Vortex Page 3

  “How much of this do you think is just the result of Burgess having the hots for Crystal?” Gavin said.

  “Well, at the very least, I suspect he’s not thinking as clearly as he would without the contents of that sweater staring him in the face.”

  Gavin chuckled. “When she said she was a ‘mystorian,’ I thought you were going to say something, um, pointed.” Karen shrugged. “I figured I might as well hear her out. But, really...‘mystorian?’ Burgess is thinking with his little head.”

  “Maybe. But we’re probably the last people who should be skeptical about much of anything at this point. I mean, after what we’ve experienced in the past.”

  “You mean, after what Burgess has put us through in the past?”

  “Yeah. That.”

  “Well, to be honest, that’s why I kept my mouth shut. I’m not as quick to dismiss the crazy stuff as I used to be.” She took a drag on her cigarette. “But at the same time, I don’t want to keep my mind so open that my brain falls out of my head. I have to admit, though, it’s pretty strange that there are people from Km Services in Mt. Shasta.”

  “What does the file have to say about Km?”

  “So far, I haven’t found anything I didn’t already know. All the details about the civilians they shot in Afghanistan, the criminal behavior they’ve engaged in over there while working for the Defense Department, their botched job of restoring order after that hurricane in Florida a few years ago, the female employees who’ve accused them of sexual harassment and even covering up incidents of rape among their employees, the lawsuits and charges, their bankruptcy, the fact that they changed their name from Quicksilver to Km Services. In addition to working for the Defense Department, they also do contract work for various corporations, the oil industry, the pharmaceutical industry and—wait, what the hell does the pharmaceutical industry need with mercenaries, for crying out loud? Anyway, all the usual stuff.”

  “Does it say what ‘Km’ stands for?”

  “No. And their website doesn’t explain, either. It’s a mystery, not unlike the fact that these guys aren’t all in prison. These are not nice people, Gavin. I have mixed feelings about dealing with them.”

  “Mixed feelings?”

  “Yes. Bad feelings mixed with worse feelings.”

  “Well,” Gavin said with a big, artificial smile, “this should be fun.”

  The word “cottage” was an accurate description of the house Burgess had rented for them. It had a rustic, almost storybook look to it—brown with tan trim, a neatly kept yard with ivy climbing a trellis on one side and a couple of plaster gnomes standing in the flower garden beneath the front window.

  “We’re going to be living in a Disney movie,” Karen said. “Do you think cute woodland creatures will help me cook and clean?”

  Gavin said, “If they do, we’re going to a hotel.”

  “I stocked the fridge with food,” Crystal said as she led them inside. She showed them through the house, then led them to the kitchen, where she hung her purse on the back of a chair at the round wooden table. “And there’s a freezer on the back porch full of meat. I hope I got things you’ll want. I’m a vegetarian and, like, I don’t know much about meat, but I did my best. I didn’t know if you were coffee or tea drinkers, so I got both. There’s French roast and Colombian and half a dozen different kinds of tea in the cupboard. Would you like me to fix you something while you settle in? Coffee or tea?”

  She made coffee while Gavin and Karen unpacked and put their clothes in the closets. The little house had only one bedroom with an enormous old cherry-wood bed with a beautiful canopy.

  “We get to sleep together again,” Karen said. “I’ve slept with you more than any other man I’ve never had sex with.” After they’d unpacked, they returned to the kitchen and sat down at the round table with Crystal, who’d poured their coffee and set out cream, sugar and artificial sweetener.

  “You didn’t have to do all this,” Karen said.

  “I promised Martin I would take very good care of you,” she said with a smile, “and I’m a girl of my word. It’ll be dark soon. I’d like to take you to dinner tonight. I can introduce you to a few friends. It’ll let people know you’re here and, like, get the word around, so people don’t wonder what you’re up to. I’ve been telling friends you were coming.”

  “You have?” Karen said.

  “Martin told me to. He was pretty confident that you’d take the job. That’s why he rented this place before he even contacted you.”

  Gavin smirked at Karen. “You get the feeling we’re being taken for granted?”

  “Martin would never do that,” Crystal says. “He loves you guys. He sounds like a kid talking about rock stars when he talks about you. He’s just, like... efficient.” She stood. “Shall I come back in about two hours and pick you up? I can show you around town after dinner.” She took her purse from the back of the chair, then said, “Oh, I almost forgot.” She reached into the purse, removed a manila envelope and handed it to Karen. “These are your IDs. Driver’s license, social security cards, everything you need to be a legal human in the United States. Martin also included credit cards in your assumed names, which you’re welcome to use while you’re here. And wedding rings, because you’re supposed to be, like, married. He wants me to take anything that bears your real names with me and put them in a safe in my house until we’re done here. Just to, you know, like, be safe.”

  “Who are we this time?” Karen said, taking the envelope. Crystal shrugged. “I didn’t look.” She headed out of the kitchen saying, “I’ll be back in a couple hours.”

  Gavin and Karen sipped coffee as they looked over their new identities.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Gertie sat at the desk in her bedroom and stared out the window at the new building that had been erected on their property. Her room was in the very back of the house. She found herself sitting at that desk a lot lately, watching the building and the people around it who came and went at all hours. It was getting dark, but there were plenty of lights set up around the building. The activity seemed to increase at night.

  Almost three weeks ago, several men had arrived in two large trucks. A few hundred yards behind the house—the only place Papa would let them do it—they’d poured a foundation and in less than three days had constructed the white, rectangular building now bathed in the glow of the floodlights. Boxes and crates had been carried into the shed and it had been hooked up to the well for running water.

  Gertie kept thinking of it as a “shed” because it had been constructed so quickly, but she told herself to stop that because it wasn’t a shed at all—it was twice the size of their large garage.

  The men had come at the request of Mr. Ryker, a tall, slender man with dark, graying hair, sharp features, and perfectly straight teeth that gleamed a brilliant white. He had rigid posture but favored his right leg and walked with a shiny black cane. He was quiet and businesslike except when he dealt with anyone in Gertie’s family—then he exhibited a pleasantness and generosity that Gertie did not trust. The men who worked for him snapped to attention in his presence and carried out his orders with the speed and intensity of soldiers in an army. Mr. Ryker divided his time between the shed and one of the two enormous motorhomes parked near it. They were the fanciest motorhomes Gertie had ever seen, two silver-and-black mansions on wheels.

  Gertie was not comfortable with all the activity that had been going on around her the last couple of months, but she knew better than to protest. Her papa seemed satisfied—and quite pleased with the rewards he received for cooperating with Mr. Ryker—and he did not like to be contradicted. Even though Gertie was in her fifties, Papa still treated her like a little girl. She didn’t mind most of the time, but in some situations, it was annoying. Like now. She wanted to warn him that something wasn’t right about the people who were spending so much time on their property now, but she knew it would do no good.

  She’d tried to warn him about the
creature now being kept in that shiny aluminum shed, too. That hadn’t worked, either. Papa was convinced that the thing she’d found eating one of their goats five months ago—the thing that had torn into her right arm—was the reason he had been so compelled to leave Germany and move here to be near the mountain before Gertie was born.

  She closed the book shed been reading and pushed up the right sleeve of the pullover sweater she wore. The bite had mostly healed, although it had hurt like hell for a while. It was going to leave a scar, though—an ugly scar where that creatures fangs had pierced skin and muscle. She passed her fingertips over the ugly impressions in her flesh.

  She went to the kitchen, where Mama was emptying the dishwasher. She looked so old as she bent down to take dishes from the rack and then put them in the cupboard.

  “Let me do that, Mama,” Gertie said, gently nudging her aside so she could get to the dishwasher. “You should have called me. I don’t want you bending down so much with your back in such bad shape.”

  “Oh, I’m fine,” Mama said with a dismissive wave of her hand. She took a seat at the small table in the kitchen. “I needed something to do to take my mind off of all this... fuss.”

  The “fuss” she referred to was the activity of the men who worked for Mr. Ryker. They didn’t come inside the house, but life in and around the Mahler home had always been very quiet, and their presence, even outside, was a disruption. Mama’s German accent was more pronounced than usual, which was a sure sign that she felt stressed.

  “Well, if nothing else,” Gertie said, “we have this nice new dishwasher and the new microwave and all the other stuff.” With another dismissive wave, Mama said, “But they’re here all the time. So noisy. And I worry about what they’re doing to that child.”

  “Remember, Mama, it’s not a child.”

  “Yes, yes, that’s what Papa keeps telling me. But when I look at him, I see a child. I can’t help it.”

  Gertie finished putting the dishes away and put a kettle of water on the stove to make tea. Then she took a seat at the table, where Mama sat with her elbow on the tabletop and her cheek leaning against her palm, scratching her temple with absent-minded worry.

  “I prefer to think of him as a child,” Mama said quietly, almost whispering. “Because if I don’t, then I have to think about what he really is. And I don’t want to do that.”

  Mama did not know about everything that was going on around the house, and Gertie knew she would be even more worried if she did. She wasn’t even sure if Papa knew everything that had been happening. He believed what Mr. Ryker told him, which Gertie thought was a big mistake.

  Unlike Gertie, Mama and Papa went to bed early and slept the night through. She was sure they knew nothing about the people from town who sometimes came to the ranch late at night and went into the shed. Nor did they know about the young girl who was sometimes brought to the shed in a black SUV and escorted inside, where she remained for hours. Gertie had seen the girl come and go several times, but suspected she’d been brought to the shed more often than that. She couldn’t be any older than twelve or thirteen and she was always accompanied by a stern-looking middle-aged woman. Whoever the girl was, whatever her reason for being there, she did not appear to be frightened or in any way under duress. Instead, she always looked rather... bored. And then there were the children.

  Gertie recognized the people from town although she did not know any of them personally. She didn’t know what their business was with Mr. Ryker and his crew and decided it was none of her business. They were, after all, adults. But the young girl was a minor. The woman who always accompanied her was built like a fireplug and never touched the girl or showed her any kind of affection or even familiar ity. Gertie did not sense a personal relationship between the two of them. It looked more like the woman was the girl’s bodyguard.

  The children, though—they were much too young to have any reason to be there so late at night. They arrived one at a time in an SUV and were led into the shed. But she’d never seen them leave. A couple of times, she’d stayed up until dawn; the people who brought them left, but the children never came back out of the shed.

  “I just hope this doesn’t get all of us into some kind of trouble,” Mama said. She and Papa had been children in Germany during the Nazi years. They rarely talked about it, and even then, they said little. But Mama’s eyes silently spoke volumes about that time in her life. They were talking now—this time about all the activity around their house, but the tension was the same.

  Gertie wondered what Mama thought about it all, if it worried Mama as much as it worried her. But she said nothing about it. Instead, she smiled, reached across the table and put her hand on Mama’s. “Don’t worry about it, Mama,” she said. “Why don’t I fix us both some pomegranate tea? Don’t worry, Mama, everything will be fine.”

  As much as Gertie wanted to believe that, she couldn’t. A tense feeling of dread had been growing in the pit of her stomach. She decided she needed to discuss it with her psychic.

  Ryker sat on the black leather-upholstered couch in the Vantare Platinum Plus motorhome with his arms outstretched over the couch’s back, right ankle resting on his left knee, body relaxed, face intensely focused on the woman seated in the matching chair across from him.

  Her name was Irina. No last name. Officially, she did not exist. Irina was a strategist, a facilitator, a problem solver. Her talents were many and her fees enormous, but she was worth every penny. She was always in demand and frequently unavailable, but Ryker had paid extra to bring her in on this and shed come in late, but he was glad she was there now. This was their first meeting since her briefing.

  She stood just under six feet and was somewhere in her early fifties, Ryker suspected, but could easily pass for a woman of 35. Her short hair was dark, her face striking and her body spectacular. The faint remains of an accent lingered when she spoke; Ryker suspected that, like her name, it was Russian, but it was difficult to tell.

  “It’s time to drop the incentives,” she said. She spoke quietly, forcing others to listen closely. “You’ve rewarded people for doing things we know they would not do for any reward whatsoever—turning over a spouse or a child—and it has worked. The next step is to drop the rewards. Make them do these things without compensation. If that works just as well, then you have succeeded at this level.”

  Ryker nodded. “I agree.”

  “I think you should have done that already. You’re too uncertain. It’s making you move too slowly. You know it works. The girl’s connection to him allows you to communicate with him effortlessly. If they aren’t already on it, your team should be working on physical compatibility. And working fast. If you’re hesitating in that regard, you are making a big mistake. That should be your first priority. That, I think, is obvious. You want to figure him out, yes, but the potential in mating him with the girl from Aquino is... spectacular. If it doesn’t work, nothing’s lost. But if it yields the desired result, it will make all this other work superfluous. And I know someone who can help you with it. The best mind in the world for this. He will be ecstatic. He’s in Switzerland at the moment, but he’ll come if I call him. He’s expensive.”

  “Call him. Get him here. Right away.” Ryker didn’t care how expensive he was. This was too big to worry about expenses. It would all be rewarded in the end, he was sure.

  “What about the owners of this property?” she said.

  “The Mahlers. They’re... not too bright. The father is into all kinds of New Age nonsense and came here because he kept dreaming about the mountain. He felt he was destined to be a part of some kind of revelation of the mountain’s cosmic significance. He sees this as part of that. It’s just him and his wife, both in their mid-seventies, and their daughter.

  “The parents are uneducated and the daughter is... odd. She went out on her own in her twenties, but that didn’t last long. Apparently, she had a very sheltered upbringing, and I suspect some trauma of some kind. Always been a lone
r, but she didn’t respond well to being on her own. She had some kind of breakdown and moved back in with her parents, and she’s been there ever since. I was a little worried at first because she’s an insomniac and she’s up at all hours. But she keeps to herself.

  “They seem perfectly satisfied with our cover story—that we’re a team of concerned researchers who specialize in the paranormal and we think they may have found something very significant. Of course, all the perks have been an effective lubricant. I don’t think they’ve ever had much of anything, so top-of-the-line household appliances, a new car and some cold, hard cash have made them very cooperative.”

  She smiled. “You do understand, don’t you, the magnitude of what you’ve stumbled onto here?”

  “Oh, yes. The possibilities are mind-boggling. And it’s all ours.”

  “But you must keep a lid on this or people will be killing you to take it away. This is... astonishing. I’m sorry I couldn’t come sooner but I was committed to a project in Dubai.”

  “I’m just glad you’re here now, Irina.”

  Chapter Four

  Crystal took them to a cozy but crowded Italian restaurant, and by the time they got there, Karen was starving. Several people at the restaurant, both employees and patrons, knew Crystal and greeted her as the hostess led them to a table. She introduced Karen and Gavin to all of them.

  “These are my writer friends, Susan McGee and Peter King,” she said. “They’re mystery writers and they’re staying in town for a while because they’re writing a mystery set here in Mt. Shasta.” After a few of those, they got a table and Crystal leaned across to whisper, “That should do it. It’ll be all over town by lunch tomorrow.”

  After ordering cocktails, they browsed the menu. They ordered their meals, then Gavin said, “I drank a lot of coffee to stay awake because flying makes me sleepy, so I’m going to have to excuse myself for a moment.” He got up and went to the bathroom.