“That’s what I like to hear,” she said, and then she left me to continue getting stinking drunk in peace.
11.
The sun was a pale yellow disc in the muted blue of the alpine sky when I piloted my rented Dacia hatchback into the quaint town center, which was really no more than a block-square patch of grass with squat, low-slung buildings huddled around. At one end of the square sat a modest but pretty wooden church, shingled and steep-pitched and obscured in part by scaffolding. A small inn faced it. Its roof was steeply pitched and shingled as well, but its walls were fieldstone, not timber. A couple of the other buildings that flanked the square looked to be businesses of some kind, what with their outsized storefront windows and hand-tooled signs hanging out over the narrow streets, but the signs were all in Romanian, their meaning lost to me.
All told, there couldn’t have been more than two dozen buildings comprising this makeshift town, most on the center square, with some trailing off narrow side streets on either side. And honestly, I’m not sure they had room to build any more; the village was nestled into a depression in the hills so narrow you could scarcely even call it a valley. Sharp stone faces jutted upward, the trees growing ever thinner and more stunted on the upslopes until eventually there was nothing on them but bare rock, gouging free its territory from the sky.
At the very top of the highest peak in sight was a castle.
The ruins of a castle, to be more precise. No mere winter palace, this; everything about it — from its thick stone walls, stained with age and crumbling, to the narrow slit windows that graced its many parapets, to its very position atop the craggy, un-bum-rushable terrain, accessible only by a narrow dirt road that switched back time and again as it wound its way up the mountain — suggested this place was built to be defended, to withstand war.
Or to repel the advances of the angry, torch-and-pitchfork-wielding hordes.
I squinted up at it and wondered how it would fare against me.
If this village — or the castle looking down upon it — had a name, it was neither indicated by sign upon approach nor on any of the road maps that I carried. And these past two weeks, I’d accumulated plenty of them.
After the debacle that was Colorado, I’d decided my days of hitching rides in amateurs were over, at least until the Brethren were dead and gone. If I was going toe-to-toe with the biggest, baddest oogly boogly I’d yet seen, I was for damn sure gonna do it armed, preferably in someone battle-trained. And since I didn’t know precisely where this hunt was gonna take me, I needed a meat-suit with a valid passport, the kind of vessel no one would question if they were to bounce erratically around the map Indiana-Jones style. That ruled out cops (too parochial) and military (who tend to raise hackles when they go AWOL.) Covert ops types are, by nature, hard to come by, and anyways, I hear tell both Langley and the NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade employ mystical countermeasures to keep out the likes of me. Which is how I settled on an air marshal.
Picked this one up in Chicago. Frank Malmon, according to his passport and the license in his wallet. No pics inside of pets or family, just the ID, two credit cards, and twenty bucks in ones and fives. And no wedding ring on his finger. That’s why I chose him.
The Federal Air Marshals have an office in Chicago, makes them easier to spot than in the wild. Taken in ones and twos, they tend to blend in with their environment — by design, not accident. Their whole point is to look like just another airline customer until the shit goes down. Then you find out they’ve been trained to quick-draw their sidearm and pop a guy head and chest in a people-crammed tin can hurtling through the air thirty thousand feet above the ground at five hundred miles per hour without so much as grazing an innocent passenger or depressurizing the cabin. But in a crowd you know to be rife with them — say, the main concourse in O’Hare — a pattern begins to emerge. Early thirties. Compact build. Hair trimmed high and tight but not too, like a cop’s, or maybe former military. Jeans, polos or button-downs, a windbreaker usually to hide their piece. No bright colors, no garish logos or bold graphics on their clothes. Polite but taciturn when addressed. Always watching, listening, assessing threats.
But never imagining the likes of me.
Grabbed this one when he ducked into the can. Not literally, mind. The orderly I’d ditched way back in Colorado. I’d cabbed it out to the airport from my liquid brunch half-smashed, and then body-hopped into an iPhone-noodling teenager who was in line with his parents to check in for their flight to Boston. Hood up, hat brim down, and headphones in, which meant I could — and did — make it all the way to the Windy City without his parents catching wise, or for that matter, speaking to another soul. When I body-hopped in, the kid’s mouth flooded with saliva and his stomach fluttered, but I focused on calming both, conjuring an image of a dial marked “nausea” in my mind, and dialing it from eleven where it was pinned back down to zero. The kid’s body’s urge to purge itself of me abated.
My only gripe with the kid was the ten seconds of ear-splitting skronk I was treated to before I found the pause button on his smart phone’s music thingy. I don’t know what a Skrillex is — some kind of power tool for grinding metal by the sound of it — but whatever it is, it sounded like his was broken. It was all I could do not to yank the earbuds from my ears. But I figured that would blow my cover, so I left them in, and handled his phone like it was packed solid with nitroglycerin; I couldn’t figure out how to shut the damn thing off, and I lived in mortal fear of triggering that aural assault anew at any time.
Anyways, I hopped the kid to Chicago, and used his layover to scope out my air-marshal options. Narrowed it down to two, when just my luck: my top choice decided to hit the restroom. I left the kid in one stall, walked out the other in a brand new Malmon-suit. His nausea dial was only set to six or so. Even if I hadn’t concentrated on adjusting it downward as I did, I suspect he woulda been just fine. It was disturbing to me how easy this possession thing was getting.
The second I hopped into the Air Marshal, I knew I’d struck pay dirt. Didn’t even have to check under my jacket to recognize the weight beneath for what it was — a big-ass handgun. But, thorough fellow that I am, I did anyways, and discovered it to be SIG Sauer P226 with two spare mags of fifteen .357 rounds each, meaning I had forty-five in total.
I walked Malmon straight out of the restroom and to the nearest ticket agent, flashed my badge, and said I needed to be on the next flight to Bucharest. The nice young man behind the counter didn’t even bat an eye. I spent five minutes in line at security wondering why the TSAs were giving me the hairy eyeball before I realized they probably saw me twice a day. A couple pilots wheeled past the shuffling masses in their stocking feet with cheerful indifference, and slipped the black nylon barrier thing out of its track for long enough to duck behind it. As they refastened it, I ducked out of line and followed suit, and what do you know? No one stopped me.
I worried Romanian Customs would give me trouble over the piece, but it’s amazing what the proper ID can get you. They kept me standing there a while after scanning my passport to make sure it came back clean, but once it did, they were all smiles, and I was on my way.
What I hadn’t realized was that I was on my way to two weeks of fruitless poking around every tiny mountain hamlet for miles around the glacial waters of Bucura Lake without even a whiff of otherworldly foul play to show for it. I questioned villagers, visited small-town coroners by dead of night, trudged through crumbling ruins, inspected smoke-houses thick with the prickly spice-scent of curing sausage. I poked through rickety old barns and long-abandoned burned-out thatch huts and even, in the case of one creepy Lugosi-looking local whose odd demeanor set my Spidey sense erroneously a-tinglin’, dug through a basement chest freezer. But I found no heads, nor blood, nor creepy monsters seeking same. Just normal folk leading normal lives.