“Simple? This Saito asshole is working with an outer-space monster in order to get everybody on earth killed. How—” A powerful gust of wind struck the ship. The Traveler lurched so suddenly that Wells lost his balance and fell. Sullivan had to shift his weight a bit but was unmoved. Impatient, Sullivan reached down and pulled Wells to his feet. Of course the Massive was unharmed. “How can you make sense of that?”
Wells dusted off his shirt. “Just because someone’s reasoning is flawed does not mean that there was no reasoning at all. Everyone wants something, and it usually isn’t what they tell you it is. Once you figure out what it is that they are looking for, that gives you power over them. That’s why even Readers are so often wrong. They can read the thoughts that float to the surface, but they often miss the ocean of subconscious which lies beneath. Find out what lurks in those depths, Sullivan, and you know them better than they know themselves. Once you achieve that, you can manipulate them into doing whatever you want.”
“No wonder your patients loved you so much.”
“I am very good at what I do. It is even easier when someone is hiding their true motives behind a false narrative, because then all you need to do is think ahead a bit to anticipate what actions they will take in order to best reinforce their narrative. Stimulus. Response. We provide the stimulus, and since we anticipate the likely response, we set a trap. Thank your lucky stars that Dr. Carr hadn’t offended me so, because if I’d still been working for him, he would’ve easily beaten the Grimnoir.”
“Trying to trap us didn’t work out so well for Dr. Carr… And what if Saito’s brain is being controlled by the Pathfinder?”
Wells smiled. “He’s not.”
“I don’t get how—”
“I’d bet my life on it. This fake Chairman’s actions are rather clearly and unambiguously human. There is nothing alien about his actions. I see a man trying to prove himself. I see a man who believes he could have been great, but was stifled in the shadow of a greater man for so very long. Everything he has done or said since he has been in control of the Imperium is a clue to his ultimate goal. It is all there, plain as that gigantic, many-times-broken nose on your face… And to think I was told that you were some sort of detective. What kind of detective ignores expert testimony?”
“Fine.” Sullivan sighed. “Assuming we don’t get blown out of the sky, we should be in Shanghai in a few days. I’ll go over this and make a call before we land.” Sullivan leafed through the pages. “I just need to know how to kill this son of a bitch.”
“There’s not sufficient information to tell you what his physical or magical capabilities are, but I can tell you how to reach him. My recommendation is in the summary. Last page.”
Sullivan skimmed it, and as he did so, he came to fundamentally understand how somebody like Wells had been able to carve himself a position of authority amongst the hardened killers of Rockville so quickly. Most of the cons would’ve been open books to somebody like him. Sullivan gave a low whistle. “Remind me to never play cards with you. So you want us to be bunco steerers and hustle the most dangerous man in the world?”
It was nice having a Ph.D. who was also a con. “More like he’s the confidence man and the Imperium is his mark. He’s laid the groundwork for us. We use his own scam against him.”
“You’re one malicious, manipulative son of a bitch, you know that, Doc?”
“It is nice to be appreciated.”
Wells’ study was much deeper than Sullivan had originally given him credit for. Though the alienist was careful to put in plenty of disclaimers about how he had a limited sample to extrapolate from, consisting entirely of Grimnoir spies’ intelligence reports, and one crazy former Iron Guard whom Wells was counting as two separate subjects stuck into one homicidal body, everything he’d written seemed to make an intuitive sort of sense.
The Traveler was still busy trying to run a blockade and survive a magical storm. Sullivan was pretty much useless in this situation, and he couldn’t abide being useless, so he’d gone to his bunk, managed to maneuver himself into place, and started reading. The lights were out, something to do with Pirate Bob conserving electricity and burning less hydrogen, so Sullivan had done most of his reading by flashlight and lightning strike.
He’d pretty much memorized the whole thing in short order, but he kept pondering on it and reading each bit over and over again. Normally he preferred to do his deep thinking while doing some sort of manual labor, a trick learned while breaking rocks in prison, but there just wasn’t much for someone like him to do on a dirigible.
Sullivan had been a private detective. He’d never been financially successful, barely making enough to pay the rent most of the time, but that hadn’t meant he wasn’t good at it. He enjoyed puzzles, and he’d often found that once you figured out the important pieces and how they fit together, the rest sort of fell into place. People were the biggest puzzles of all, but that didn’t mean they were any different. As he read and reread the profile of Dosan Saito, Sullivan began to get that old puzzle solving feeling again. This fit.
The Pathfinder must have landed sometime after the Chairman had died… Unlucky for them, it had wound up in Asia again, and somehow it had hooked up with Saito. Why China again? Bad luck, or something else? All of those details were a complete mystery, but Saito himself wasn’t. He was a man who wanted to be in control and thought he really was in control.
If Wells was right, even if Saito was being influenced by something alien, he was still a man, and he would make decisions like a man. He was the product of a foreign culture, which most of them could never understand, but he was just a man, which meant he could be reached. Now the question became what to do once they got him.
That turned his thoughts to a sheet of paper hidden under his bunk with a terrible spell copied onto it… It had drastically magnified Zangara and Crow, but at what cost? Maybe that. But only if he didn’t see any other choice…
“Mr. Sullivan?”
He pointed the flashlight at the hatch. Buckminster Fuller had to cover his eyes. He’d been so distracted he hadn’t heard the Cog come in. In fact, he’d been so engrossed in pondering on the fake Chairman that he hadn’t even realized the storm had tapered off. How long had he been thinking? The Traveler was running as quiet as something with jet engines could run. The emergency lights were on in the corridor, so he killed his flashlight. It would’ve been too much work to try to get his big body out of the tiny bunk, so he just set the report on his chest. “Hey, Fuller.”
“The knots!” The Cog seemed agitated, but then again, Cogs usually seemed agitated. Browning was the only one Sullivan had met so far who seemed collected. “I’ve untied the knots!”
“Knots?” It took him a second to remember. “You mean the skinless man’s magic?”
“It isn’t magic! It was! Not anymore. It is something else, a perversion of magic, an evolutionary monstrosity. The deceased biological specimen used to be a Brute. And it wasn’t a knot at all. It was a loop! A lasso! It isn’t omnidirectional, it is multi-omnidirectional! It’s, it’s, it’s—”