License to Ensorcell Read online

  And one detail that struck me as oddly humorous—his actual name: Ariel. Yes, I know about Ariel Sharon, who had more in common with fire and brimstone than magical spirits, but my education had pounded Shakespeare into my brain. No wonder, I thought, Nathan went by Ari.

  I logged off and shut down. When I came out of trance, I heard a slice of cold pizza calling to me from the refrigerator, a lot louder than all the healthy salad stuff I’d bought at the grocery store. After I ate, I considered turning on the TV, but my mind kept revolving around the problem of Ari Nathan. Tell him I was his handler—sure, easy enough to tell him, but would he listen? The way he’d run out for his “something personal” appointment without even giving me a full briefing made me doubt it. And where was he, anyway? Probably with some unfortunate woman, I figured, and good luck to her!

  Eventually, of course, curiosity got the better of me. Hey, it’s one of my job qualifications. I took out the pad of paper and box of crayons that I keep at home.

  The LDRS gave me three drawings, all of them less scribbly than usual. The first two puzzled me. I wondered if I were looking at a crime scene, because pale white bodies lay on the ground behind barbed wire. They all wore white clothing, as shapeless as pajamas. What had Nathan done, gone off the deep end and shot a lot of people? The third drawing showed two standing figures: a flesh and blood elderly man wearing a heavy gray sweater, black pants, and a yarmulke. He was looking at a white ghost—no, at a plaster sculpture.

  All of a sudden I realized what I was seeing: the Holocaust memorial out at the Legion of Honor art museum. I caught a glimpse of Nathan himself, also wearing a yarmulke, standing and staring at those symbols of remembered murder lying on the ground. I broke the trance. I was ashamed of myself, spying on him at such a moment, but the shame didn’t last, because the sense of danger came with the glimpse.

  I had a hard time breathing for a moment, just because of the danger-sense, or the Semi-Automatic Warning Mechanism. Outside the sunlight had faded. The purple neon sign on the Persian restaurant across the street lit up and began to blink. I drew the curtains and switched on both of the lamps in the living room, turned on the one in the bathroom, too, just because. Was he really an Israeli agent, I wondered, or was that a pretense? Was he working with Johnson instead of tracking him down, a double agent, a traitor? I decided to try to find out.

  At my kitchen table I did a tarot spread, something the Agency doesn’t have a name for, but it’s always worked for me, provided I use the old Marseilles deck and do a full layout. I took my pack out of its silk-lined sandalwood box. The scent from the wood soothed me and put me in the right mind for a reading. As I shuffled the cards, I focused on the sense of danger Nathan brought with him. Some guys smell of sweat; this guy smelled of danger.

  When I began turning them over, I expected to see a good many swords and maybe even the Death card or the Broken Tower. Instead, a spread heavy on cups lay in front of me, with the ace prominently displayed beside the Sun. In the middle, covering my significator, sat the Knight of Cups himself. The Empress leered at him from several cards away. The danger Nathan represented appeared obvious.

  “No,” I said aloud. “Not for all the cold cash in the world am I going to fall in love with this guy, or with any guy, but especially not this guy. And that’s that.”

  It had taken me years to reconcile myself to my talents and find some kind of mental equilibrium. Having the family I do didn’t make it any easier. Falling in love with a difficult guy would take more energy than I could spare. I gathered up the cards and shoved them back into their box, slapped down the lid, and wrapped the entire thing up in a scarf to block the vibrations.

  I wandered back into the living room and flopped down on the couch. I was going to watch the nightly news—in my business you have to be a news junkie, no matter what the source—but what did I see onscreen but another lousy angel. It waved, then morphed into the face of the usual anchor, babbling about the state budget.

  Joseph and the coat of many colors. Lean years, then fat years? Sold into slavery in Egypt? I grabbed the remote and flipped channels until I found some ancient Looney Tunes, a fitting end to the day.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE NEWLY CREATED Mr. Morrison strolled into the office around ten in the morning. Nathan had upgraded his suit to a navy blue pinstripe, a little too broad in the lapels, set off by a yellow and red silk tie, giving him just the right air of a small businessman trying to look like a big businessman.

  “Good morning,” I said brightly. “Sir.”

  He stopped in front of my desk, shoved his hands in his jacket pockets, and scowled at me. “I heard from your State Department this morning,” he said.

  “Good. Then you know I’m your handler.”

  “I know that they told me you were. There’s a difference. Listen, I don’t want interference.”

  “Then you don’t want my help. You can call me your liaison if that makes you feel better.”

  He snarled on past and slammed into the inner office. I let him brood while I called Aunt Eileen. I reached her answering machine, left a message about lunch, and hung up just as Nathan slammed out again. He’d taken off his suit jacket and the gun harness.

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “Come into my office, and I’ll finish briefing you.”

  I left the door between our offices open so I could hear the phone if Aunt Eileen returned my call, then followed him in. The gun lay on his desk in plain sight.

  “Can’t you put that thing away?” I said.

  He scowled, but he did shove the gun into a desk drawer.

  “This fellow, William Johnson,” he began, “we know him as an American who came to Israel to buy land for a Christian kibbutz.”

  “Christian? Does your government let Christians buy land?”

  “Why not? They’re a lot less obnoxious than the black hats.”

  “The who?”

  “Sorry. The haredi, the ultraorthodox. The ones who don’t want the streetcars to run on the Sabbath and think everyone should keep kosher and the like. The men all wear black hats. Hence the name, though it’s old-fashioned. Most people at home just call them ‘the blacks’ now, but that name won’t do here in America.”

  “No, it sure won’t.” I assumed then that life in the spiritual practices kibbutz had formed his opinion, but later I found out that a lot of Israelis felt as he did. “So Johnson had a legit reason to be there.”

  “No, as it turned out. The group he claimed to belong to doesn’t exist. We didn’t find that out until too late. The government doesn’t investigate every tourist who comes through. By all accounts he seemed like an ordinary sort of pilgrim, except he had a lot of money to flash around. We get them all the time, tour buses full of Americans babbling about Bethlehem and the footsteps of Jesus.”

  “Yeah, I know the type.” Most of my relatives, I thought.

  “So,” Nathan continued. “As far as the police can tell, he was using the land buy to give him an excuse to look for someone or something beyond the usual tourist routes. He may have found it—a young woman who worked for an estate agent who turned up dead two days after meeting him.”

  “May have?”

  “There was a lot of muddled evidence pointing to Johnson, but no motive and nothing that would have stood up in a court of law. Still, the police kept an eye on him as he moved on. The next victim was a member of the American consul’s staff. The secretary told me that Johnson came in to ask about handling the police. He knew they suspected him for the murder of Miriam Greenbaum.”

  “Miriam was the realtor?”

  Nathan looked briefly puzzled. “You mean the murdered estate agent. Yes, she was.”

  “That name’s familiar, but damned if I can remember why.”

  “Well, try, will you?” His voice echoed sneers. “She was a recent immigrant, if that helps.”

  The man had a genius for driving thoughts out of people’s heads. Who can remember names they heard on
ce, maybe, when they’re furious?

  “Anyway,” Nathan continued, “during his interview with the consular officer, the receptionist heard them arguing, though she couldn’t understand what they were saying. The officer only told her that Johnson was an idiot with too much money who should go to the police and tell them what he knew. Two days later the officer was found dead in his apartment.”

  “I was told there were odd circumstances around that murder, the sort of thing my agency specializes in.”

  “Oh, yes. Both victims were killed with silver bullets. That’s what linked them.”

  “Were both bodies found naked?”

  “Yes.”

  “And both happened around the time of the full moon?”

  “How did you know that?”

  “This gets us somewhere, Nathan. Both of these victims must have been werewolves.”

  He winced. “That’s absurd.”

  “No,” I said, “it’s logical.”

  “Logical? You know, if you start with an absurd premise, you can be as logical as you like and still reach an absurd conclusion.”

  “Oh, all right! It appears, it may be, it could be, that Johnson thought these people were werewolves. Is that better?”

  “Yes, actually. Thank you.” An adolescent sarcasm poisoned every word.

  “Listen, Nathan,” I said. “Neither of us likes this arrangement. But you don’t have the psychic skills to track this guy down, and I don’t have the brawn to bring him in once I do.” I braced myself for an explosion. “So we have to work together. Can we try to do it pleasantly?”

  The explosion never came. He spent a minute or two looking at me. He lowered his hands and sat up straighter in his chair. When he spoke, his voice sounded level. “Quite so. We’re both stuck with each other, I suppose, as you Americans say.”

  “Yeah, we are.”

  All at once he grinned, a warm smile, boyish and seductive both. “Very few people stand up to me,” he said. “You do it quite well.”

  “Yeah? Good. Get used to it.”

  I had no more attention to waste on him at the moment. I needed to get control of my own rage. My brother Patrick had been shot and killed with an ordinary bullet, which had left his corpse in wolf form. The family never could go to the police, never get justice for his murder. This Johnson had at least done the honorable thing— all at once the hair rose on the back of my neck. Could Johnson have been the killer?

  “What’s wrong?” Nathan said.

  “Just evil thoughts. Johnson’s running around loose in my hometown. I’m wondering what brought him here.”

  “So am I. He’s quite obviously deranged if he thinks innocent people are werewolves, which means one of two things. Either he’s a psychotic serial killer, or the two victims weren’t the innocents they seem. I tend to the latter, because he fled Israel to Syria. There’s also a semi-reliable report placing him in northeastern Iran.”

  “Only semi-reliable?”

  “Yes.” He paused, considering me. “You can’t blindly trust any information from that part of the world, the Hindu Kush, that is. Even, at times, if you’ve gathered it yourself.”

  Something lurked behind this reasonable statement. I marked it in my mind.

  “At any rate,” Nathan continued, “it was impossible to trace him beyond that until he reappeared in San Francisco.”

  “Your people think there might be an Al Qaeda connection?”

  “That’s the reason I’m here and not an ordinary Interpol officer.”

  I could guess that his background in that peculiar excuse for a kibbutz had something to do with the assignment, but I couldn’t blame him for not wanting to dwell on that.

  “If he’s Al Qaeda,” I said, “what was he doing in Shia Iran?”

  “A very good question. I asked it myself, but my superior couldn’t answer it. He told me that finding out was my job.”

  “Your superior sounds like mine. You have my sympathy.”

  Again that boyish grin, and his eyes looked less Byzantine, suddenly, and a lot warmer. I suppressed an urge to call him by his first name.

  “I can give you the dossier on the murders,” Nathan said eventually. “It’s not terribly detailed, I’m afraid, but—” He stopped and held up his hand for silence.

  I heard the footsteps, too. Someone was in the corridor outside our office. Since the other suites stood empty, whoever it was concerned us. Nathan got up, slid the drawer open, and picked up his gun, all smoothly, utterly silently. In a few long strides he crossed into the outer office. I slipped off my noisy high heels and followed. Pebbled green glass filled the window in the door that led into the corridor. I could see the silhouette of a person standing just outside and hear the noise of the handle turning, clicking against the lock.

  “Nola? Are you in there?”

  “Aunt Eileen!” I called out. “Just a minute. The lock’s stuck.”

  Nathan trotted back into his office while I pretended to fiddle with the door. I finally opened it with a flourish.

  “You must have gotten my call,” I said.

  “I did, dear, and thank you.” Eileen came bustling in, swinging a brown paper shopping bag. “I have a cell phone now, and Brian showed me how to get messages by relay or remotely or whatever they call that. I was downtown at the big Goodwill store over on Eleventh.” She held up the shopping bag. “And so I thought I’d just stop by since it’s almost lunchtime. I hope your boss doesn’t mind.” She spoke the word boss with invisible quotes around it, playing along with the cover story.

  In the doorway between the two rooms, Nathan stood frozen, staring at her. She was wearing one of her usual outfits, a white blouse complete with a peter pan collar, and a red felt circle skirt with a fuzzy appliqué of a poodle near the hem. She’d cinched in both with a wide black belt, the kind shaped in back to hug your waist.

  “Well, young man,” she said, “do you mind?”

  “Not at all,” he said. “Take a little extra time if you’d like, Nola.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Morrison. This is my aunt, Eileen Houlihan.”

  Nathan nodded to acknowledge the introduction. Aunt Eileen glanced at my bare feet. “Where are your shoes, darling?”

  “In my office, I should think.” Nathan struggled to suppress a grin but failed. “I’ll just get them for you.” He hurried back into his inner sanctum.

  “Nola!” Aunt Eileen hissed. “Honestly!”

  Lunch came with an extra helping of Aunt Eileen’s religious views on womanly behavior. Like her clothes, they date to the 1950s.

  “He is awfully good-looking,” she said, “but honestly! I hope you weren’t sitting in his lap.”

  “Say what?” I said. “This pair of shoes hurts, and I’d just slipped them off for a minute when you arrived.”

  She glared at me over her coffee cup.

  “Really,” I went on. “Nothing’s going on. I hardly know the man.”

  “That’s my point. You shouldn’t be necking with someone you hardly know.”

  “I wasn’t doing anything like that at all.”

  “And if you wore stockings, your shoes wouldn’t hurt.”

  “That reminds me,” I said, “what did you get at the Goodwill?”

  “A perfectly lovely baby blue twin set. It must have been lying in storage for years. But don’t you try to distract me. I sincerely hope your Mr. Morrison isn’t a Protestant.”

  “No, he’s certainly not! And he’s not mine. He’s just my boss.” I lowered my voice. “A coworker, really.”

  She gave me the stare that her daughter, Clarice, calls the “gimlet eye.” “Well, you should keep your shoes on in his office. What if he’s a foot fetishist?”

  I blinked several times. “You know,” I said at last, “that idea never occurred to me.”

  “That’s why girls have aunts. To warn them about the possibilities.”

  At that point, fortunately, she allowed me to change the subject.

  Once I’d
caught up on all the family gossip, I returned to my office. I found Nathan standing at one side of the window and looking out at an angle.

  “See anything interesting?” I said.

  “No. Just checking the lines of sight.” He turned back into the room. “We need to move your desk. A sniper on that motorway overpass with the right sort of rifle could take your head off.”

  “I’d call that very interesting.” For more reasons than one—why wasn’t I more afraid of this possible assassin? Although I suspected that he’d left town, I couldn’t depend on a suspicion, especially since he might come back at any time.

  I shut down the computer and began clearing the clutter off the desk. Once we had the furniture rearranged, I left for the day, but work followed me. In the lobby of the office building, tiled in dirty green, what light there was came from a pair of bulbs in a dust-clogged overhead fixture. In late spring and summer, glare from the street did seep through the glass doors. In winter, only the streetlights outside got through and produced interesting shadows.

  When I stepped out of the elevator I saw movement in one of the shadowed corners. I took a few steps closer to investigate and heard a hiss, more like a cat than a snake. The creature I saw, however, looked reptilian—scaly blue skin, wedge-shaped head—as it rose onto its hind legs like a meerkat. It stood perhaps two feet tall and had shiny yellow claws that looked like they could give its prey a good rip and tear. About this apparition I had no doubts at all. I shifted my bag to my left hand and with the right sketched out a Chaos ward. The creature popped like a balloon. A shriveled skin fell to the floor, then disappeared.

  The forces of Chaos had found my office and sent one of their spies, constructs modeled on some creature from one of the nastier places in the universe. I could see two possibilities: the Chaos masters wanted to kill me specifically, or they merely knew that an agent of Harmony had appeared in their territory and wanted to kill whomever it was. I disliked both options and got the hell out into the open air.