Secondhand Sorcery

Central Anatolia was a lush and hospitable land, compared to the moon. That was the best you could say for it. The hills went up and the hills went down, one after the other to the horizon and beyond, most of it in shades ranging from drab brownish-green to drab yellow-brown. The really lush spots, scattered around the landscape, had bushes or even actual trees, which Keisha assumed would have pretty green leaves in another month. Possibly the grass got greener too. She didn’t know. At the moment, it was all cold and dead.

Dr. Gus sat serenely in the parched grass with his eyes closed, ignoring the prickly stalks poking up between his crossed legs. Going by her phone, they’d been here for seven minutes, to the extent that there was a ‘here’ to be. His breathing was still slow and regular, but he was starting to take longer with each check, and it wasn’t just thoroughness. He was getting tired. They all were.

Hamp and Ethan stood off to one side, not talking, just taking in the scenery, and the scenery was about the same as the last four stops. There wasn’t anything left to talk about; every possible topic of conversation had been exhausted, usually ending in an argument. Tempers were short. None of them had had much sleep. Keisha had done more on less, and so had Ethan, but the other half of their party were older men in poor health. Their limitations were another source of tension in the group.

“Another source of tension in the group.” So dry, such clinical language. Like she was already writing up the report in her head, justifying their failure. But they couldn’t have been expected to succeed, with what they had to work with.

It was—she checked her phone again—10:09 AM, Wednesday, January 30th, 2013. Day three of the hunt for Yuri Marshall. His “retreat” from Ankara, such as it was, had taken him due east along Highway 88, leaving a trail as broad and plain to see as it was difficult to follow. Every ten miles or so, another eruption, another outburst, another little town or chunk of a city wiped off the map.

Sometimes there were tanks and APCs amid the wreckage, and the scene wasn’t hard to reconstruct: the valiant Turkish Army, or an isolated and confused fragment thereof, set up a checkpoint—possibly to catch Yuri, possibly just to control the flow of refugees and restore public order. Either way, a single boy driving down the highway could make out military vehicles long before they had a chance to pick him out from the general traffic.

When Shum-Shum came out, the guns started booming, but there wasn’t much risk to Yuri because the damn primeval halo fried the brains of everybody in reasonable range. The men at the controls stopped thinking about complex concepts like defense or even survival; their minds were full of flashing lights and bright colors and they wanted to make more. They turned their weapons on whatever will make the loudest and most satisfying boom, which usually worked out to the nearest large vehicle or building.

Sometimes they had artillery backing them up, which was worse because they couldn’t get a fix in a halo. Half of them held fire and retreated. The other half panicked and fired blind. The guns doubled Shum-Shum’s collateral damage while somehow always managing to avoid Yuri. Shum-Shum might have knocked the nearest misses out of the air, or created enough localized turbulence to throw the shells off course. Unclear. The carnage was immense and unsparing regardless, and when it was all over the boy had been slightly delayed by his need to find a new working car on the other side of the firestorm.

Not every battleground had soldiers, though. More than half were pure innocent civilian casualties. They’ve argued at length about what set Yuri off in each case, and finished the discussion no wiser. It might be that somebody tried to attack him when he stopped for gas or food. It might be that they caught him stealing supplies. Or it might be that he got bored, or lost his temper for no clear external cause. He was a teenage boy cut off from the entire human race, running scared and angry, and his only escape, however temporary, from the prison of his mind was to pull his big friend out and spend a jolly half-hour leading the cheer section in Hell.

And another red X appeared on their cheap paper road map, another data point gathered many hours after the fact: Yuri was here.

By the end of Monday they knew they were falling behind, chasing a quarry who had mostly clear roads to drive on and put up roadblocks of melted asphalt and shrapnel behind him. The roads between were increasingly clogged with frightened people they could do nothing meaningful to help, and while they stopped to clear a road or two Yuri was busy inflicting twice the damage ahead.

They spent Tuesday closing the gap with Tantrum Song. It was a good plan; however quickly Yuri drove between fights, he still lost time with his familiar, time they could make up in a car flying parallel to the road in their own personal whirlwind. The population he himself had stranded on the highway was usually enough to keep Song fed. They made terrific time, stopping only to confirm that Yuri was still following the highway.

At 1800, they discovered he wasn’t—the city of Erzurum, nine hundred klicks east of Ankara, was still pristine, with a heavy military garrison that opened fire on Song the moment they got visual. So they backtracked to his last atrocity, branched out from there. The Doctor got lucky and caught him in the act once, from extreme distance, and pointed them in the right direction. Some tiny village called Başbağlar, way the hell off the road, had been annihilated. They’d probably never find out why, they arrived at least an hour after it was done, and they stayed up till two in the morning trying to pick up the trail again.

When they didn’t find it, they fell asleep in the car, caught a few hours’ sleep. Keisha’s phone woke them a half-hour before dawn, and they continued the search, but with little hope of success. Now it was ten, and though they hadn’t said anything one way or the other Keisha had the feeling they would be done if Doc came up dry again.

Ethan had found a reasonably close tree to lean on, and dozed. Hamp looked like he was considering it himself, but decided against it. Which was probably wise; he couldn’t catch himself as easily as Ethan could. Instead he hobbled over to Keisha and said quietly, “I don’t suppose there’s any other tricks we could pull that I haven’t been told about?”

The question sounded wistful, not bitter, which she counted as major progress on his part. She hated to disappoint him. “No. I have my VRIL and Adesina, Ethan’s got Song, and Dr. Gus can do what he’s doing now. That’s it.”

“You sure he doesn’t have one too? He’s been in the business long enough.”

“He doesn’t. I’m positive. Clairvoyants can’t be emissors.”

Hamp shook his head like he was driving off a fly. “I know everybody says that. Who’s to say he didn’t find a way?”

“Every paraphysical theorist for the past thirty years.”

He scowled, but shut up—for a moment. After thirty seconds he piped up again, “And you’re sure the little punk can’t hide his tracks?”

“Yes,” she said, refusing to elaborate. She’d gone into detail on this same subject multiple times before, and it hadn’t helped.

“Look, I’m just trying to help,” he told her. She resisted the urge to mouth the words along with him.

“I know you are,” she said, without apology. She was still looking at Dr. Gus. Ten minutes now. She wondered if he hadn’t just nodded off sitting up. Should she poke him? At this point, they might be better off letting him rest a bit. They could all stand to rest, maybe in actual beds if they could find any, and rush off to the hunt again as soon as there was a fresh lead to chase. It didn’t feel good, simply waiting for death and destruction, but sometimes you had to pick the least bad option.

Only, she decided, this right here already was the least bad option. Yuri had done them a favor, traveling in a straight line. Now he’d wised up, or changed his mind, or something, and they had no better way of finding him than this. Everywhere he went, he jacked up communications and other infrastructure; if he struck again, and there didn’t happen to be a satellite or esper eyeballing the area, they’d hear about it days later as a rumor with half the details wrong. Last she checked, all the Coalition’s updates about Yuri’s location came from them—or, at least, all the accurate ones did. There was too much information flowing in from too many places, and not enough people to make sense of it all.

She got out her phone to check again, just for something to do, and found the area had no reception. Battery low, too. She hadn’t been charging it, because they hadn’t actually been running the car; it was only a box Tantrum Song could carry. They’d traveled halfway across Turkey on less than a quarter-tank of gas. If only food and water were so plentiful. Prices were already soaring, with people across the country emptying store shelves in anticipation of shortages. The last fifty years had trained them well. Attempts at rationing led to looting, and a black market, and as often as not the military or local law enforcement took an active hand in both …

The car door slammed. She and Ethan both looked up with a jerk, saw Hamp wasn’t around anymore. It took her tired, caffeine-deprived brain a second to draw the obvious conclusion that he’d gone to grab some rest in the car. She decided against joining him. He had a better reason than the rest of them to be irritable.

Ethan needed to be here to transport them, Dr. Gus was their radar, and Keisha was the only one who could visually identify Yuri, in addition to having a VRIL that worked in sparsely populated areas. Hamp only came along because he couldn’t serve any useful purpose in Ankara by himself, and because he was notionally in charge. He didn’t care to hang around waiting for somebody to put two and two together, remember he existed, and haul him into an office to discuss how much he knew about Project Belvedere, and when he’d known it. Instead he was off on the world’s worst road trip, looking forward to having that kind of conversation as soon as he got back. None of it was really his fault, and he knew he was an excellent scapegoat with no paraphysical talent.

Dr. Gus cleared his throat. “Contact. Very weak.” He tried to push himself to his feet, failed, and looked around for a hand up, which Keisha gave. “South and east, greater than ten kilometers. Too small and inconsistent to be an emissant, I think. I took some time even to convince myself it was real.”

Ethan looked wary. “Do the Turks have VRILs?”

“No,” Keisha told him. “Too easy to reverse-engineer. We keep those kinds of toys close and quiet, and the Turks know better than to try. But Russia doesn’t use them, either, unless some survived the purge.”

“I think that unlikely,” Dr. Gus said. “Or rather, very likely—but any who did survive would obviously not continue in service to the new Russian state.”

“They might have trained new ones,” said Ethan, sounding unconvinced himself. “It’s been five years, maybe they’re not so hung up on not being Soviet anymore. Maybe somebody’s a little nostalgic for the proletarian approach after all. It could happen, I guess.”

Keisha didn’t buy it. “No, it must be us. Or Coalition of some kind, anyway.” The US, Britain, and France had active VRIL programs, and modest training and supply agreements with trusted EU allies. Which didn’t add up to much; most European countries went for a couple of panic-button familiars they could treat like mascots most of the time. The thought of masses of ordinary people who could effortlessly bypass security like that gave them indigestion. Best to leave that to the big boys, and let them worry about its implications for a free society.

“Could be China. Technically.”

She didn’t even bother answering that. “Willing to check it out, Doc?”

“Perhaps that would be best,” he said. Whatever this was, it didn’t seem to be Yuri—but if they couldn’t find Yuri, this was worth knowing about.

They had to drive a little ways on the ground first, filling in Hamp as they did. He was fully awake and up to speed by the time their borrowed red hatchback took to the air in Song’s halo and sane conversation became difficult. The need to stay close to population, and Dr. Gus’s uncertainty about the destination, dragged the trip out. They landed a safe distance outside a modest town the better part of an hour later.

“I guess that’s Karakoçan,” Hamp said, squinting at the GPS. “Looks peaceful enough.”

“Who the hell’s going to bother coming out here to start trouble?” Ethan demanded.

“Us, apparently.” Keisha had her phone charging again, while she flicked through updates. Nothing reliable on Yuri or the other Marshalls. Fatima’s new Numenate bodyguard reported no problems, but they were moving her to a different hospital under a new name with a fake backstory, to be safe. Snowdrop was still active in the Ankara area, but less ambitious without the kids’ help. Mostly random terror attacks against NGOs, just so everybody got the message that the situation would not be allowed to stabilize.

Dr. Gus was meditating once again in the back seat. Ethan drove them around aimlessly, mumbling old zydeco tunes to himself until their mentor got aggravated enough to break trance and tell him to shut up. Karakoçan didn’t seem especially troubled at a glance; they passed a few army vehicles, but this was close enough to Kurdish turf that you would expect those to be prominent even in peacetime. The town had a large commercial district with tree-lined streets and shops that looked well-run, if not busy at the moment. Men and women went about their errands, walking briskly. Streets active, not crowded; people tense, not actively frightened. Reasonable, given the state of the country.

By and by Ethan pulled over. “I don’t know about y’all,” he said in low tones, “but I could go for some real chow, fresh and hot. We’ve got lira to spare, and the awning over there says ‘pizza’ in big letters; either of you want to find out how Turkey screwed that up?”

“Contact,” Dr. Gus said, prompting Ethan to sigh and gently thunk his forehead against the steering wheel. “Very slight, and mobile. Fifteen hundred feet, more or less. That way.”

The signature disappeared before they could catch up to it, but the Doctor had a good feel for its last location: one of the city’s many apartment buildings, a four-story block in white and powder blue. He was reasonably certain that it had been on the first or second floor when it disappeared. Keisha directed them to park outside, then wait. Two and a half minutes later, Dr. Gus detected another signature, coming from the same direction, and was able to pinpoint it: a tiny flying insect, fluttering from shadow to shadow before disappearing into a tiny crack in the building’s wall.

“You want to check it out?” Hamp prompted.

“You know it,” she said, breaking out her piccolo. They were close enough that a little mock-up midge would do, the kind of lazy construct you used for a quick snoop around the corner. It went in through the same crack the recent arrival used, and within sixty seconds found what she was looking for: three men lying on the floor, in postures that suggested they had fallen over. One had left a little smear of blood on the kitchen island where he hit his head going down.

She looked around a little longer, verified that two of the men were dead and the third was barely breathing. All three were dressed in casual street clothes. She considered hanging out to intercept the last visitor, then decided against it. It was the same sequence she might have used herself: a gas-based construct to knock them down, then individual attention to make sure. But the initial hit would be pretty lethal on its own. Besides, the midge was hardly built to stop an attacker, and she had no idea who these men were.

“Assassination,” she announced to the car as she left her construct to dissolve on a sunny windowsill. “There’s going to be one more. Can we track it back?”

“I already have a fair idea,” Dr. Gus told her, and Ethan put the car back in gear. They didn’t have far to go, just a little distance around the corner, to a smaller set of apartments in red brick. The Doctor didn’t quite catch the last bug coming out, but was almost certain it had been on the third floor, going by elevation. Another midge got them the rest of the way: a woman in a chair, pipe still in her hands, eyes closed in concentration. One more construct to quietly unlock the intervening doors, while Ethan made his way up under sovereign protocol with a handgun ready.

There was no fuss, no noise. They came down together inside five minutes. The woman—long skirt, blouse, headwrap, nothing unusual—only walked a little stiffly, and Ethan wasn’t much better. “ID says Kiraz Hoca,” he drawled, “but she’s feeling shy about the details.”

“There has been a mistake,” she said in good English. “I am a secretary.”

Keisha looked at Ethan. “Got her pipe?”

“The one she was using. Didn’t check for others, she was looking squirrelly and I didn’t want to take my eyes off her.”

“Miss Kiraz, all we have to do is show the right Turk that device and you will disappear forever. I just saw what you did with it. There are three dead bodies to account for. Can you give us a good reason not to turn you in?”

She ran her eyes around the people in the car. “You are American?”

“Numenate,” Hamp confirmed. “And I’m going to take a wild-ass guess here. Is your real name Cohen, or Goldberg? Friedman, maybe?”

“I am Kiraz Hoca,” she said coldly.

Hamp snapped his fingers. “Of course, it’s Levy. Right?” Her stare hardened further. “We can ask Mossad direct, if you want.”

Looking at the woman’s face, Keisha was suddenly very glad she didn’t have her pipe anymore. But Hamp had probably guessed right. Very few VRIL-using powers went in for this kind of out-of-uniform wet-work. “If my colleague is right, there’s no reason for us to be enemies. I don’t believe you mean America, the Coalition, or the Turkish state harm. But I do need some amount of cooperation, if I’m not going to turn you in. Were those three men Turks?”

“No,” she said at last. “Two Syrians, one Lebanese. Trying to start a radical cell among the Kurds.”

Ethan came around from behind her to look her in the eye. “Which is Israel’s business because … ?”

She was incredulous. “Do you have any idea what’s going on in this country?”

“Does anybody?” Ethan shot back. “It’s falling apart, basically. And now Tel Aviv is worried about people it doesn’t like picking up the pieces.”

Her expression immediately became guarded again. I can neither confirm nor deny … “Hamp, what do you think?”

“Miss Hoca, you know anything about Russian activity in the area?”

“I am a secretary,” she said at once. “For a petroleum company.” What she lacked in acting talent, she made up for with persistence.

“I do not think this is our concern,” Dr. Gus put in. “This woman may be Israeli, or something else entirely, but we do not have the time to spare getting to the bottom of it.”

“Turkey doesn’t need to turn into a regional free-for-all, boss,” said Ethan.

“There’s probably no stopping that now,” Keisha told him. “I say we walk away.” Ethan still looked mulish, so she added, “Whoever she is, she’s not Russian, and I doubt she’s working alone. Getting entangled with the local government to stop one covert agent won’t help us with anything.” And would probably raise awkward questions about their own business, at that.

“Let her go,” Hamp agreed. “This has all been one big waste of time.”

Ethan shook his head, but stepped out of her way, sweeping his arm to invite her back to her apartment. She took a few steps, stopped, and held out a hand. “What? What do you want, a tip? You got your ID back already, and I didn’t find anything else on you. You’re a secretary, remember?”

It was childish, and made them an enemy they didn’t need, but Keisha let him have his victory, and they drove away without harassing the woman any further.

The woman herself meant little, but like Keisha said, she probably wasn’t working alone. This was one small town in a backwater part of Turkey. There’d be others like ‘Kiraz,’ trickling past the borders, finding places here and there, pulling in violence from outside Turkey’s increasingly meaningless borders, while Turkey sent some its own out to trouble other countries.

They left town without stopping for the lunch Ethan longed for. The trail was cold again, and getting colder. Keisha was just going to ask where they were going when she, Hamp, and Ethan got text messages simultaneously. Only Hamp bothered to look, and mumbled something that sounded like “God damn it.”

“Tell me,” Keisha said in a dull voice, slumped over in the back with her head resting against the window.

“Well, the good news is, it looks like we found Ruslan,” he said. “The bad news is, it seems he’s been a very busy boy.”