I removed the drawer and spotted Mr. Lawyer Man—Brad Maxwell, that was his name—in the hallway, between bathroom visits. He looked a mite clammy and pale, entering Makayla’s office. I followed before the door could close and offered him the drawer. He took it, looked inside, and blanched even more. To Makayla I said, “You will now give us all the access we need. Are we clear?” I asked.
“What happened to the accent?” she asked, as the lawyer placed the yucky drawer on top of the desk, moving as if it might explode in his hands.
I thought about that for a moment before answering truthfully. “I’m done using cute”—and my childhood—“to look harmless. So, again. Are. We. Clear?”
“Abundantly,” she said, flinging a heated glance at the lawyer as he rushed back to the men’s room. “The security footage is ready. Would you care to view it now?”
“We would,” T. Laine said from behind me. “And as Special Agent Ingram has just implied, any further hindrance to our investigation will be viewed as accessory after the fact, if not collusion, in what might be considered by the federal prosecutor as homegrown terrorism. Now. Areweclear?”
“Yes,” Makayla said. “This way.”
***
The footage was set up in security, and I watched as the hallway camera showed Tandy throwing me down, landing on me, and the debris shooting out. The lawyer falling back against the wall and sliding down to the floor. Colleen walking out of her office and later out the front door.
At that point, the video, which was all digital, went on the blink as she wrapped a witchy working around herself and walked through the advancing military crew as if they couldn’t see her. And they couldn’t because the spell made them not want to see her. It was called anobfuscationspell, and it worked like a doozy. She was gone.
I left T. Laine studying the footage, discussing various sections with JoJo at HQ, and walked back to the first basement. Something seemed off, but I couldn’t put my finger on what. So I did what agents were good at. I was very nosy. I looked into the kitchen and the bathrooms and the labs. There was a short-order cook in the kitchen, who kept breakfast foods, coffee, tea, salads, and sandwiches available all the time. I discovered that groceries and other supplies had been delivered to the front door since LuseCo had gone on lockdown. The bathrooms were set up with schedules. There were showers in the labs, also with schedules. There were three coffee lounges and sleeping areas with folding cots.
As no one had been allowed to leave, the employees had been given cots and had claimed different parts of the building for sleeping in shifts. The employees with no assistance for child care had been given subsidies, and LuseCo had hired a bevy of part-time nannies to care for the children at the employees’ homes. For a company that might be involved in an attack on Knoxville, they were taking really good care of their personnel.
I found the cot used by Colleen. She hadn’t taken the time to clean out her sleeping area, and it was full of personal belongings—which meant information. There was also a tiny spiral notebook, inside of which was contact info on all the witches in Knoxville, intelligence that was much more comprehensive than that given me by the HR department. I photographed and sent everything to Jo and Lainie, and again, the density of the records took time. Back in Colleen’s office, I did the same thing with the electronic data. And with the info from human resources. To be on the safe side, I also copied it all to a micro–thumb drive, which I hung on my key chain.
As I worked, I tried to think, but I wasn’t having a lot of luck with that. How did an investigator get a clue when she didn’t know what the instigating incident was? Or who it was aimed at? Or even if there was a deliberate crime, with motive and intent, or just an accident? But someone had shot at Occam and me a while ago, so someone wanted us out of the way. And Colleen had sent a bomb our way. I wandered back up to the main level, thinking.
While I was pondering the uselessness of my brain, there was a strangled scream close by. It was Shonda, who was standing in the open doorway of the office of the CEO, Kurt Daluege.I wasn’t the first to arrive, but joined a small group to see the CEO, who was standing on his desk, buck naked, facing the outside window, orating about going to space and seeking out the final frontiers for the fatherland. It was all psychotic-sounding gibberish until he said, “Pools and flows and dies in the land.” That was vitally important to the case.
He shifted his feet to the side, his body following as he turned around in a circle, slowly, slowly, his bare feet shoving papers and desk equipment to the floor while saying things about energy for all people, mumbling the name Midas, several times, and saying, “All the gold in the land will be mine.” Very strange things.
I got a good look at Kurt’s naked body, which was blotched with black spots, just like the patients in the hospital. Just like the neighborhood land and the hospital walls and the drawer in the office downstairs.
Kurt faced the doorway once more and his tone softened as he seemed to focus on our growing group. He held out his hands in a blessing and said, “It was lost to us, but it is ours again. Flows, flows, flows. Pools, pools, pools. Dead. All dead. All dead. Forever...”
I pushed my way inside, wondering what about this job and my life was making me see so much naked male flesh. But that was a discussion with the Almighty, if I decided to talk to him again someday, and with Soulwood—all for later. For now, I read Kurt with the P 1.0 and he was redlining. I called JoJo who sent in the military medics and carted him off, not telling me where they were taking him.
I rounded on Makayla. “Talk to me.Now. What was being tested. What wasInfinitio? And for the love of God, what went on? Or I swear by all that I hold holy, I will place you under arrest and this place will be locked down and under quarantine until the devil builds igloos in hell or the government nukes the place.”
***
The conference room was well appointed, with padded walls, a carpeted floor, and a table big enough to seat twenty easily. Makayla was sitting in the center of the table, a place she had migrated to without thinking, as if it was her assigned space at meeting time. She sat slumped, resting her weight on her elbows,and stirred the mug of coffee placed at her left by Shonda. I reined in my impatience and waited.
Eventually Makayla said, “Kurt and I had been working on energy and propulsion research and were making headway on a quantum vacuum plasma thruster. Real headway.” She met my eyes as if to convince me, which instantly left me unconvinced. “But Harold White and his team at the Johnson Space Center beat us to the first US working model. NASA showed interest in their design. We lost our funding.
“We were on the verge of closing our doors when Kurt’s grandmother died and he came upon some old papers in her attic. When he translated them, they proved to be the research notes of a coven in Germany, circa World War Two, testing a self-perpetuating magical energy device. With a little research, and interviews with the local coven, he discovered that covens all over the world had been testing similar workings before the end of the war, with special success in Britain and the US.”
“Witches weren’t out of the closet in World War Two,” I said, feeling a little muzzy headed from the blast. I sat across from Makayla and propped myself on my elbows.
The CFO sat back in her chair. “Long before they came out of the closet, witches all over the world were in contact. Had been for centuries, via private couriers, almost since the concept of writing. The SS in Germany discovered the existence of witches and covens during their early paranormal studies, long before the war even started, and they captured every witch they could find and eventually put them to work, including the powerful Rosencrantz family.” She waved a negligent hand as if it was ancient history and didn’t matter.
“Following a trail of coded letters, Kurt managed to acquire notes about self-perpetuating energy workings from eight covens from around the world, from the same time period, and he and Daveed Petulengo, our COO, hired Aleta to get us an interview with the local coven leader, Taryn Lee Faust. Together, Kurt and Daveed convinced the local coven to help with our research into a revolutionary energy source. The working is calledInfinitio.”
That was a lot of information to process, but even with my dazed head I got some important things out of it. Kurt had a lot of ancient research papers. A self-perpetuation energy device would totally revolutionize energy as we now understood it. A lot of rich people would lose everything if and when it becameavailable. And a lot of less-rich people would getreallyrich. All were reasons to help or hinder the research, depending on where people stood on the financial benefit/detriment line. Shonda brought me a cup of herbal tea, something red and aromatic and sugary. I thanked the woman. She was so sweet. Theyallwere. Which seemed odd for just a moment, before that thought slid away as unimportant. I stirred my tea and remembered what I wanted to ask. “How?” I asked. “How did he convince the local coven to help him?”
“Money. Lots of money that he was able to raise in South America and Europe, using the notes as bait. Initially the money was paid to the coven itself, as if hiring a subcontractor. He provided them a place to work that was totally safe and insulated from the outside world. He offered them shared patents, if they could makeInfinitioactually work, and ten percent of the energy company they would form together if they were successful.” She shrugged and giggled.“Money.”Her tone suggested that nothing else had any value.
I needed to talk to Kurt, but I had let the military cart him off. That was stupid of me. Very stupid. The CEO had started this stuff. The workings had been his idea. Now I needed to figure out why and how. “What happened next?” I asked, not thinking that there would be more, but Makayla was amazingly forthcoming.
“In the papers from Germany, Kurt found a similar working toInfinitio, a version stronger and more promising thanInfinitioalone. The working was calledUnendlich. It was supposed to be more than an energy working,” she said, “and we knew that the DOD would jump on it. But we needed the research to show promise fast, and that meant some form of testing that pointed to a possible successful weaponization of the workings, to garner some of the Defense Department’s budget. Those pockets are so deep they have no bottom. Not anywhere.
