“Where are we going?” he asked.
“Shut up,” she said. Twenty silent minutes later, when they were at the very fringes of a middle-income residential district, Violin pulled into a garage beside a pleasant two-story home. The house was furnished and clean, but empty. Violin brought the book with her and went upstairs with it, leaving behind an order for him to sit down on the couch and touch nothing. He obeyed.
She came back fifteen minutes later without the book. She had cleaned herself up and changed out of her black clothes. Now she wore a soft crimson wool sweater over charcoal slacks. No shoes. Her long dark hair was still wet and hung loose down her back.
She carried a pistol in her hand. “There is a guest bathroom through there,” she said, pointing to a hall that ran between living room and kitchen. “There’s some clothes in a closet. Don’t take long.”
“But—”
She sat down with the pistol on her thigh. Violin didn’t say anything else.
Harry went into the guest bathroom, checked it for bugs and cameras and found nothing. The window was block glass and could not be opened. He peed, then got undressed and started the shower. While he waited for the water mix to adjust, he stared at his face in the mirror. He was not a bad-looking man, he decided. Like a slightly chubby Matt Damon. Not actually fat, but not built for the kind of things he’d had to do tonight. Not built for running, that was for sure.
He saw that his thighs, buttocks, and back were stained dark with red from the pool of blood he’d fallen into. Olvera and Florida’s blood. Harry’s stomach did a few backflips and he thought he would hurl. He didn’t.
When the nausea ebbed, he climbed into the shower and dialed up the heat to see if he could boil this all out of his brain and off his skin. Even though his skin glowed pink and spotless when he toweled off, he knew that there were some things that can’t be scrubbed away. He folded the towel and looked through the closets for something to wear.
He found a pair of bright yellow bike shorts and a concert T-shirt advertising the 2012 This Is Desolation Tour for the Hungarian heavy metal band Shell Beach. The shorts and the shirt were one size too small. He studied himself in the mirror and decided that he looked like a black and yellow sausage.
When he returned to the living room, Violin was tapping away on a small laptop. She looked up with her stern face.
And burst out laughing.
“Bite me,” Harry mumbled as he crawled onto the couch, his face burning. He snatched up a decorative pillow and placed it over his lap.
Violin dabbed at a tear at the corner of her eye. “I’m sorry, Mr. Bolt, but I know your father and I suppose I’m guilty of being unfair to you by expecting you to be like him.”
He frowned, uncertain as to whether that was a compliment or a slam. Either way he didn’t like it. “You know my dad? How? Have you been on a case with him?”
There was a flicker of something in her expression. Distaste? That’s how it looked to Harry. “Harcourt Bolton is an intense individual. He is a hero of your country.”
“Yeah, he’s the cat’s balls.”
Violin frowned. “I do not know that expression.”
“Doesn’t matter. He’s not here and I am, even if that’s a disappointment. Can we focus on what just happened instead of who I’m not living up to?”
She shrugged. “Certainly, let’s do that. Tell me what you know.”
“Um…,” he began, and suddenly realized that he was in a conversation with someone who, at best, was an agent of a foreign power. Even if her government and his agency were allies, that seldom formed an invitation to be chatty. She nodded, clearly aware of the speed bump he’d just hit.
“Then let me tell you what my people found out,” she said. “You are hunting a black marketer named Ohan who you believe is smuggling a portable EMP weapon called Kill Switch into the United States on behalf of ISIL. How am I doing so far?”
“Go on,” he said in a voice that cracked only a little.
“Your intelligence,” she said, leaning on the word hard enough to make it bend, “is faulty. But not entirely. The materials Ohan is shipping do, in fact, originate with ISIL. But these are not, as we’ve seen, materials to support new ISIL recruits in the States.”
“So it’s what? The Islamic State Book-of-the-Month Club?”
She laughed. “You know, you remind me of a friend of mine. Another American agent.”
“Oh, and is he a figure of fun, too?”
“Hardly. He is the single most dangerous man I have ever met.”
This time she leaned on the word “man,” as if the fact that this guy was dangerous did not mean that he was the most dangerous person. After what Harry had seen back at the library, he was willing to bet that whoever was at the top of her list had two X chromosomes. Fair enough. Harry considered himself a progressive modern male. He was the last guy to try and prove that men always had to be tougher than women. He knew better.
“Who killed my team? Was that ISIL? Because none of them looked Middle Eastern to me.”
“They are not. They had nothing to do with the shipment. They do not work for either the black marketer or for the ISIL team involved in this project. In fact they were there to make sure that shipment was never delivered.”
“Yeah, but who are they?”
“I told you who they were.”
“Right, something about a bunch of locksmiths who burn books for fun. I don’t know what that means.”
“The Fraternal Brothers of the Lock,” she said. “The Ordo Fratrum Claustrorum. They were a kill team sent by the church to destroy that book.”
“Whose church?”
“The Catholic Church, of course.”
“Why ‘of course’? Last I heard the Catholics weren’t sending kill teams out.”
She snorted. “You don’t know much about the world, do you, Mr. Bolt?”
“It’s Harry… and what do you mean?”
“The church is a political organization as well as a religious one. It is ancient and very powerful and the Vatican has many rooms. Many ‘cells.’ Not even the pope knows a tenth of what goes on inside the church.”
“So these guys are, what? Militant censors?”
“A bit more than that, Mr. Bolt. The agenda of the Brotherhood runs very deep,” she said. “It is their belief that certain books contain more than heretical or blasphemous writing. They believe — truly believe — that these books have actual power.”
“Power? Like what kind of power? Are we talking magic here?”
She pursed her lips. “‘Magic’ is an imprecise word, Harry. It suggests the supernatural, and my people do not agree. This is not a world of ghosts and goblins. Not in the way most people think. Think of it more like science. What most people consider to be supernatural is actually an aspect, or perhaps many aspects, of science that has not yet been properly studied, measured, or named. Are you familiar with science at all? The belief among certain quantum physicists that there are other dimensions? Possibly many others?”
“I may have read something. Saw a few specials on Discovery Channel.”
She made a mouth of mild disapproval. “You do realize that science and technology are the major stakes in all important espionage, don’t you? This is the twenty-first century, Harry. The key battles of our age will be fought in cyberspace and in labs.”
“Fine, and when you’re done blowing Neil DeGrasse Tyson maybe you can explain what the frak you’re talking about.”
She laughed. “You really do remind me of my friend. A shorter, dumpier, less intelligent, and less attractive version of him.”
“Hilarious.”
Then he saw the laughter in her eyes and realized she was actually making a joke rather than directly mocking him. It pulled a small, faint smile from him.