The Scarlet Crane: Transition Magic Book One (The Transition Magic Series 1) Page 3

  Please. Please let us in.

  A grimacing babushka wearing a white head scarf, apron, and flour-spattered black dress swung the door wide and demanded, “Da?”

  “The police—Victor—told us to come here.” Tears of desperation filled Anya’s eyes. “He said you would help us.”

  The woman looked over Anya’s shoulder and frowned at the crouched figure that was staring at the sidewalk several paces away. “Who’s that?”

  “My mama,” Anya said. “Please, Victor said you’d provide shelter.”

  The old lady’s voice softened. “Not mine to give, child. But come inside.”

  * * *

  The babushka closed the door behind them and told them to wait.

  The entry opened into a large, empty dining room. The plaster walls were cracked, clean, and unadorned. The ceiling lights, covered by ivory glass shades, cast a warm golden glow and sparkled on the polished plank floor.

  Anya whispered, “Mama, smell that? Fresh bread! Even if they won’t let us stay, maybe we can beg some bread.”

  Her mother didn’t answer, her sweaty face vacant as if she’d retreated within herself.

  A small man in a dark suit and open white shirt approached them. “I’m Pastor Vasily Chuikov. I don’t believe we’ve met.”

  Anya repeated what she’d told the woman who answered the door.

  Pastor Chuikov leaned toward them and began firing questions, making each of them answer in turn. Names? Where from? How old? Were they religious? He didn’t ask about alcohol. Anya figured he’d was leaning forward so that he could sniff their breath.

  We stink so bad that won’t tell him much.

  The pastor finished his interrogation and straightened his shoulders. “You’re in luck. Several people left today and it’s early. We haven’t filled up yet.”

  He’s going to let us stay?

  “I’ll permit you to remain with us for up to a week. We provide two meals: breakfast and dinner. There are no men here, other than me, and no boys over 12. But you must follow our rules. No alcohol. No drugs. No fighting. You’ll have to shower tonight and every two days for as long as you stay. And you’ll have to sleep separately—we don’t allow adults and children in the same sleeping rooms.”

  Anya recalled the sharp sting of her mother’s slap.

  Fine with me.

  “You can stay here during the day or go out. If you do go out, you have to be back by six. No one is allowed in after six.”

  He looked at Anya. “How long have you been in Transition, child?” Hard to keep Transition a secret with lavender eyes.

  “About three weeks.”

  “Twelve is late for Transition, you know. Perhaps due to your nutrition. Anyone talked with you about it? About the risks?”

  “No.”

  Her education about Transition came from the streets. She knew she’d have to say certain words to make Transition magic work. She didn’t know what they were.

  Will he teach me how to use magic?

  “I’ll sit down with you first thing in the morning and have a talk. Transition can be very dangerous.”

  Shit. Doesn’t sound like it.

  The squat old lady returned, along with another woman in green pants and jacket with a white shirt.

  “Anya, go with tetya Masha to get cleaned up and get your dorm assignment.” The pastor nodded to the babushka, who reached out to take her hand.

  He looked at her mom. “Please go with my wife.” He nodded to the woman in the jacket.

  Later that night Anya lay in her bunk listening to the soft, deep breathing of the other girls in the dorm. Safe, full, warm and clean. And too excited to sleep. She’d seen three other kids in Transition, more than she’d ever seen in one place. Maybe one of them would know the words.

  This is my best chance.

  Washington, D.C

  The United States

  John snapped awake at four a.m. He wanted to get to Joint Base Andrews early. The FBI tech team was more likely to speculate before the Director arrived. He showered, called the desk for a cab, and headed out after grabbing a cup of black coffee from the hotel’s cafe. The cab dropped him at the main gate a little after six. A slurry of rain and snow was falling. He felt like he could poke the clouds with his cane and provoke a storm at will.

  He cleared security without challenge, although the guards gathered around to inspect his cane. Not so much for its potential as a weapon—although noted and appreciated—as for its totally badass dragon’s head.

  Bentley had arranged for a base hangar to receive the container from Hanoi. John called and asked for a car to take him there. Agent Stony Hill soon pulled up to the gate, driving a gray military pool car. He climbed in, and she headed back along Perimeter Drive toward a distant group of massive buildings.

  “Good to see you, Dish,” she said. “Overheard your call and volunteered to pick you up.”

  “Appreciate it. Is Marva already here?”

  “Nope. I wanted to get a head start. You know how the tech guys can be; won’t talk much with the brass around. And our beloved Director is pretty brassy.”

  “Never occurred to me.”

  Stony Hill. He’d once asked her about her name. It turned out that it had more to do with her parents’ smoking habits than the obvious pun.

  Just how stoned would you have to be to give your daughter that name?

  She stood about five-two and weighed maybe a hundred pounds. John thought her personality was closer to six-five and 200 pounds of fighting muscle.

  Stony said, “I figured we should touch base before we joined the group. You been good?”

  “Yup.” He smiled. “You still talk too much?”

  He’d been paired with Stony four years earlier. She learned fast, street smart and book smart. But he’d worried that her constant babbling disclosed too much about her thinking. Mostly it just drove him nuts. After several public arguments that became legend in the department, they’d agreed on a signal—John would rub his nose and she’d back her prattle down a notch. And he’d come to appreciate her chattering as an effective camouflage that led people to underestimate her. The verbal equivalent of his cane.

  She laughed. “Less than I used to. But feel free to pat your proboscis any time.”

  She glanced at him, “Jesus, Dish, you’re so old AARP has probably dropped you from their mailing lists. What are you now, eighty? You gonna be able to keep up?”

  He smiled and glanced at her hair. “I see you still coordinate your colors.” She wore a conservative black pantsuit and dark red pumps. Her brown hair sported bright red streaks; her nose a small ruby stud. Cute and sexy, with a dash of urban punk.

  “Just for you, John. And I have a brand new belly button ring. Wanna see?” She tugged at her shirt.

  John fought the almost irresistible urge to rub his nose and changed the subject. “You had a chance to talk with the FBI team yet?”

  “No. Just got there when you called. I’ve read the file, but there’s crap in it.”

  “Yeah.” John couldn’t tell her about the PRK connection.

  “Dish, something stinks. It’s horrible that Adams was killed. But the full court press? Nothing in the file explains the priority. What’s going on?”

  “You know all that I can share. We’ll see how things unfold, but trust me when I tell you the priority is justified.”

  The rest of the drive passed in silence.

  * * *

  Marva had commandeered an entire hangar. An open shipping container the size of a semi-trailer sat dwarfed in the center of the yawning space, surrounded by several scattered rooms assembled from eight-foot office partitions.

  Evidence techs in white lab jackets scurried back and forth. A blond, blue-eyed man with horn-rimmed glasses and an athletic build approached them with casual confidence. He extended his hand to John with an easy smile. “Mike Piper, the SAC. Welcome, Agent Benoit. Thanks for getting him, Stony.”

  “No problem,” Ston
y said. She’d apparently been there long enough to get acquainted with the FBI’s Special Agent In Charge, who, John noted, wore no wedding ring.

  “John will do,” Dish said, looking around. “You’ve had a busy night.”

  “Not so bad. Let me give you a quick tour and bring you up to speed, unless you want to wait for Director Bentley,” Piper said.

  “No need to wait.”

  They circled the container. The ghost of petroleum hung in the air, and mercury vapor lights high above flooded the area with a bloodless blue glare.

  “We’ve built a replica of the Hanoi hotel room. We’ve also constructed an investigation operations center, a conference room, and four forensics labs to process evidence on-site.”

  They stopped by the door of the room mockup. The tech team had faithfully reproduced the chaos and destruction John had seen earlier in the embassy photos. A bloodstain in the carpet spread from the desk chair.

  Piper spoke quietly. “Agent Adams’ body has been transferred to an FBI forensic lab. I have the detailed autopsy report in the operations room. He was shot with a nine mil round in his right shoulder, probably from a suppressed handgun. The wound was superficial but had been sliced open by a large knife. He was tortured and killed by multiple cuts from the same blade. All the cuts were ante-mortem; no evidence of passion or anger. It’s … ah … gruesome.” He paused, looked at each of them, and continued.

  “His left eye was cut out—found under the chair. His right eye was held open with tape from the desk. And he was castrated. They found his testicles under the chair with his eye. He bled out from a cut to the right femoral artery.”

  He paused to give them a little time to digest the ugly news. “Okay to go on?”

  It took a minute. Then John nodded, deeply unsettled by the cruelty of Quince’s death.

  Stony asked, “How was he restrained?”

  “Strips of torn sheets on both his wrists and ankles.”

  “How’d they keep him quiet?”

  “Mouth stuffed with a wash cloth from the bathroom, secured by strips cut from the sheets.”

  “So no one heard anything? Hard to believe.”

  “Yeah. But like I said, the shot was probably suppressed. Housekeeping found the body mid-afternoon.”

  “Any evidence they came prepared?”

  “None. It looks like they improvised.”

  “Signs of robbery?”

  “Yeah, but real or a decoy, we can’t tell. The pictures showed his wallet on the bed. No blood on it. No money in it. Tan lines indicate that he wore a watch, but no sign of it.”

  “Briefcase?”

  “Empty. But of course we can’t tell if something’s missing. It’d been wiped clean of any prints.”

  “Phones?”

  “Both his agency and personal phones were on the bed. No prints, like the briefcase. Can’t tell if the contacts, call history, or other stuff had been accessed.”

  Piper led them to the operations center.

  A half-dozen chairs surrounded a round table in the center of the room, its surface cluttered with half-empty coffee cups and donut boxes. Three sixty-inch video displays stood next to each other along a wall. Knife wound close-ups filled the first display; the second showed a montage of the hotel room photos taken by the embassy; and the third presented a map of Hanoi. A large cork board, blank, faced the monitors from the opposite wall, a silent homage to investigation techniques now past.

  “What other questions do you have?”

  Stony again: “Prints in the room?”

  “Fifteen people plus Agent Adams. No hits on any of the fifteen. None on his body.”

  “Fibers or other trace?”

  “Lots, but useless so far. They need a better cleaning service in the hotel.”

  John said, “All this is routine. Tell us something that isn’t.”

  “A couple of things. We caught a break with his iPhone. We’ve been able to pull his path from the location data.” He moved over to the monitor with the map and punched a remote to zoom in. A blue line traced a timed-stamped path through the old section of Hanoi. “Maybe Agent Adams was headed to a meeting. Regardless, something changed—he suddenly started moving faster in no obvious direction, then disappeared from one side of a block and reappeared on another. From there, based on his speed, he must have caught a cab back to his hotel.”

  “You mentioned a couple of things,” John said. “What else?”

  “The Hanoi hotel manager said all their rooms had a framed picture of Ho Chi Minh,” Piper said. “The manager noticed the picture was missing from Adams’ room. This was on the wall instead.”

  Piper pressed a button on the remote; the map was replaced with a framed abstract of a bird, drawn in heavy scarlet lines on cream-colored paper. Two lines formed a long neck that curved down to its body. A long bill jutted from the head. It appeared to be standing on one leg, with the other raised and obscured by a wing.

  “We woke a posse of art experts to take a look. They agreed it’s an abstract of a crane, but not a known piece. When we took it apart, we found this on the flip side of the paper.”

  Quaere enim avis replaced the image on the screen, handwritten in blue ink.

  “Handwriting analysis was no help. Can’t tell if it was written by Agent Adams.”

  “What the hell?” Stony asked. “Latin? What’s it mean?”

  They heard a commotion in the background dominated by Marva Bentley’s distinct voice.

  “Hang on,” John said. “We might as well explore this together.”

  * * *

  They returned to the front of the hangar to join Bentley. She shook Piper’s hand. “Good to meet you, Special Agent. Your director speaks very highly of you. I’m eager to hear what you’ve found.”

  She smiled at John and Stony, “I thought you might get here early. Have you been briefed?”

  “Yes,” John said.

  Piper gestured across the hangar. “Shall we move to the conference room, Director?”

  Bentley shook her head. “I’m not interested in a formal presentation. Let’s use your ops center and have a more relaxed give and take. And since you’ve already talked with Dish and Stony, I can save us some time—I’ve talked to your director and gotten your reports from him.”

  Piper’s face wrinkled in surprise. No surprise at all for John.

  “Not a problem,” he said. “This way.”

  Once back in front of the monitors he summarized the findings he’d disclosed earlier. John noticed that Piper stayed close to the facts. No speculation on where Quince Adams was headed the morning of his death or whether he’d made his meeting with the Hanoi source. Marva interrupted with questions that elicited more detail, but no new insight. Piper finished with the group standing in a wide semicircle around the display of the printed words Quaere enim avis.

  The SAC said, “I’m told it’s not the best Latin, but it roughly translates as ‘search for bird.’”

  “That doesn’t tell us much,” Bentley said. “Maybe it’s the title of the print.”

  This could drag on and go nowhere, John decided. Time for a little argument.

  He looked at the FBI Agent. “Are you telling us that Agent Adams ended a morning stroll a bit early, surprised a couple of sadistic thugs in his room, and got himself robbed and killed? Occam’s razor prevails—tragic, but simple. Is that all the FBI can offer?”

  Piper’s response was hot and immediate. “Wait a damn minute. As crime scenes go, this one is near impossible. Evidence collected a day late from half way around the world, handled by god knows who, stuffed in a container, dropped in the middle of Maryland with a few hours to work, and you’re saying we didn’t do our jobs? Bullshit! We—”

  Stony stopped him. “That’s not what Dish said. He said the simplest argument is a robbery gone bad. But I don’t buy it.”

  John pointed his cane in her general direction. “Convince me.”

  “Three things,” she responded. “First
, you don’t tie a guy to a chair and torture him if you’re surprised during a robbery. You run like hell. Second, maybe you look for money, but not the way this room was searched—takes too long. And third—”

  Piper waded back into the fray. “Third is the damn picture. I don’t believe in coincidences at a murder scene. Adams had to’ve hung the picture of the crane on the wall before he was attacked. It was an insurance policy, in case something happened to him. He hid it in plain view with a message that would mean something to us but maybe not the bad guys.”

  Stony squinted in annoyance. “Thanks for finishing my sentence, Agent Piper. I appreciate it.”

  Piper, still pissed, wasn’t done. “Don’t mention it.” He glared at John. “The DTS is spending a fortune on this investigation. Your director’s calling the shots personally. You’ve pulled in cross-agency and military support way beyond what’s justified by a robbery-murder. So, Mr. Occam’s Razor, the most likely explanation is that your agent was on some sort of spook assignment that’s directly related to his death. And if I had to guess, that mysterious something is called red bird or crane.”

  “That’s much more helpful,” John said. “And there’s something you don’t know that supports your analysis. Quince was a seminary dropout. He knew Latin.”

  Message received, Quince boy. A scarlet crane, paid for with your blood.

  He focused on Bentley. “Quince died as a direct result of his investigation. We have no evidence he made contact with the source. We don’t know how his attackers learned he was in-country or how they tracked him. Agent Piper’s most likely right in his interpretation of the picture. We need to pick up where Quince left off.”

  Bentley nodded and took a minute before answering. “Agreed. You and Stony have tickets to Hanoi tomorrow morning at nine. Find out what’s going on, and shut it the hell down.”

  Moscow

  The Russian Federation

  The next morning Anya rose early and followed her nose to the kitchen. She found tetya Masha kneading dough in a steamy kitchen. Two other women were cooking eggs and stirring kettles of oatmeal.

  “Dobroe utro Anya. Sleep well?” tetya Masha asked.

  “Da, tetya. The bread smells so good!”