Get Blank (Fill in the Blank) (27 page)

“Affirmative. Smoke signals, hobo signs, vibrational asides.”

“And these are things you can do?”

“Affirmative.”

“Can you contact a specific member of the group?”

“Affirmative. Signals harmonized to alpha waves. Zing zing.”

“Great. We’re contacting Brady.”

“Negative, negative. Brady is not available. Probability of dissolution is high.”

“She’s alive, and responsible for all this.”

“Gender parameters have been altered. Brady is male.”

“We can debate this later. In the meantime, I’m going to get us some backup.”

“In anticipation of violence?”

“Oh, yes.”

I wrapped up a few of the non-seafood leftovers in a Chinese takeout box and we returned to the car. “The U.S. Bank Tower.”

I named the tallest skyscraper on the Los Angeles skyline. A multi-tiered building, it even had a crown of lights at the top, which would be red and green at Christmastime. There was only one group arrogant enough to put their headquarters on the top floor of a place like that. And now I had to deal with them.

I overpaid for parking downtown and VC and I swapped the dirty and noisy street for the cathedral-like lobby. “Stay quiet,” I told VC. “If I need you to go into the whole MiB schtick, I’ll nudge you.”

“Affirmative, Temporary Buckaroo. This unit’s pleasure centers are humming.”

“I... uh... are you trying to say you’re having a good time?”

“Affirmative.”

“Oh, good.” He had said I was his best friend.

Our shoes clicked on the hard floors of the lobby, VC’s space-age wingtips much louder than my Chucks. We had to go through a metal detector, which momentarily worried me, because who the hell knew what was inside VC, but the check was perfunctory at best. I didn’t even have to show them my Illuminati ID, which was good, since it was in the trunk of my car. We were waved to the elevator, where I used the ID with the concealed magnetic strip on the keycard reader. I hit the up button on the elevator and waited for the ding. The doors opened, giving us a mirrored box.

I pressed the buttons for floors 5, 17, 23, and 76. Then I leaned over into the call box and said in a clear voice, “This is Kenneth. 23 megahertz.” The elevator doors shut and the panel displaying a digital readout of floors started cycling through hieroglyphics. The mirrors shifted and turned into computer screens, showing off my identity.

Daniel Isringhausen, a failed mortician from Redondo Beach. Fired during a minor scandal in which he used various putties, appliances, and makeup to alter the appearance of one corpse into another when the original bodies were too damaged by death. Was discovered when a shark attack victim suddenly had a head, despite that head’s present location in the tummy of a fish. His prodigious skills now on the wrong side of the law, it was rumored he was involved in corpse smuggling. I painted a picture of a man who wanted power, but was a much better tool for those who already had it. And was hired.

On VC’s side of the elevator, personal information popped up, but it was garbled. A driver’s license for an Encino man named Dong Ha. A marriage license in the name of Jake and Fran Rosenblum. Court records on an attempted carjacking in the name of Caleb Cates. These flickered, switching with other documents, all in a dizzying array of names, only to be replaced by redacted forms, flashing question marks, and blurred faces.

I grinned inwardly. Them not knowing VC gave me a bit of power, something I’d need in these negotiations. Never go to the Illuminati with your balls in your hands.

That’s where I was, the headquarters of the Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria. These guys were the conspiracy’s conspiracy. Everyone modeled themselves on the Illuminati, and if even half the stories were true, they were to be feared. Supposedly, they founded the U.S. of A. as an elaborate experiment to free the world from the grips of inbreeding, going so far as to replace George Washington with a doppelganger named Adam Weishaupt. There are so many Illuminati references on our money that if you show one of them a dollar bill they collapse in hysterics.

They have one motive: power. They don’t really want it
for
anything. It’s not like other organizations that look to information or money or sex as a road to power, and usually a road back. No, with the Illuminati, they just want raw power and are willing to use it as a cudgel. And unlike most of the older organizations, they’re more than willing to roll with the times. They don’t do it compulsively like the Discordians, but take the parts from other groups that work in order to ensure the entire future is a pyramid with an eyeball at the top.

The elevator dinged and the hieroglyphics had changed to that eyed pyramid. I shot it the finger and walked out onto the penthouse floor.

I’ll say this for Bavaria, they had taste. A nice mixture of old and new, the decor was, in a word, elegant. Dark wood-paneled hallways led off in spokes, doors separated by alcoves boasting impressive-looking
objets d’art
. Ceremonial Baalish daggers, Atlantean pottery, a golden crown from El Dorado, and I had no doubt it was all authentic. I immediately wondered if they’d placed the crown there as a reference to the car I’d arrived in. Paranoia, it’s a blast.

“Mr. Isringhausen,” said a voice from thin air. “Wait in Room Four.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. Four was bad luck, and it was possible they were threatening me. Or maybe Four was just the room they had open. I was probably reading too much into things. I went down the hall, where floor-to-ceiling windows gave a dizzying view of LA. I could see all the way to the ocean on one side and the mountains on the other. The wind had scoured the sky, and for a moment, I was struck by the beauty of my city. Apparently she wanted me back bad enough to try to kill me.

I turned the corner and found Room Four between a shining broadsword that just might be Excalibur and a chunk of wood that could possibly be from the original cross. I opened the door, coming into a spacious office setup. The desk was almost bare except for a few completely mundane touches: a computer, a blotter, and some expensive pens in a holder. There was no nameplate. Two chairs faced the desk, and those who sat down would have their backs to the door. A huge pitcher plant grew in a lighted alcove. An old man in a dark suit, his skin hanging in lank folds, juggled bright red balls in one corner, apparently oblivious to us.

Two could play at that, old man.

I sat down and pretended the old man didn’t exist. He continued to juggle. He was pretty good at it. VC sat in the other chair and we both waited in silence, neither one of us removing hats or sunglasses.

It was around fifteen minutes later the door opened. It took a lot of willpower not to turn around, but to do so would have been an admission of weakness. That wasn’t happening as long as I was here.

Diane Shah stepped around the desk holding two plates in her hand. She set them down on the far side of the desk, near us, and took a seat behind the desk. The plates held one slice of sweet tea pie each. I took mine without a word and ate it. Then I ate VC’s, mostly because I didn’t think we needed to watch him mash it into his ears, and he hadn’t reached for it anyway. The whole time Diane remained perfectly silent, watching us expressionlessly. Her eyes, so dark brown as to be almost black, were empty.

Diane was severe-looking, pretty like a stylized drawing of an Indian princess. Her brown skin was flawless, her long black hair glossy. Her arms, shown off in a sleeveless blouse, were lean and muscled. She looked like she spent at least two hours a day in a gym, and I knew she would be multi-tasking the whole time. She was a genius, and I mean that literally. Her IQ wasn’t quite off the charts, but it was close to the edge. She had won the goddamn National Spelling Bee when she was ten and supposedly had multiple post-graduate degrees. She was also the highest-ranking Illuminatus in LA.

Yeah, she was better than me in nearly every measurable way, but there was no way in hell she was going to beat me in this game of social chicken. In the corner, the juggler switched to one hand.

“What are you doing back, Daniel?” she asked finally.

I grinned at her. “I need to borrow your golem.”

THE GOLEM, THE ORIGINAL ONE,
was created in Prague by Judah Loew ben Bezalel back in the late 1700s. The Rabbi created this clay man to defend his people from various pogroms, which were the main hobby for most gentiles back then. Turns out gentiles were dicks. Anyway, the Rabbi, also known as the Maharal because he was basically a superhero, made a golem called Josef. This thing was essentially the Thing from the Fantastic Four, only he could turn invisible, summon the spirits of the dead, and had to get shut down every Saturday because what’s a Golden Age hero without some ridiculous weakness? Josef was destroyed when the Maharal accidentally left him running on a Saturday.

The secret was not lost, though, and the Illuminati weren’t going to ignore the chance of having powerful clay men serving them. A couple groups still have golems, but as far as I knew there were only two in LA. I’d rather deal with the Illuminati in this case, since the other one belonged to a Rosicrucian splinter group and the last thing I needed was another potential run-in with Heather Marie Tooms.

To her credit, Diane didn’t flinch. “What happened to your nose?” she asked. If you could box the perfect accent, where every letter is enunciated and the meaning of every word conveyed exactly while being sprinkled with just enough aristocratic distain to know who was in charge, it would sound like Diane Shah.

“Is he here? Or should I wait?”

It was a stupid game we were playing. Trying to get the upper hand by dictating the terms of the conversation. On a normal day, I would put up a token resistance and then give in, because Daniel Isringhausen was an underling. Not today. If I negotiated from a position of weakness, there was no telling what she was going to get out of me.

“Does it have something to do with your disappearance? A year ago, you suddenly vanish. And then, just as suddenly, you return, dressed like that, injured, and demanding my golem.”

“To be fair, it was a request.”

She smiled in that Diane way of hers, managing to display neither warmth nor humor. In the corner, the juggler bounced the balls off the ceiling and caught them behind his back.

“Is this to get revenge on whoever broke your nose?”

“Oh, the guy who did this died thirteen hundred years ago.”

Diane didn’t react. I was being honest, which might have had something to do with it. “Why do you want my golem?”

“I need muscle.”

“What about him?”

I glanced at VC. “He’s mostly gel-based.”

VC nodded in agreement. “Hubba hubba, Miss Kitty.”

Diane’s eyes widened slightly. I’d never seen her react so strongly to anything. “Elias is a lot of muscle.”

“Why do you think I’m here? If I wanted to lay my hands on flesh-and-blood goons, I’d go elsewhere.”

“The Russian Mob, maybe?”

I kept my poker face, but inside I was cursing. Why had she said Russians? Did she know about my connection to Vassily the Whale, or was she fishing? “There’s a lot of choices out there. It’s a buyer’s market.”

“That it is. Any bounty you get with Elias is split seventy-thirty in my favor.”

“Noted.” Seventy percent of zero was zero, so I was fine with that. All I needed the golem for was to catch bullets and eat Brady’s kicks. Maybe hold onto her while we... I don’t know. I wasn’t going to beat anything out of her. Reasoning with Brady had proven to be a lost cause in the past. I trusted myself to come up with something once we had her. No reason to start planning stuff now.

“And any prisoners are to be kept at our facility.”

“Nope.”

“Ah, so you’re collecting a prisoner. And there’s no bounty.”

I cursed myself and then Diane Shah and her giant brain. “I’m catching a murderer, Diane.”

“The police do that.”

“Oh, come on. If you were that naïve, you wouldn’t be sitting there.”

She liked that one. I could tell by the slight crinkling of her eyes. “I had never known you to be so civic-minded, Daniel.”

“Somebody has to be.”

If I didn’t know Diane, I might not have seen the subtle change in her expression. It flickered over her face in a wave, a subtle widening of the eye, a twitch at the corner of her mouth. She was surprised. She was reassessing me. The juggler threw the balls from between his legs.

“Elias is yours. You have thirteen hours.”

I checked my watch. Until one in the morning. It would have to do. “Thank you.”

“This isn’t a gift, Daniel. You owe me one favor to be named later. You
did
abandon your duties for a full year, and I am letting you off very easily.”

“Old rules are still in effect.”

“I know about your squeamishness. No killing. It will be something more suited to your revealed talents.” She paused, and when she spoke again, it was to the air. “Send Elias in.”

A moment later, the door opened, and a man stooped to get in. He wore a double-breasted suit, a trenchcoat, gloves on his hands, a scarf over his face, and a hat pulled down low. Gold eyes peered outward, and when you got close enough, the distinct clay smell of his wet reddish skin was apparent.

“Elias, this is Daniel. You are his for the next thirteen hours. Do what he says, then return here.”

“Ma’am,” Elias said. His voice carried an abrasive hiss under the rumbling words.

“Good luck, Daniel. I hope you catch your killer.”

“I always have in the past.” Technically it wasn’t a lie. It was just that there was only that one time and the whole thing had been a misunderstanding.

The juggler added two more balls from somewhere.

VC and I left the room with Elias lumbering along behind. We returned to the car, and when the golem sat down in the middle of the back seat, the car lurched before correcting for the weight. I thought about VC’s back-seat flamethrower and briefly wondered if that would fire Elias into a nice clay pot. That had to be sacrilegious somehow.