Broken Ice (Immortal Operative Book 1) Read online

  Sticking close to the wall, I hurry back on foot and make my way to the third floor of the other apartment building. As quiet as I can be, I slip out of the stairwell and count six apartments down from the end, then listen at the door.

  A woman whispers, assuring someone that they’ll be okay. Another voice sniffles. Along with the clatter of handcuffs, a child complains that they’re tired of being tied to the bed.

  Wait. What? Shit. This could be bad.

  The door has a physical lock, so I use my auto-pick. It’s about the size of a pack of gum with a thin metal rod sticking out one end. After inserting it into the keyhole, I squeeze the tool’s only button. The mechanism extends into the lock, feels around for a few seconds, then turns, freeing the door. I ease it open, slipping the amazing little gadget back into its pocket on my bodysuit.

  The air inside blasts me with the overpowering aroma of stagnation: sweat, mucous, ripe armpits…

  Beige carpet covers a living room so neat it appears to be a demonstration model rather than a place anyone actually lives in. A man in a tank top and grey pants hovers over a camera mounted to a tripod near the window. I’ve no doubt he’s a night walker given his pallid complexion and scent. He’s also giving off a mild air of feralness that suggests he hasn’t been consuming enough blood—kind of like an overexerted cop on an extended stakeout. Not the blood part; I mean not eating enough.

  Staring at the back of the guy’s head, I nudge the door open the rest of the way and creep into the apartment. I’m not sure how he didn’t hear these damn hinges squeak. Admittedly, a human wouldn’t have, but I’m sure this guy isn’t one. A few steps later, faint, tinny music breaks the silence, coming from the guy’s direction. Aha! He’s wearing headphones with the volume way down, probably to drown out the people he’s holding captive; in fact, probably the residents of the apartment he’s ‘borrowed.’

  Halfway across the living room, I glance left down a short corridor to an open door. A blonde girl in her later teens, sitting up on the bed, sees me. The instant her eyes pop open, I give her a suggestion to stay calm. She’s wearing an oversized T-shirt that she probably went to bed in the night this guy invaded their home. Her right wrist is handcuffed to the bed frame above her shoulder. Someone else I can’t see from this angle clatters a chain—a child based on the diminutive grunts of exertion—trying to get loose.

  I focus on the teen’s thoughts, projecting my voice into her head. I’m here to help. Give me a sec to deal with this idiot.

  Her look of surprise softens to one of pleading.

  The night walker by the camera emits an annoyed sigh. I shift my attention back to him and take three steps closer.

  “Bloody… how the feck much longer are they gonna want this place watched?”

  “Not long,” I say, loud enough to pierce through his headphones.

  He jumps.

  Before he can turn, I grab him from behind and fling him to the ground, landing on top of him with a knee at his throat. He gurgles, fangs bared. Ugh. Dude hasn’t showered in weeks. The whump of us hitting the floor sets off hopeful gasps from the people in the bedroom.

  The man starts to throw me off, since I don’t weigh much compared to a vampire’s strength, but freezes once I penetrate his mental defenses. Sure enough, the Dominion sent him here to observe Jake. This guy thinks of him with his real name—not Andreas… So, yeah, my theory is probably accurate. Whatever vixen Jake hooked up with had been working for the Dominion and mined his brain for all she could.

  Kinda like what I do to this guy.

  Time to dive deep. Hmm. Ooh. That’s interesting. They’ve got an ‘operations center’ in Berlin. In his thoughts, I see a nice black marble office building. He crosses the lobby to an elevator, types ‘7532159’ on the code panel, and the elevator goes down three levels underground. Perfect. I repeat the number a few times to commit it to memory, using an old agency phonetic number trick. Yeah, I might need to pay this place a visit.

  He doesn’t know what’s on the memory stick or why the Dominion had interest in Jake specifically, only that they wanted his apartment watched to see who came to clean up. He’s been in this place for a month, holding the family hostage in the back bedroom. Two adults, older teen girl, boy about ten, and one cop who came to check on the family when the parents stopped going to work.

  Normally, I’d consider surveilling an asset simply business as usual and be polite about it. Maybe throw him off the roof of a high-rise building or something tame like that. Keeping a family with two kids prisoner for a month? Yeah. That’s over the line… and it isn’t like Origin vampires or human authorities would lose much sleep over the destruction of one night walker.

  He senses my intent to end him, and slips free from my mental hold in a burst of desperation. I should’ve expected that. Both vampire types have a strong ability to feel threats. He throws me straight up with enough force that my back hits the ceiling, then springs upright and dashes out from under me as I drop down to my feet. Evidently, he’s lost all interest in fighting, and dives headlong out the window he’d opened for the camera.

  I grab my Beretta, but have a ‘screw it’ moment. Meh. Not worth the effort. If he’d murdered the family, I’d have gone after him. For many night walkers, having a ‘true’ vampire ready to kill them is pure nightmare fuel. That guy’s probably going to run for hours. Maybe even lose sleep for a while wondering if I’m looking for him.

  Anyway…since he’s no longer a factor, I head down the hall to the master bedroom. With a full view of the bed, I now see the parents are handcuffed together—his left hand to her right—in the center of the king-sized bed through the headboard slats. A boy around nine on the other side keeps trying to squirm his hand out of the cuff. The daughter is still sitting in the same position I first saw her in. The female police officer on the floor at the foot of the bed stares catatonically into nowhere. Everyone except for the little boy looks pale and borderline anemic. A few drops of blood on his pajama shirt tell me the guy fed from him too, but apparently tried to be careful about taking too much. At least, I’m guessing since the kid doesn’t look or smell dangerously low on blood.

  “You’re one of them, aren’t you?” asks the daughter in German.

  “Yes and no.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” The father shifts defensively in front of his wife, arm twisted awkwardly.

  “Do you want the long or the short explanation?” I crouch and pluck handcuff keys from the cop’s belt, then toss them to the dad.

  “Short enough to make sense.” He unlocks the wife, then moves to free the boy, cuffs still dangling from his wrist.

  “The one who held you hostage is basically an enemy agent,” I say. “I work for the other side.”

  “Why did he do this to us?” asks the woman... the wife and mother, I assume.

  “He was lazy and careless. Wanted to use your window to conduct surveillance on one of our people. The person in question won’t be returning to the location being watched, so the bad guys have no reason to come back here. Give me a moment to undo whatever he did to this officer’s head.”

  The family rushes out of the bedroom and proceeds to have a bit of a nervous breakdown in the living room. I lean down to stare into the officer’s eyes and remove the other vampire’s compulsion to lie on the floor, motionless.

  She sits up and gives me a weird look like she’s not quite sure if she should be grateful or terrified. “What’s going on here?”

  “Something over your pay grade, I’m afraid.” I flash my quasi-legit State Department ID.

  She looks at it. “You are American? That is impressive. You speak German so well I didn’t realize you’re a foreigner.”

  “Thanks.”

  “So what is all this?” she asks. “What’s going on here?”

  “Hostile parties have begun employing vampires for espionage work. What happened here isn’t too different from your being caught up in a spitball contest between i
ntelligence agencies, only with fangs.”

  “Spies don’t usually hold people hostage for a month.”

  “No, they usually just shoot them in the head. Believe it or not, the family is lucky. You are lucky, too.”

  She pales. “All right, you have a point there. So… what am I supposed to do now?”

  “Fill out reports. Isn’t that what cops do?” I grin. “Unless you’d rather not remember it, but then how would you explain disappearing for a month to your superiors?”

  “That’s unsettling.” She stands and dusts herself off. And yeah, she smells like she’s been wearing the same uniform for weeks. “I’ll need to take down your information.”

  “Knock yourself out.” I let her copy the State Department ID number. I jerk a thumb back toward the living room. “But the camera needs to come with me.”

  When she balks, I give her a prompt to accept my terms.

  Meanwhile, I spend a little while answering the family’s questions. They decline the offer of a memory wipe as the vampire who stole their apartment hadn’t been overly rough with them. Honestly, I don’t know why he didn’t merely fill them with the urge to go somewhere else. Having to babysit five captives is way more work than going out to a nearby park to feed. Maybe he had orders not to leave the apartment and figured he’d eat in, as they say. Anyway, he’d taken too much from the cop, the parents, and the daughter, not quite enough to kill them… but I do make sure they know they need to go to the hospital. The boy’s not in danger, but only creeps—or the truly desperate—feed from kids. Given the night walker’s reaction to me, he most likely got his orders from another Origin vampire and had been terrified of messing up, hence going out of his way not to ever leave this apartment lest he miss something.

  Once they’re off on an ambulance—the German word for it, krankenwagen, makes me laugh every time I see it— and the place is swarming with cops, I drop the camera in the trunk of my borrowed car and jog over to Jake’s former apartment.

  An open five-story atrium connects the sidewalk out front to a courtyard inside the C-shaped building. I take the stairs on the left to the third, and head down the hall to his place. Again, I make use of my magic lockpick. It’s not actually magic, pure technology, but it damn sure feels like it. While I have been trained to pick locks the old fashioned way, this thing takes two seconds.

  The place already looks tossed. Dominion probably showed up here looking for the fob. Not sure why they’d expect to find it here if he’d supposedly gone to the park to hand it off to me. I wander about, searching the usual places, and discover eight bugs—electronic listening devices—planted around the apartment. Between knowing where to look and psychic intuition, I’m fairly sure I found them all. Not that it’s terribly important. Jake won’t be living here anymore. If the Dominion wants to listen in on some random civilian who gets this place a month or so from now, it’s their resources to waste.

  For no reason other than simple thoroughness, I rummage the closets, cabinets in the kitchen, look under the couch, under the mattress, behind all the curtains. In the bedroom, I spot the photo he’d asked me to get. It’s been tossed on the floor by whoever searched the place before me. It’s an eight-by-ten shot of a maybe thirteen-year-old Jake with the fake parents, younger sister, and older brother, all in pajamas and Santa hats. Whoever tweaked the image did a better job on this one than the wallet-size one he carries. If I didn’t know the Klein family to be a fabrication, I’d think this a real picture.

  It’s a bit weird for him to have developed an attachment to a cover story, but I suppose it makes sense given his upbringing. Still, the photo clearly came from a tech at Langley and he would’ve been able to get another one if he wanted it that bad. Why would he ask me to go all the way back to Munich to get a picture he could’ve had someone print out again?

  That doesn’t make sense.

  I examine the frame, turning it over a few times. Seeing nothing unusual, I decide to pop the thing open and take the picture out. As I do so, I notice a strip of masking tape on the inside of the backing that feels oddly significant—so I pick at it until it peels away, revealing a small hollow with a micro-SD card.

  Bingo.

  Clever, Jake.

  Might as well still bring him the picture. I pocket the memory card, button the frame back up, and—convinced there’s nothing else here of any use—head back to my car.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Target of Opportunity

  The next day, I’m sitting in a lab at the US Embassy in Berlin watching the nerd squad bang their heads against a wall.

  Metaphorically that is.

  Desks covered in computer equipment, wires, tools, and circuitry fill most of the usable floor space. Two guys and a woman from Berlin, as well as a woman and a man who flew in yesterday from Langley, struggle to make sense of Jake’s diagrams. The micro-SD card from the picture contained his notes regarding how he’d managed to reverse engineer the schematics of the pinouts on the 1024-bit ‘alien’ technology.

  The memory card also contained some fragmented files he managed to download from the unidentified memory unit, which appear to be geolocation coordinates to a glacial ice field in northern Siberia. The instant Nakamura—the woman from Langley—mentioned that, I got a chill. I assume that means my ass is going to wind up in Siberia at some point in the not-too-distant future.

  I leave them for a little while and go check up on Jake, who’s still mostly sleeping. He doesn’t react to me entering his room and placing the requested photo of his fake family on the nightstand beside the bed. After about forty minutes of sitting there talking to his comatose body, I stand and spend another moment or six staring at him, trying to rationalize the little white lie I told myself.

  Okay, the big fat honking lie.

  After all, there hadn’t been a real need, mission wise, for me to give him the change. I’d done it as a reflex without thinking, the same way any agent might’ve grabbed and put pressure on a gunshot wound. The instant I saw where he’d been hit, I knew he wouldn’t make it. Not that I had the option to try first aid with an active sniper looking at us, but compressing that injury wouldn’t have helped. The majority of his bleeding happened internally.

  Jake told me he’s a bit of a thrill seeker, and he didn’t appear to mind what happened. In fact, he seemed perfectly happy with it. No, I didn’t save him for the mission. I saved him because I didn’t want to lose him, and that’s the part that’s messing with my head. Who’s to say he would even want to keep seeing me. And if he did, maybe we’ll fizzle out in a month or two.

  Or maybe we’ll wind up together for the next century or two.

  At least now we’ll have the chance to find out.

  I smile, at peace with it. If it doesn’t bother him, I shouldn’t dwell on it. Psychic danger warnings are far from exact. Back at the hotel room, I had felt imminent danger to my life, but I hadn’t processed it right, an error any of my kind could’ve made. No sense beating myself up over it. The outcome could’ve been far worse.

  What I thought to mean something bad would happen to us if we didn’t leave that hotel room turned out to be true, but not what I’d expected. Fair bet that sniper would have nailed me in the head through the windows if we’d dawdled any longer in the room.

  “See ya soon.” I bend down and give him a quick kiss on the lips.

  When I return to the lab, everyone’s buzzing in a frenzy… and they even have Andrew on a video conference.

  “Mina!” calls Andrew, beaming. “Perfect timing.”

  “Must be that psychic thing,” I deadpan. “What’s up?”

  “We’ve cracked it.” Klaus Reiser, one of the local technicians, points at a computer monitor on a nearby desk. “This is absolutely fascinating.”

  I examine what appears to be a fairly ordinary-looking graphical file system. “Looks like a normal desktop setup.”

  “Not quite.”

  Klaus gestures at the silver ‘alien’ fob st
icking straight up from a printed circuit board. Gold threads shimmer over the shiny green surface, fanned out from the central plug like Rapunzel’s hair. “We 3D printed a connector for it and ran the pin-outs according to Agent Bishop’s notes with a few revisions and corrections. The fascinating part is that the file system contained on that device is both completely different from anything we have, yet also readable.”

  “We had to throw together a set of drivers to run a 1024-bit interface.” Fellow nerd, Annie Chang, points at the PCB the memory stick’s connected to. “Once we established a means of communication with the device, the information within it was surprisingly easy to decode.”

  “That memory stick has a capacity of 24 Petabytes,” says Thom Becker, another local techie. “Vinod had to develop an abstraction layer to allow the operating system to even address that much space.”

  “The computer sees it as a massive array of multiple smaller drives.” Vinod Patel, the other Langley technician, goes wide-eyed with awe and proceeds to burn ten minutes explaining how he solved the connectivity issue.

  Andrew, via video conference, fires a ‘get on with it’ stare at him for nine minutes of it.

  “But the important thing is the main schematics and data.” Klaus pats his monitor. “It points to some kind of facility in Siberia that has been trapped under glacial ice for thousands of years.”

  “It’s a starship,” says Vinod.

  Nakamura rolls her eyes. “You have been watching way too many movies. The facility floorplan being elongated, symmetrical, and wider at one end doesn’t prove it’s anything of the sort.”

  “Look at this.” Klaus pulls up a file with images of a device that resembles a Van-de-Graaf generator with dozens of crystals embedded in the sphere at the top. He looks at me. “Have you ever seen one of these before?”

  “I don’t watch that many 1950s horror movies,” I say.

  The techs chuckle.