Breaking and Entering
16
The forest that burst into existence around them one moment and four thousand miles later was like none Emily had seen. Dark and overgrown, twisted with ivy, it was so bewitching that she blinked several times to make sure it was real.
“Bernie?” she whispered to Hartgrave as he slipped his cell phone into a pocket.
“Leading Kincaid on a merry chase. Let’s go.”
Hartgrave’s watch around her wrist showed it to be six o’clock exactly, the time in the part of the world where they now stood. They had fifteen minutes if they were especially fortunate, thirteen if Bernie managed his average. But possibly less.
They moved as quickly as they dared from the clearing where they’d materialized, through a dozen feet of woods and down to another, larger clearing. In it stood a substantial house, half-covered with the same ivy, deeply shadowed in the enveloping darkness and encircled by a wooden fence.
She had visions of gingerbread and wicked witches.
Hartgrave pulled himself onto the fence, one arm outstretched, face twisted in anxious concentration. “Count out five seconds.”
Afterward, they stared at his cell phone for a sign that his signal had been picked up. It hadn’t. Lips pressed into a tight line, he pounded a fist on his creation, then stood up on the fence and (she almost couldn’t bear to watch) stepped straight off—half a dozen feet above the lawn.
“Give me your hand,” he whispered, standing in midair.
They crept over the lawn, stopping once so he could repeat the procedure and extend the conjured path all the way to a window. She risked a glance at the dark grass below and had to spend the rest of the time looking straight at Hartgrave, resolutely not thinking about falling and setting off the motion detectors.
Other worrisome thoughts were fast on the heels of the ones she’d stamped out. His tracking program couldn’t show them the house at a room-by-room level, so they knew only that two people were inside—somewhere. As they stopped at a second-floor window, she murmured, “What if there’s someone in this room?”
He shook his head as he pressed her hands against the house’s stone facade. “There won’t be anyone. It’s Crawford’s. ”
She was about to ask how he could be sure, but the magic fizzling under her fingers silenced her. His assumption about a protective spell around the house had been right, at least, and hopefully he was right about the room, too.
He convinced the window open and gave her a boost in.
As dim as it was outside, it was even darker in the room. But Hartgrave, gripping her elbow, set off with a fair approximation of confidence and managed to get all the way to the door without bumping into anything.
“Report in,” he whispered, pausing there.
Willi’s response was just audible from her position under Hartgrave’s ear. “Here. Plan proceeding.”
Seconds ticked by. Hartgrave’s grip on her elbow tightened. “Ballantine?”
“Here, here, was just going into a jump,” Bernie said, sounding harassed. “Keep your socks on.”
Hartgrave exhaled. He put his ear to the door, waited a moment and opened it with care.
The hallway was empty. So were the staircase and ground floor below, the entry-point to the basement—where the server lay hidden. As she treaded softly in Hartgrave’s wake down the stairs, she glanced at her watch. Nearly three minutes past six. They were running exactly on time.
Then she ran straight into him because he’d stopped dead at the bottom of the staircase. The door to a nearby room stood open.
A man walked out .
“Oi!” the wizard exclaimed, shock flashing across his face as he caught sight of them.
Whatever else he might have said was cut off as a burst of magic hurled him against the front door, Emily staring in shock as his body hit with a thunk . He crumpled to the floor and lay there, unmoving.
“What’s wrong, Jack?” A woman’s voice—muffled, probably by a door, but close and anxious. “Jack! Answer me or I’m calling the boss!”
Emily had no idea what to do. But Hartgrave, hoisting the man in a fireman’s carry, paused for only a second before saying in a voice heavy with an accent that wasn’t his: “Nuffink’s wrong. Went arse over tea kettle, ’at’s all.”
“Typical,” the woman replied, and said no more.
Emily tried to be happy about the miraculous recovery, but two questions weighed on her: How badly had they just hurt this man with curly blond hair who looked as young as her students? And did Hartgrave know him?
Hartgrave staggered to the wall by the staircase, and she roused herself. Every second counted, and the ethics of self-defense could be pondered later.
She pressed her hands against the wall. The illusion hiding the door to the basement disappeared with a speed either gratifying or disturbing, considering what it said about her state of mind. The doorknob gave way next, and they were in, creeping down stairs that mercifully did not creak.
As they reached the bottom, she risked a whispered question. “Is he ... is he dead? ”
“Alive.” He set the wizard down.
Relief left her light-headed, but it didn’t wipe away the unsettling—unwanted—feeling of sympathy for this Organization man. A few months ago in a different room, she’d been in his position.
Hartgrave, lashing the wizard to the far side of the staircase with a rope he’d pulled from his coat pocket, glanced up and gave her a what are you doing look.
“Behind you,” he whispered. “Hurry .”
Crud, yes. She whipped around and saw it—the computer server that allowed the Organization to track down and kill people, kill Willi’s wife. She had expected a hulking mass of electronics. Instead it was a narrow metal cabinet with no doors, a monitor up top and two stacks of black boxes the size of dictionaries below.
She rushed forward and immediately smacked into the outermost layer of invisible magic around it.
“It’s—God, it’s even more than—than I’d counted on,” Hartgrave whispered, voice shaking. “And we’re already behind schedule.”
Each barrier fizzed away at a good clip, but they’d been cast so close together, it would clearly take her more than ten minutes rather than less. She tried, she really tried to reach for anger, but panic set in. Their only hope was Bernie managing to hang on at least as long as he had yesterday. And far longer than this morning.
Hartgrave appeared at her side, adding his surges of magic that would stay under the radar and thus wouldn’t help much. She glanced at her watch: 6:09. Four minutes left .
A soft but unmistakable cry of alarm burst from Hartgrave’s earpiece.
“What?” he said in an urgent undertone. “What is it?”
She was close enough to hear Bernie’s breathless response: “He almost overtook me. I could see him coming in as I jumped out.”
Hartgrave swore. “That’s it—I’m pulling the plug.”
“No! And stop distracting me!”
Hartgrave hit the mute button on his phone. “Daggett, you must get angry. Do you hear me? Furious .”
But fear outflanked fury. Bernie might die. They all, for that matter, might die. The old reliable in the Inferno practice sessions, thinking of the Organization’s killing spree, now added fuel to the wrong emotion.
In desperation, she tried their other tactic—getting angry at Hartgrave.
This was his ridiculous plan, with bare-minimum help. Honestly, even one more person could have made a substantial difference, especially if that person had more staying power than Bernie. By insisting no one else be put in danger, he’d endangered all four of them.
Okay, that was working. She needed to keep doing that.
Jack, the wizard Jack: Surely there was something Hartgrave could have done short of flinging the man into a wooden door. Was his go-to reaction in times of stress always violence?
This hit a bit too close to home. Anxiety seeped through the cracks of her anger .
She looked over her shoulder, afraid she might find the wizard coming to, but he still appeared unconscious. Which, in truth, was also upsetting, bespeaking as it did the likelihood of serious injury. A few months ago, that could have been her.
What had Hartgrave been thinking that night? Could he have been trying to give her a concussion?
She glanced at him, deeply troubled.
Hartgrave looked at her, apparently misunderstood the source of her apprehension and said, “Don’t worry, he’s not getting free. Kincaid didn’t train him well enough. Doesn’t want the microchip staff to take him on if they all turn on him at once.”
The doubt that lay heavy in her stomach rose into her throat, choking off her reply. Kincaid didn’t train him well enough . Not “I doubt Kincaid trained him well enough.” Didn’t , full stop. Along with the reason why.
She stared at Hartgrave as if she had never seen him properly before. In the shadowed half-light, his angular face looked frightening.
“Daggett,” he murmured. “Are you all right?”
“How do you know that? Or which room is Crawford’s, or how to imitate that man’s voice, or—or even exactly where the server is located—how could you know any of that if you weren’t one of them?”
He staggered like he’d been struck. But no explanations spilled from his lips.
“You lied to me,” she said. She sounded calm. She had no idea how.
“No!” His whisper was fierce, desperate. “I didn’t tell you everything, but I never lied to you! ”
“Then you badly misled me,” she hissed, wanting to lift her hands off the barrier and shake him. “‘I’ve had a painful past, don’t ask me about it’—God, I’m such a fool .”
“Daggett—”
“How could you join them? What did you do for them?”
But she knew the instant she said the words—knew the quarter-second before he gave himself away by glancing at the server.
He hadn’t just invented a similar tracking system for himself. He’d made the original—made it for them.
“Daggett ... Daggett, I—”
Bernie’s voice cut in, wheezy and urgent. “Something’s wrong! I think Kincaid’s stopped following me!”
Two things happened almost simultaneously. Hartgrave’s cell phone, set to vibrate only, went off with an audible buzz. And a soft alarm pulsed from above, as if someone had just set off the motion detectors outside.
She looked at him in speechless dread. He fumbled for the button to unmute his phone.
“He’s here—get back home, Bernie, go, now,” he said. “Not you, Willi, I need you to keep those two away from here—we’re almost there—”
Upstairs came a sound that was unmistakably the front door banging open.
“Daggett, for the love of God, please get me to that server.” Hartgrave grasped her shoulder. “I’ll tell you everything when we’re safely out of here, I swear, but we must take this weapon out of their hands! ”
He spun on his heel to face the stairwell, a second alarm going off like the keening of a tornado siren. He must have just appeared on the Organization’s tracking program. Charging up. Preparing for battle.
And there, galloping down the stairs, was a man who could only be Kincaid. Silver hair, silver beard, silver spells bursting from his hands. His opening salvo hit like fireworks against the defense Hartgrave erected.
Hartgrave was right—they were close to breaking through to the server, perhaps as close as twenty seconds. But now she was choking on horrible uncertainty about the entire endeavor. What else might he have lied about? Did she even have the essentials of this situation right? Should she let him destroy the server?
But the moment passed. Madness! She couldn’t imagine a scenario in which it would be a good idea to flee back to Ashburn and leave the server with its deadly program still operating. Besides—there was no going back to Ashburn. Her life was in total disarray. She had nothing to look forward to now but a future of hiding from the Organization with a man she couldn’t trust.
With a howl, she kicked the barrier she was trying to undo. It was oddly satisfying, so she kicked at the next one in her way, and the next, and after that her foot swung clear through and she lurched into the cabinet.
“Hartgrave! I’m through!”
He and Kincaid were halfway across the basement, separated only by Hartgrave’s nearly see-through barrier. They pressed against it like a warped mirror image: the tall IT director in his well-worn black duster and the equally tall Organization director in a white trench coat.
“Do you ... Do you see a portable hard drive?” Hartgrave—already sounding overtaxed after just half a minute pitted against Kincaid. But then, he’d had hardly any time to gather magic to him—and Kincaid was so much more powerful.
“Small,” Hartgrave added. “It’s small!”
She cast a frantic eye over the two stacks of identically rectangular electronics, every second increasing the odds of imminent death. Small compared with what? Where was it?
Then she saw it, sitting on top of the monitor.
“Here!” she yelled over the din of competing alarms, holding up the storage device to squint at the label. “It says”—she faltered as she recognized Hartgrave’s precise handwriting—“‘locator backup.’”
“Put it back—” He doubled over, coughing. The moment he caught his breath, he said, “Container ... in my pocket—pour it—pour it over—”
Another coughing fit. She thrust shaking fingers into the coat pocket he’d aimed at her and came out with a cylinder full of a dull gray powder. When she’d covered the monitor, the stacks and part of the floor below for good measure, he gasped: “Here! Hurry!”
The second she reached his side, he took one hand off the conjured barrier protecting them and raised his palm toward the server.
“No!” Kincaid—looking not at Hartgrave but at her, his gray eyes piercing, his expression thunderous. “Stop this! You’ve no idea what you’re doing! ”
This gave her pause, despite the source. It was, after all, what she’d been thinking herself.
But even if she’d wanted to prevent Hartgrave from completing the task for which they’d risked so much, it was too late. The spell he aimed at the server engulfed it and the cabinet in white fire.
As abruptly as that, the cellar was thrown into near-silence. The soft motion-detector signal continued above, but the wailing alarm had cut off.
They’d succeeded.
She wished she felt happier about it.
Hartgrave put both hands back to defense, but he looked a moment longer at the carnage, a grim twist of satisfaction on his face. She glanced at it again and shivered at the sight of the melted remains, shimmering like a mirage through the barrier he’d erected to protect them from the heat.
“Take my arm,” he croaked. “Be calm.”
She did the former, but the latter had never seemed more impossible. She squeezed her eyes shut to block out everything—the fire, Kincaid, the face of the man she’d thought she knew.
“Can’t,” she whispered.
A coughing fit overtook him. “You can,” he said after that. “You must . Please—”
More coughs. His arms shook. If they stayed, they would die. If they left, they might be eternally stranded in the aether—assuming his fate-worse-than-death theory was right. She had to calm down.
The valiant never taste of death but once. The valiant never taste of death but once. The valiant —
“Are you ready?” he said, the question strained.
“Yes,” she gasped. Perhaps it would even be true.
On the other side of the barrier, Kincaid bellowed, “NO!”
But Hartgrave looked only at her. He tore one hand from the barrier, making a jerky movement that had to be an effort to pull in enough magic for the jump.
He’d half-dematerialized—past the point of no return, perhaps a tenth of a second from taking her with him—when she was wrenched from his grasp.