The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.: A Novel Page 28

  “Erszebet, please,” I said.

  She stopped twisting the chair. “I am Sending him back exactly where Tristan goes?” she said, sounding wary.

  “Yes, exactly.”

  She sat up a little straighter. “Why do we have two DOers in the same DTAP?” she asked. “This is a complication. It is hard enough to keep one person on the right Strand. Two is very tricky.”

  “It’s time to get fresh eyes on the problem. We need to think outside of the box.”

  Erszebet said, “This is a terrible idea, and I do not want to do it.”

  “Yeah, I had a feeling you were going to be difficult,” said Frink. “Les, show her the goods.”

  Les smiled complacently, opened a manila folder he’d been holding, and pulled out some documents. “Look at these,” he said, as if speaking to an eight-year-old. “Erszebet, it has your name on it.”

  He laid it on the table directly in front of her: a British Airways itinerary for Erszebet Karpathy to fly from Logan Airport to Budapest three days hence. Despite herself, she gasped audibly, and on reflex her hand slammed down on the paper so that he could not pull it away.

  “Look what else I have,” he said, and from the inside pocket of his blazer he pulled out an American passport. He opened it. There was a photo of Erszebet—I still don’t recall any moment in time when we subjected her to an official government-issued photo, so I don’t know how he’d got it. But he’d got it.

  Erszebet reached out for the passport with a rare display of physical impulsiveness. He let her grasp it, but did not let go his own grip on it.

  “Once you have Sent me back there,” he said.

  I got a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach. Glancing at Frank and Rebecca, I could see they felt it too. All three of us turned our attention to Erszebet.

  For an endless moment her eyes flicked between the passport and Les Holgate’s face, whilst her other hand continued to press down on the British Airways itinerary. Some fathomless gulf inside of her survived a change of moral tides, and then with a look of genuine pain on her face, she released her grip on the passport and crumpled the British Airways page into a ball, hurling it away from the table.

  “You are bad men,” she said in a husky voice, and looked away. “You are very wrong to tempt me this way when it is not safe to say yes.”

  Les appeared slightly taken aback that his plan had met resistance, but he rallied. “There’s nothing dangerous about this. It’s not like I’m taking a gun back there with me,” he said in a cajoling voice.

  She gave him an incredulous look. “You say that as if it were a choice you were making,” she said. “Do you know anything?”

  “Don’t overthink this, honey,” said Les. “Do you want to go to Hungary, yes or no?”

  At the word “honey,” a look flashed across Erszebet’s face that made me relieved, for Les’s sake, that she could not do magic outside of the ODEC.

  “Of course I want to go to Hungary,” she said fiercely. “But not enough to risk performing bad magic at your demand.”

  “You’re saying you need stronger motivation,” said Les, in an arrogant yet maddeningly agreeable voice.

  “I am saying I need to calculate on my számológép, before anything,” she corrected him. “But I suspect those calculations will tell me not to do it.”

  Les’s eyes flicked to the computer screen. I watched Erszebet follow his gaze. Les Holgate and Frink exchanged meaningful looks.

  “Do you know what,” Erszebet amended, sounding almost nervous, “you are so undeserving of my trust and cooperation, I must say no, absolutely I will not Send him. It is a terrible idea. I don’t even need the számológép.”

  “Well that’s good at least,” huffed Frink. “Since you no longer have it.”

  A hardwired reflex sent Erszebet’s hand clutching for her bag. “What?” she cried. She began to frantically grope around in the bag.

  “I removed the Asset’s personal computational device for security and analysis,” Les Holgate explained to the rest of us. All the blood had drained out of Erszebet’s complexion as she dumped the entire contents of her large handbag onto the conference table, then began to shove things—hairbrush, tissues, cough drops, lipstick, vintage perfume atomizer—off the edge in her frantic search for the számológép. “Sir,” Les continued, to the face on the computer screen, “I believe this move will now also work as a negotiating tactic.”

  “Where is my számológép?” Erszebet demanded, almost voiceless with panic. I had never imagined she could look so vulnerable.

  Briskly, Les Holgate pulled out a shipping bill from his other inside pocket. “While you were Sending Tristan, I secured it and shipped it to the Trapezoid.”

  “Where is it?” Erszebet repeated, wide-eyed. “I must know this.”

  “It’s in transit,” said Les Holgate.

  “I need it,” said Erszebet, struggling to maintain her dignity. “I must have it, here, in my hand. There can be no diachronic magic without it.”

  “Permission to negotiate with Asset?” said Les to the computer screen. I barely repressed the impulse to throw something at him.

  “Granted,” said Frink.

  Les turned to Erszebet, tucking the shipping receipt back into his pocket. The glib, aggressive positivity he radiated was the social equivalent to fingernails down a chalkboard. “You obviously don’t need the zamlagip”—(he never once pronounced this correctly)—“for every transfer, since you didn’t have it on you just now when you Sent Lieutenant Colonel Lyons back. Ergo, you don’t need it to Send me back. Just one DTAP, one time, one DEDE.”

  As usual, he pronounced it wrong: “dee-dee.” Rebecca rolled her eyes and blurted out, “Deed!” He wasn’t expecting the correction, and faltered for a moment before winding up to the big finish:

  “Trust . . . just . . . trust me on this. It’s only going to take one time, because I’m going to crush this!”

  I saw her almost answer him, and then restrain herself. She had recovered some color, but only in an unhealthy way, in that she was now slightly green. “You are saying that if I Send you to the Tearsheet DTAP, I will have the számológép returned to me immediately.”

  He smiled. “Send me to the Tearsheet. Once I have returned, I’ll issue a recall code to have the zamaligope returned to you.”

  “And if I don’t Send you? What happens?”

  He shrugged. “The ODEC’s not much good to us if it’s not helping us to accomplish our stated goals. The team members will be considered redundant and their employment terminated.”

  “You will fire me?” she said, struggling to regain her derisive demeanor.

  He shook his head. “Negative. But your zamlogap is almost certain to get lost in the reallocation of physical resources. That would be a shame.”

  “I’ll do it,” she said, looking grimly at the table. “I’ll Send you.”

  Everyone pushed their chairs back to go.

  “Dr. Stokes,” said General Frink, “if I could have a private word with you.”

  It sounded like more of an order than a request, so I scooted my chair forward again and doodled on my notepad while the others filed out of the room. Les was the last to go, and pulled the door closed behind him. He tried to make eye contact as he did, but I wouldn’t give him that victory.

  It was just me and General Octavian Frink now, or rather me and a flat-panel screen displaying an oversized rendering of his face from some secure videoconferencing facility in Washington.

  “Yes, General Frink?”

  “You’re an intelligent woman,” Frink said. “You have to have realized that this is an incredibly expensive and roundabout way to raise what amounts to pocket change, by the standards of the Trapezoid.”

  “The thought had crossed my mind,” I admitted.

  “Nevertheless, what Les just said to you all is an empty threat. DODO is not going to get shut down. Its management may be changed but it will keep on going.”

 
; “Why?” I asked. “Is it because you want cheap plutonium?”

  “I won’t lie to you. There is certainly a lot of interest in that. But even if we can never get the Asset to turn lead into plutonium, this project keeps going. It is distressing that you have bungled this bucket-burying project to the extent that you have. There is no way that this passes a cost-benefit analysis even if you get the bucket and sell the book tomorrow. But we are learning, Dr. Stokes. Painful as this trial-and-error phase may be, DODO is building institutional knowledge of how we can conduct diachronic operations in the future—and how our adversaries may be conducting them even as we speak.”

  It wasn’t the first time that someone in my chain of command had dropped a hint that foreign powers might have their own equivalents of DODO. It explained a lot about how willing Frink and others were to keep backing such an unlikely enterprise.

  “Well, I am glad that we are making progress, however haphazardly,” I said.

  “It’s the haphazard part I would like to work on,” Frink said. “There is far too much unpredictability and randomness in these . . . DEDEs . . . for my taste.” I had to give him credit for nailing the pronunciation. “It is for that reason that I am going to bring Roger Blevins into this in a more serious way.”

  The general paused, and I could tell he was awaiting some sort of reaction from me.

  Which wasn’t something he’d have done if he’d been expecting a negative reaction. No, he was expecting me to jump out of my chair in transports of joy. He was expecting it because his old school chum Blevins had prepped him for it—told him of the superb mentor/pupil relationship we had enjoyed, or some such bullshit malarky.

  Instead I was frozen. Like a deer in the headlights. Not one of my more admirable qualities. Later, when I was going through hand-to-hand combat training with military experts, I heard a lot about the predator/prey relationship, and how it was the natural instinct of many to freeze up when in the grip of a more powerful animal. It turns out you can train yourself to fight, or to run away; but I hadn’t been through such training at the time.

  “I’ve been discussing it with Roger,” Frink went on. He seemed a little nonplussed by my reaction, but soon enough worked himself back up to his usual brute intensity. “He speaks highly of you, but we have arrived at a consensus that it might not hurt to have a couple of greybeards in the loop—people who know their way around history and dead languages and such. Constantine Rudge is still following along, but he’s busy and can only put so much time into it. So I have asked Roger. And he has expressed a willingness to take a leave of absence from his position at Harvard so that he can throw himself into DODO with a higher level of commitment. It’ll take a few months for him to disentangle himself, but he’s on it. I wanted you to be the first to know, Stokes. Given your warm relationship with him, I expect this will be a load off your mind.”

  “Thanks for letting me know, General Frink,” I said. “Will there be anything else?”

  “I look forward to hearing good news from your end in a few hours,” Frink said. “Les is a good man. When he says he’s going to crush it—it’s time to pop some popcorn and pull up a chair.”

  “I’ll get popping, then,” I said.

  LETTER FROM

  GRÁINNE to GRACE O’MALLEY

  Your Grace—pardon me the rude beginnings, but it’s a terrible, terrible thing that’s happened, I must write quickly to tell you all and I warn you now, it may be the last letter you shall ever receive from me, for reasons that will become clear as you are reading.

  Tristan Lyons returned again, still without success, but with a willingness now to be honest with me. But the truth he shared was foul enough to kill an ogre, and that was just the beginning of the woes.

  As I told you before, he comes from an era in which magic has been blotted out entirely. Sure he and his brethren are attempting to resuscitate it, but it’s only one witch he has to work with, and it’s a horrible situation she’s in from the sound of it. Lives like a prisoner, she does, under their watch all the time for they want her kept safe else their work comes to naught. So very limited her life sounds. And the worst of it is the work itself! They instruct her on all the magic she may do, and ’tis only ever Sending they want her for, which as you’ve heard myself and my sister Breda tell you, is exhausting and often frustrating, for there are so many particulars to be kept in mind, and the risk of lomadh—and you haven’t the satisfaction of accomplishment, for by its very nature, the results are not where you are.

  And even worse than that, ’tis a strange mechanical chamber she must spend her time in, the only place magic will function in their age. Tristan described it somewhat to me and for all the pride in his voice—’tis his creation—it sounds a right horror, so it does. So this poor witch is living under nasty circumstances, and more than that: she is nearly two hundred years old! Magically preserved she is. So for all those years she survived, aging slowly, in a world with no magic, making friends and then watching them die of old age . . . while she waited patiently for the time to come for her to spend her day in a horrible little room doing unpleasant tricks on demand for a secret government.

  For that’s the other part of his confession: Tristan and his lot aren’t bringing magic back for the good of the world, or for magic’s own sake, but because his government (what rules over the nation full of Irish who speak English) wants to use magic to spy upon and check the power of other kingdoms. Now I’ve nothing against that, sure we’re doing it ourselves, right now, and who doesn’t? But it’s nothing to the glory of magic, it’s nothing to the artistry or craft, and worst of all, it’s a horrible life they’re giving this witch, by the sound of it. I asked Tristan was she happy, and he said not especially, but he thinks that is due to she’s Hungarian and they’re not a merry race. And he has a point. Still, very sad I was to think of the state of affairs. Not at all as I’d imagined it, when first he told me their aim was to bring back magic.

  But all of that is nothing compared to the horror to come. For Tristan’s crew is an evil one, and never was there more evidence of that than the story of Lester Holgate. ’Tis a fell tale I’m about to impart to you, so I hope you are nursing some potent spirits to get you through it.

  Tristan was giving it a rest with Sir Edward. As soon as he arrived and told me and Rose all (for didn’t I summon Rose to be a witness to his story too), he went from the Tearsheet Brewery with Rose. She was friendlier to him now, given as how he had spoken with us more openly, as he’d promised. In fact, she had offered to introduce him to other witches around, of whom she knows more than I, having family here. She is about to be married off to a gentleman, pleasant enough, but very dull, and it appealed to her sense of adventure to be assisting a handsome fella from the future, especially in the name of magic. The plan was that Rose would take him to meet her mother and aunts, as they’re a whole family of witches (like Breda and myself), with the grandmother out on the Fulanham estate by the Sheppards Bush Green. So it’s an overnight trip he had left on, and didn’t I feel like a mother seeing her son off to the wars?

  No, in fact, I didn’t. A bit of a relief it was.

  So there I was on my lonesome upstairs at the tavern, taking the rare chance to air out the closet and the bedding, when suddenly there was a shimmer in the corner of the room and there’s another naked fella, with his hair cut in a peculiar way. He’s about as tall as Tristan but thinner, less imposing (good teeth though), and he falls to the floor moaning like they do. He most certainly does not seem familiar, telling me he’s only on this one Strand—something strange is afoot here, one of those things that Tristan would call an Anomaly.

  As soon as he could speak, he looks around the closet like it’s Newgate Prison and he’s no idea how he got condemned to be there. “Have a seat,” I say, and pat the mattress beside me, but Mr. Anomaly looks nauseated and stays where he is, covering his shaft but feigning not to. I give him a moment to collect himself, chuck an extra set of drawers and shirt a
t him and wait for him to dress himself (he’s not so much to look at, a wee bit soft around the waist like a bride he is). As it happens we’ve collected some of Ned Alleyn’s fancier costumes from Dick Burbage, should Tristan ever have occasion to chat up the Court Witches, or courtly associates of Sir Edward, in nicer places. But Tristan was wearing his regular costume that day, so the fancier one was at hand, and I gave it to this new fella. Such a mess he made of putting it on, you’d think he was from the Indies. “Can’t you lace a doublet?” I asked in amazement, and he doesn’t even seem to hear me as he’s trying to figure out what the devil to do with the codpiece. I barely keep myself from crying with the laughter, but finally we get him dressed, and then for the first time, a quarter hour after my hands have been all over him to help him dress, he looks at me directly.

  He’s not a bad-looking fellow but it’s city air he breathes a lot, I’m guessing, not like our Tristan, for his complexion is sallow like a hatter’s (although fashionably pale) and he squints a bit like a tailor. He carries himself well enough but unsteady he seems to be, as if a permanent amazement he is trying to hide. And his hair, Your Grace—’tis a thing best not spoken of, but I’ll speak of it anyway, as there is much worse to come, and as it enters into the narrative in a small way. The whole time we were struggling with the doublet his colorless limp hair kept straggling down over his brow and nervous he was in tucking it away.

  And didn’t I then remember a thing that Tristan had told me, concerning his unlovable colleague, Les Holgate: “He employs a surfeit of Product.” I’d no idea what he meant by it, but he’d said it as if revealing it was, of something important concerning the man. So I had pressed Tristan for an explanation and didn’t he say, “That means his hair is gelled until it’s hard and shiny as a beetle’s back. It is a kind of pomade that some in my time use.” Tristan, understanding that none of this “Product” or pomade would be Sent with him, had grown out his own hair and had it trimmed in accord with our fashions, so that conspicuous he wouldn’t be. But this fellow hadn’t done so much. And since his Product has stayed behind in the chamber whence he’d been Sent, wasn’t his hair now all over the bloody place and a court fool he seemed to be.