his failure to use the word vampires vampires, and I hoped he"d take another drink or two to loosen himself up, or we"d never get anywhere.

I was about to ask in a more pointed fashion when he sensed my impatience and added, "I can"t tell you anything about them. I couldn"t see them. One of them was a vampire, yes, but the other two-I"m not sure. And there were new additions by the time I escaped-one more vampire, but I didn"t recognize anyone else"s scents. They could"ve been anything, or something altogether outside my experience."

"Ooh," I said, not for being impressed, but for being distressed. "Wow. The implications of that. Huh." If the military knew about vampires, and it knew about a few of the other less conventional brands of humanity, too, then what was the big plot? They obviously weren"t trying to recruit us, which was sort of a shame. I imagined a full unit of vampire soldiers and I got a little giddy, and distracted.

Bad idea, maybe. But it"d be epic, wouldn"t it?

"Yes, the implications. They"re quite alarming, if you ask me."

"But I am am asking you, Ian. I"m asking you to tell me what you know, and what you learned about the project, and how you left it. I"m sorry if you feel like I"m prying, but I think it"s important that I know how you escaped." asking you, Ian. I"m asking you to tell me what you know, and what you learned about the project, and how you left it. I"m sorry if you feel like I"m prying, but I think it"s important that I know how you escaped."

"I can"t imagine what that has to do with anything," he said, but I could tell I"d worn him down. His words said "No, and go away." But his tone said, "If it"ll get you off my back, fine. fine."

He sighed and folded his hands in his lap, though he twisted them together as the story began to unspool.

"It was summer and quite warm, I remember that much. And I could smell the ocean, but then again I always could. The island was scarcely three miles long and a mile wide; regardless of how deeply they kept us underground and isolated, the smell of salt and seabirds always wafted down. They opened doors, they closed doors. The breeze came and went, even in the filtered air down below. After a while it was something I lived for, small and sad as that may sound. I lived to hear the slide of the gla.s.s and the peep of the electronic lock, because when the doors opened, I could smell the night outside.

"In time, I could tell when the tide was high or low, just by the scent. I cannot explain how, not in a thousand years. But that awareness awareness, for lack of a better way of putting it...that awareness was the first sign that something was changing."

"In the laboratory?" I asked, not sure where he was headed with this.

"No. In me me. And I"m sorry, but I can"t be more precise. I can"t give words to something like this. I can only describe what happened, I can"t tell you how how it happened. And what happened was that, at first, I could sense the tides outside-just by the smell of the air the workers brought downstairs with them when the shifts changed." it happened. And what happened was that, at first, I could sense the tides outside-just by the smell of the air the workers brought downstairs with them when the shifts changed."

"All right, I"m trying to follow you."

"Good." He nodded. "So first I knew about the tides changing, and before long I could tell things about the weather, too. I could smell rain, and dampness. I knew when it was storming, and when it was about to storm. Write it off to barometric pressure if you like, but I could feel the air above and the water outside, working together, pushing against each other. Let me ask you something, Ms. Pendle."

"Go for it," I urged. I seriously had no clue where he was going with this, but I was willing to grasp at whatever straws he offered.

"When you were still alive," he broached, "did you ever have migraines?"

"Migraines? I don"t know. I had headaches sometimes, sure. It"s been a long time."

"I"m not speaking of ordinary headaches. Migraines are different, from a neurological standpoint, or so I have been told. I had them, and I sought treatment for them for years before I was turned. And I can only compare my new forms of awareness to the sensation of having a migraine. There was pressure across my forehead, and a light, tingling feeling at the base of my skull, where it meets my neck. I saw lights, too-bright swirls that dipped and rolled across my right eye"s field of vision. These things, these sensations. My knowledge of the weather and the water...it came from the same place."

"So...having a built-in meteorologist is kind of like a really bad headache?"

He appeared to struggle with his words-wanting at first to argue, then changing his mind. "It is not altogether different. But it"s as if the pull goes both ways. I..." He untucked his hands from each other and used them to gesture again, drawing the words in the air in front of him-trying to force this odd communication. "I could feel the ocean and the clouds pulling at me. And one day, it occurred to me that I might be able to pull...back."

I frowned without meaning to. "Are you trying to tell me you can control the weather?"

He unleashed a nervous laugh and said, "No, no. Nothing like that. Not anything as huge as the weather...but perhaps something that drives the weather. Pressure changes, electromagnetic fields, the earth"s rotation, the persistent motion of gravity...I don"t know. Something, though. Something large called to me, and I called in return."

Pausing then, he reached out for the gla.s.s of wine he"d nearly forgotten. He tapped it gently with the back of his knuckles to locate it. Another swallow or two, and he was ready to continue talking.

"I experimented at first, and in the process I wondered if I hadn"t completely gone crazy. But I used my mind to pull it, to nudge it. To push it around. And in the beginning, I couldn"t tell if it was working or not. It was a process, you understand-learning my way around this new thing. We were so far underground, after all-"

"Wait," I interrupted. "You said "we." How many people were down there by the time you left?"

"Oh, let me see." He narrowed his eyes from some long-ago habit of thoughtfulness and then, after a few seconds, said, "Not many. Of the half dozen or so cells...only mine and two others remained occupied. One was a young man, another vampire who sounded like he might"ve been from Texas. The other was something else, a were...wolf or something else. She was female, at any rate. I could smell that much. And she never made a sound."

"But there"d been others, like us, in the cells before?"

"Several. They came and went. But something was changing down there; people were packing up equipment and moving it out, and moving in larger pieces. The personnel shifted. Two men left, and were replaced by a different man and a woman. The routine of the place had been disrupted, and it worried me-for all that I sometimes thought I had nothing left to worry about anymore. After all, it seemed like the worst had happened, hadn"t it? How much worse could it get? But I didn"t want to find out."

I sat back in the chair, both chilled and intrigued. "Can"t say as I blame you. So you started playing with this new...power? Whatever it was?"

"You could call it a power, I suppose, though I don"t think it was new. Nothing they did to me produced this. I think it was in my head all the time, perhaps as a result of the faulty wiring that made me p.r.o.ne to headaches. Or maybe it"s similar to the mortal phenomenon, where people who lose one sense gain sensitivity in the others. There"s no way of knowing now. Privately," he confessed, lowering his voice and holding tight to the winegla.s.s, "I think it might be a combination of the two. My strangely functioning brain, struggling to compensate for the loss of my sight...that"s how I like to think of it, anyway."

I understood. It was another mortal phenomenon, after all-the desire to understand something by retroactively a.s.signing it a myth. I told him, "Sure. But you still haven"t told me exactly how you escaped. You"re avoiding that part."

"Am I?" He sounded surprised. "I don"t mean to. It"s just that what I"ve told you so far is so difficult to discuss. The rest can be summed up quickly, if you like."

"Tell it however you want," I said. I liked to hear him talk, and now that I knew I could drag the whole story out of him, I didn"t mean to rush him.

"Hm. Well, as I said, I tried out this power in small ways at first, trying to find a rhythm for it. Imagine, if you will, pushing a merry-go-round. At first it"s difficult; it"s heavy, and slow. But soon you find the weight of it, and you learn how to keep it moving-and then all it takes is the occasional shove to keep it going at full tilt. That"s what this was like. At first, I was trying to move something huge and impossibly heavy, trying to make it spin."

"Spin?"

"Yes. I wanted the world to turn, or at least the Gulf of Mexico."

"So you...made a hurricane?" a hurricane?"

"No." He stopped me quickly with a wave of his free hand. "Nothing like that. More like a tornado, yet nothing like a tornado at all. Believe me, I was as shocked as you are."

"How do you know how shocked I am? You can"t see see me." me."

"No, but I can imagine the look on your face," he said with a smile. "My initial attempts yielded no definitive results, but then I was making the windows rattle, and shaking the doors, and I could hear the fencing outside uprooting itself." He sat forward on the edge of his seat now, closing the s.p.a.ce between us. "They didn"t know it was me. Even if I"d told them it was me, they wouldn"t have believed it. But one night I heard them coming. I heard the doors opening and smelled the tide, and I couldn"t bear the thought of them even one more hour. I called down the vortex-if I must call it anything, then that word will suffice-and the building..." He shook his hands, almost spilling a little of the wine. "It came apart."

"That"s it? It came apart?"

He shrugged. "Blew apart. Exploded apart. I felt my way out of the rubble, and I went blindly into the woods where I hid for several nights, feeding on whatever I found or could coax into my hands."

"Then what?" I asked.

"Then..." More hand-waving. "I was found by the captain of a shrimp trawler who had ventured close to the island. I persuaded him to a.s.sist me. He took me off the island and over to St. Petersburg, where I threw myself upon the mercy of the Broad House."

I couldn"t believe he"d taken the chance. "Seriously? And they didn"t kill you on the spot?"

"No. They"re ostracists," he said, which meant that the House members were the equivalent of anarchists. They didn"t play nice with other Houses, and they tended to take in the freaks, geeks, and weirdos-the undead dregs. Few ostracist Houses (if they can loosely be called such) are very powerful, and they live on the fringes like the Hollywood stereotype of Gypsies.

"Still. b.a.l.l.sy move, mister."

"Thank you. Eh...Ms. Pendle, is your phone ringing?"

"What?" I didn"t hear it until he said it. "Oh. Well, it"s buzzing at me." But I"d missed the call, and had to wait until the little blip told me I had a message. I pried it out of my purse and checked the number. It looked familiar but I didn"t recognize it outright. I sighed and said, "I"m sorry, I don"t mean to be rude, but so few people have this number that I need to check it as a matter of professional duty."

"There"s nothing rude about it. You"re here on business, and more business has come calling." I thought it sounded even more rude when he put it that way, but I didn"t argue with him. He downed the last of his wine and rose, going in search of a refill.

I flipped the phone open and realized that my caller hadn"t left a voice-mail message, but rather had sent a follow-up text. It said, "Call BH ASAP re: HP and JR." The sign-off was a callback number unrelated to the text"s origin.

I unpacked the message to read, "Call Bad Hatter as soon as possible about the Holtzer Point and Jordan Roe information." But I"d never actually spoken to Duncan in person before, and the prospect weirded me out. We"d exchanged emails, and a couple of text messages here and there, but never when it wasn"t of the utmost importance.

I cursed the other thief"s sense of timing, and when Ian returned to his seat with a fresh gla.s.s of wine, I said, "I"m awfully sorry. I mean, I"m even more sorry now than I was before, because I think I have to call this guy. It"s about your case, if that makes any difference."

"My case? It makes all the difference in the world. Make yourself at home in the bedroom, there, if you"d like a bit of privacy." I liked the sound of that-even though I knew I was only being dirty-minded and that anyway, he could probably hear every word without even trying. But I accepted his offer and closed myself behind the double doors, into a large s.p.a.ce dominated by a frothily overstuffed king-sized bed. I dialed the number that was included at the end of the text message, and it was answered on the first ring by a man who sounded too old to be in this business.

"Cheshire," he said.

"Yes," I admitted. "And before you go all strange about it, I"m a woman."

"I know."

"You know?"

"I guessed. But that might not hide you."

"What are you talking about?" I demanded.

"We have problems."

I said, "We have problems?" have problems?"

"That PDF I sent you was flagged."

"Wait. What? You sent me a PDF?"

He said, "I didn"t know until after I sent it. There are..." I could almost hear the gears in his head turning, tumbling, trying to think of the easiest way to explain it to me. I"m tech-savvy for an old lady, but I don"t know all the ins and outs of the Web. He went on, speaking very fast. "Uncle Sam"s keeping a lookout for keywords related to the info you wanted, presumably because it was a cla.s.sified program-a very very cla.s.sified program. When the keywords are tripped-like when I nab a file that"s loaded with them-a quiet little note goes back to an administrator someplace, and then the tracing begins. I"m a lucky f.u.c.ker; I know what to look for. Otherwise I would"ve never seen it coming. I figured it out in time to move, and now I"m telling you, because it"s my fault the thing"s been sent your way." cla.s.sified program. When the keywords are tripped-like when I nab a file that"s loaded with them-a quiet little note goes back to an administrator someplace, and then the tracing begins. I"m a lucky f.u.c.ker; I know what to look for. Otherwise I would"ve never seen it coming. I figured it out in time to move, and now I"m telling you, because it"s my fault the thing"s been sent your way."

"Sent my way...," I repeated, only barely following what he was telling me.

"Yeah, like a hot potato. Someone"s going to follow it, you can bet on that. They"re already all over my IP and breathing down my network"s neck. I"m sure you"ve got your a.s.s covered in all the usual ways, but this is not a usual situation. I don"t know how they found me so fast, but Jesus, they found me fast. fast."

"Found you-are you all right?"

"I got out in time. I may be old, but I"m not slow," he said, reinforcing my impression that he sounded like someone"s grandfather. "Are you at home?" he asked. "That place of yours on Seventeenth Street in Seattle?"

"What? No. Why do you know that address?" I demanded.

"Same reason you probably know mine. Insurance."

d.a.m.n him, he was right. I"d dug up a general location on him years ago. "Fine. But no, I"m not home."

"Good. And if you want to play it one hundred percent safe, don"t go go home. I had to leave without destroying everything I wanted destroyed, including some personal info on some of my fellow freelancers-I"m telling you, kid, they were on me like home. I had to leave without destroying everything I wanted destroyed, including some personal info on some of my fellow freelancers-I"m telling you, kid, they were on me like lightning lightning. I can"t promise they won"t come after you, too. Don"t check anything, just check the f.u.c.k out. You"ve got safe places. Pick one and camp there for a few weeks, lie low, and keep an eye on what happens." It wasn"t a question. You didn"t get to our tier in the game without a backup plan.

"Yeah, I do," I said, and the panic was coming back, right up into my throat. I chewed it back down and said, "Thanks for the warning."

"You understand though, don"t you? This wasn"t deliberate. I wasn"t trying to junk you." And now we were at the crux of the matter. His call wasn"t just a guilty heads-up; it was a double check that I wasn"t planning to rat him out as a traitor to the industry, via network gossip.

"I get it," I said. I tried to make it cool, but I was shaking inside. "Duncan, what do I do?"

"Anyplace where you access those files from the Internet is a potential ground zero. If you think you can get them fast enough from some remote location, have them printed out and mailed to you, that"s your best bet. Carry them far away and as fast as you can. And destroy your phone. Don"t throw it away, destroy it destroy it. I had your number listed in some of the stuff those a.s.sholes seized."

"Uh, okay. Okay. And I guess we"d both better run."

"d.a.m.n right. I"ve got some more phone calls to make."

"More warnings to hand out?"