“I’m not buying it,” Rule said. “I don’t know why no reporter showed up, but I don’t think that’s the reason. Friar’s smart, but I don’t think he’s capable of the sort of devious, layers-within-layers planning you’re talking about. She is, but she’s limited by her tools.”
“Friar has some kind of deal with the sidhe lord who provided Dya. I’m no expert on the sidhe, but they’ve got a rep for the devious and the subtle. Layers-within-layers, like you said.”
Isen’s eyebrows shot up. Rule started to say something. Stopped.
“Son of a bitch,” Cullen said. “She’s right. The sidhe adore subtlety, and we don’t know jack shit about this elf. Maybe he isn’t involved at all. He hands over Dya for some unknown consideration, then heads back to work on his own plots back home. Or maybe he’s the boss of this operation and pops in for a cup of tea and a status update twice a week. We don’t know.”
Rule summed that possibility up nicely. “Shit.”
Isen spoke. “You convince me that we’ll have to be especially wary. But trap or no, we have to rescue Brian, and I don’t see how your participation would help. You’re injured and not up to a fight. Your presence would divide Rule’s attention.”
Lily drummed her fingers once, impatient. “I don’t go in as part of a lupi SWAT team. Kidnapping is a federal crime. We’ve received a tip about a kidnap victim that I judge to be valid. I go to Friar’s front door and present him with a search warrant. The rest of you need to find a back door.”
It wasn’t that simple, of course.
Normally, kidnappings were investigated by regular FBI, not the Unit. But add in gado, a lupus victim, potions, and an out-realm being, and Lily could easily argue that this particular kidnapping required a Unit agent. Normally, too, a kidnapping was treated as a hostage situation—you went in with your weapon drawn, not with a search warrant. But the warrant would be as much legal sleight-of-hand as it was a serious search tool.
One more “normally” she wasn’t observing: her backup. Oh, she wasn’t going in alone. The warrant made a good lifeline; if she vanished, there’d be a judge who’d point a finger in the right direction. But Friar could decide that a pointed finger was the lesser of two evils, compared to getting arrested right then and there. Criminals were like that. So backup, yes, but not regular FBI. The situation was too volatile, with too much she couldn’t tell them. Just asking the wrong question at the wrong time could land them all in “oh, fuck.” Instead, she wanted to take Cullen and Cynna.
Cynna would not go into the tunnel with them. She’d Find it. As for Cullen—well, his presence might come back to bite her later. Unit agents were allowed wide discretion in employing Gifted consultants, and a few months ago, she wouldn’t have thought twice about using Cullen in a search. But that was then, this was now, and it was Robert Friar’s home they’d be searching. He would claim that Cullen planted anything they found. They’d be lucky if he didn’t sue.
And it was absurd to worry about that when the thing that would really get her ass handed to her was outsourcing a break-in by lupi.
By the time Cynna returned, they’d agreed on the basic plan. “The bad news,” she said, tossing her purse on a chair, “is that there is no lupus in or beneath Friar’s place.”
Cullen scowled. “Does that mean there’s good news?”
“More like not-quite-so-bad,” she said, digging in her purse. “There is a tunnel. I mapped it as closely as I could by Finding for air beneath the ground—which is not as easy as it sounds, believe me. No underground rooms that I could Find, but I couldn’t follow it very far. No good cover to hide from the guys with guns.” She pulled out an aerial map, unfolded it, and spread it on the table. “Here’s Friar’s house, see? I’ve drawn the location of the tunnel in red.”
“Heads up into the mountains,” Rule said. “Or under them, I guess.”
Lily frowned. “Why would he go to so much trouble and expense to create a tunnel into the mountains? An underground shrine or dungeon or drug-making lab I can see. But this?”
“A node?” Cullen tipped his head, considering his own suggestion. “If you want your elf buddy to be able to drop by, you need a node.”
“Wouldn’t you have noticed a node near Friar’s place?”
“Not if it’s far enough below ground. The power gets absorbed or dispersed by that much earth pretty thoroughly.” He frowned. “Seems to be a pretty long tunnel, though. That’s both expensive and hard to hide while in process.”
“I found something,” Arjenie called from the other side of the room. She was heading toward them, carrying a laptop. “It’s not exactly what we’re looking for, but I thought you ought to have a look.” She reached them, hesitated. “Something’s up?”
Rule explained briefly.
“Let’s see.” She leaned over the table, looking at Cynna’s map. “Yes, this makes sense. Let me show you.” She set the laptop down and touched a key, waking it from sleep. The screen lit with a puzzling diagram. “This idea kept nibbling at me. It was sort of wild goose-ish, but I wasn’t having much luck looking for the back door, so I gave it a try. Lily, you probably remember that after the Azá created all that trouble at that underground node, the USGS got tasked with mapping that cave system.”
Lily shook her head. “I never heard about that.”
“Oh. Well, Ruben did, and he had me check on the progress every so often. One of his hunches, I think. They never finished—first there were budget cuts, then the gnomes applied to have the cave system added to their Underways, which is why the partial map got classified Secret. You know how gnomes are about privacy. But I remembered looking at a schematic of the part that did get mapped, and I thought … well, here it is.”
It looked like spaghetti to Lily. Radioactive spaghetti. Wiggly white lines glowed against a black background with a few glowing blobs—caves, caverns?—strung along some of the loops.
“Of course, you can’t tell much from this,” Arjenie said. “Here’s the 3-D view.” She hit a few keys and the lines separated, becoming a 3-D representation. “They tied a bunch of key points to GPS, so I was able to transpose it onto an aerial map. I’ll show you.” She moved the cursor, clicked. Glowing spaghetti suddenly overlay the tan, gray, and dull green of mountains. “This is the tunnel we’re interested in.”
She shifted the screen to follow one particular strand of spaghetti that stretched out straighter and farther than most … and the aerial view was suddenly familiar. A whole lot like Cynna’s map, in fact, complete with a view of Friar’s roof and swimming pool.
Lily felt cold. Then hot. “Are you telling us that Friar’s tunnel connects to the cave system the Azá used?” On the list of places she never wanted to see again, that one would be number two. Right after hell.
“I can’t say for sure. My tunnel ends more than a quarter mile from the one Cynna found, and I don’t know if that’s because it really ends or if that’s just where the mapping stopped. Plus I’ll have to check the notations about depth to see if the two tunnels are in the same plane. But it looks like they could connect, doesn’t it?”
It sure as hell did. “Arjenie, you said the gnomes petitioned to have this added to their Underways. Was their petition granted?”
“I don’t know,” she said apologetically. “I didn’t check.”
“Find out. Unless the petition was refused out of hand, I’m betting it’s still pending. It’s been less than a year, and if the gnomes claimed that cave system, they wouldn’t tolerate Friar’s little tunnel.”