Besides dogs, the greatest impediment to a good night’s work was competent security. I kneed him in the face, sending him sprawling back against the security booth. He went for his gun and radio; I went for the Maglite and a word of power. “Tzain!”
The radio squealed and popped with a bang and a puff of smoke, surged well beyond capacity. The guard dropped it with a startled sound, his gun half out of his holster. I slung the Maglite like a club, bringing it down on his wrist, and then up across his jaw on the backhand. He pitched to the road like a ragdoll.
“Honestly… You could have just read your magazine and had your five hundred bucks.” I grumbled, picking him up by the armpits and dragging him around the back of the booth. We were guaranteed to be on camera. Whether or not the camera center guy was as motivated as Captain America here remained to be seen.
I tore the guard’s shirt up and used it to tie him hand and foot to the railing behind the booth, blind and gagged. Then, I finished my frisk, took his keys, and left him to stew. Today was not his day to die, but he was going to have one hell of a headache when he woke up.
That taken care of, I jogged down the ramp, getting my bearings among the forest of color-coded concrete pylons. I knew Maslak’s apartment number thanks to some strategic phone calls made earlier in the evening, but the blood was pounding in my temples and my gut was cramping, and I had to pause to search for cameras as I zoned in on the bay I needed. Eventually, I found the gleaming black Renault, parked between a Landcruiser and a motorbike. The garage was blessedly still and silent. Now it was time for the fun part: rigging the car with enough explosives to wreck the car and cause a big bang, but not enough to kill anyone.
First things first. I dropped down, and using my well-earned Maglite, had a look under the chassis to rule out exotic anti-theft features. Most nouveau riche had someone do up wards on their cars, and this one was no exception. On the floor just under the driver’s seat was a circle drawn in white paint. It had three concentric rings formed by the body of a snake that twisted around and held its tail in its mouth. An arrow outside the circle pointed to the right of the car. There was a six-pointed star in the center of the circle, and the planetary symbol of Mercury inside that.
Wards are essentially small magic circles that are pre-charged with energy. They are almost always protective magic, and the energy only discharges under certain programmed circumstances. White was the color of the Moon, which made perfect sense to me: The Moon and Mercury are planets associated with thieves and the protection of items against theft. If this ward had been consecrated with those two planetary symbols in mind, then the ward was fueled by emotion and concentration, the Moon and Mercury respectively.
I rolled out, had a look around, and then went back under to pull my glove off and hold my hand out near the design. It ‘fizzed’, and with some concentration, I felt myself connect with the cycle of energy. There was a silver and mercury talisman under the driver’s seat, the material anchor of the ward. It was charged by the focus, anxiety and day-to-day emotions of the driver. The talisman almost certainly contained a hair or a drop of Maslak’s blood. It was quite a nice little piece of magic… any thief who tried to steal the car would be unconsciously fueling the ward with their feelings and focus, making the magic more powerful. The same was true of anyone who tried to banish the magic, such as myself. By concentrating on it, I would make it more powerful and more resistant to deletion.
Wardbreaking was typically a case of opposites: black for white, Sun for Moon, Saturn for Mercury. I got out my travel kit of magical tools and dusted a few ingredients onto the oily concrete: gold filings, white lead base powder, charcoal and ground red pepper. I mixed them together, spat on it, and mixed it some more. It turned into a dark grayish paste that I daubed around the ward, encircling the magic with my own. The underside of the car hummed like a wasp’s nest, and as it did, I was able to search for the gap in its armor, the weakness that was always present in every static ward where the mark of the mage’s finger or brush ended the circle. The more I concentrated, the angrier the ward became… it was soon too close to triggering for me to continue, so I kicked the ground and focused on the sensation of my foot banging against the inside of my shoe to calm it down. When the heat laid off, I got my knife and made a small, moderately deep cut on the inside of my arm. Then I squirted mace on it.
The pain took my breath away, but it certainly drew my attention away from what I was doing. Writhing, cursing, eyes watering, I jammed my fingers into the remaining paste, felt out for the break in the circle, and swiped my gloved fingers across it. There was a small pop, more felt than seen, then the muffled sound of bursting glass from overhead. Ward broken.
The mechanical act of breaking into the car was considerably less exhausting than dealing with the magical part. I pressed my sleeve against my bleeding arm and used a rag to mop up my remaining poultice, then rolled back out and picked myself up. I was still alone.
Satisfied, I got a screwdriver and used that to pop the hood, then cut the car alarm cable with a pair of shears. I closed the hood hard, bracing in case an alarm went off. There was only the heaviness of still air. That meant that I could let myself into the cabin with a shoelace and get busy on wiring up the ignition. The keyless entry system he’d used was something new to me. After some poking around, I found a set of wires I wasn’t accustomed to finding, and got busy with tin snips, electrical tape, wire and a small tube of shake-and-bake explosive, the kind you mixed together from a powder and a liquid.
My next job was to siphon out some of the gas and use it to flood the car seats. After that, all that remained was to affect the appearance of magic, which I did by scribing the same Sun wheel sigil that had been burned into Vyacheslav’s chest on one of the pylons beside the car. The police wouldn’t know what it meant, but Maslak would.
The last step was the most dangerous. I hooked up the detonator to the radio box, locked up, and beat a hasty retreat, watching over my shoulder the entire time. The security guard was already awake, howling behind his gag at me. It wasn’t going to be any good to leave him there, so I pulled him off the rail – still bound, and dragged him to the basement entry door, unlocked it with his keys after some trial and error, and rolled him into the dark room beyond. I left the keys on the door handle. The police would find him easily enough after the fact, and he would be able to give a rousing account of his heroism against the six-foot, brown-on-brown Long Island goon who had, for some mysterious reason, let him live to see another day.
Chapter 8
Naturally, I desired to see the results of my handiwork.
I spent the rest of the night disposing of my equipment, one piece at a time. I filed the security guard’s pistol, pulled it apart and drove a big circle across the Brooklyn Bridge and back to throw bits and pieces out the window and into the water. Gowanus was always a good place to dump things; so was East Williamsburg. Everything went overboard: shoes, gloves, coveralls, wig. It was coming up on dawn by the time I was done. I used the last of the gas to drive to a friendly scrapyard, where I filled in a form under a fake name and sent my temporary ride to the shredder. Back to my blond, short, white-eyed self, I took the subway back to Gateway Apartments, set up in front of the office across the road with a newspaper and a cup of coffee, and waited for the fireworks.
At a quarter to eight, there was a dull crumpling sound. The road vibrated briefly under my feet in the split second before a dozen car alarms went off all at once down in the depths of the parking garage. I jumped up as people stopped, cars slowed, and the parking garage spewed a cloud of black smoke around the people fleeing the fire.