Advanced Mythology Read online

  “It is not me; it is the spirit guides,” Maria said. “If first they say it is south and now they say it is north, what of that? The spirits do not anchor themselves in the physical world. They give me the impression, the clue. We must seek on our own. I will tell you if we meet the true magic. It is here.”

  Beach, disgusted, flung himself to his feet and glared down at Maria. Stefan stood up between them; his five-foot-eight frame an inadequate bulwark against their employer’s six-foot-two. “She knows, Mr. Beach. She was much respected in the … old regime. She is genuine. Just because you do not like her answers does not mean she is of no use to you.”

  Beach threw up his hands. “I want answers, not impressions, Stefan. I’m not saying I believe in all this mumbo-jumbo. If it exists, I want to lay my hands on a source of genuine magic. If it exists. I’m still not saying I believe you. I could have gotten better results tossing a dart at a board.”

  “You must not doubt Maria,” Stefan said firmly. “Our … former … government respects her highly.”

  “If she’s so good why don’t you have … our target … already in your possession? Why would you need to work with me?”

  “Money,” Stefan said. “Maria is exact, but she finds by circling around her prey, like a cat. It takes time, and we could not afford the search on our own. So we are willing to share the fruit of our efforts. We have the same goal, eh?”

  “I doubt it,” Beach said. An expatriate Australian who had served in numerous U.N. peacekeeping missions, Beach had had a chance to see the vast difference between the haves and have-nots in the world. More problems could be attributed to the curse of capitalism than would ever make the headlines of any newspaper—after all, they were owned by organs of the rich. He had quit, taking his connections with him, and set out with a new goal in mind: To rid the world of pernicious Western influence. Money. There was too damned much money in this country, none of it flowing into the right pockets, the pockets of the people. Capitalism enriched the very few out of the labor of the millions. The world was overbalanced in favor of the big guys. Everette was proud to be part of the effort to right that balance.

  He had no trouble enlisting numerous like-minded, highly trained people to his cause. The main problem they had was the very one they were battling. In order to overthrow the moneyed powers, one had to have money. It’d be a nice irony once he succeeded, but a pain in the down-unders while he was working to achieve his goal. To get his stake money he hired himself and his force out for industrial espionage to the new superpowers, the mega-corporations, under the nom de guerre Dotcommunist. It told everyone what his eventual goals were. He liked the idea of weapons that didn’t rely upon billions in research and development. Stefan had come to him from the former government of an Eastern European power, a former satellite of the former U.S.S.R. His deposed masters had been on the edge, they said, of finding the source of supernatural power. Beach was intrigued. If his sources were right about what they were chasing, they’d have counterintelligence “equipment” that no technological power in the world could equal—or detect.

  It wasn’t that the West didn’t know that such things might exist. In response to a Russian effort in the 1950s, the US and other western nations had started chasing psychics and magic, but the effort had never gone anywhere, probably because the scientists working on the research been debunked, ignored, or laughed out of whatever chamber they’d had to go into for funding. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the east had never stopped looking, testing, probing, building on the scant evidence that had made them believe in supernatural powers in the first place. And then the Soviet Union broke up.

  The evidence the satellite states had that made them believe in magic was put away into vaults. Everette had seen some of it when he was stationed in the Eastern Bloc: A wealth of documents in an unfamiliar alphabet, written on parchment, leather and primitive paper in inks that laboratory tests showed was made from nut juice, soot, ochre and other pigments. In spite of the materials’ ephemeral nature, the inks had not faded and the papers resisted even the slightest crumble. That alone had excited scientists and scholars. They couldn’t pinpoint precisely when the documents had been made. They defied traditional carbon-dating, but the provenance, the chain of ownership, went back at least to the 15th century, if not before.

  But there was more. They had artifacts. They sounded simple: wooden knives that cut as well as steel, a box that kept food, even milk, fresh at room temperature indefinitely, and several other things. In Everette’s estimation, what they were looking at here was forgotten technology, like the architectural skills that had built the Pyramids, moved the trilithons of Stonehenge, not magic, but it was still amazing compared with modern electronics and inexplicable in the face of its great age. He was intrigued. He had never told anyone back home about what he had seen. Only when he left the Foreign Service, citing personal difficulties, did he go back and try to find the things and the people who knew about them he’d seen. The Eastern European governments needed money. Without Soviet money they’d been left behind by the rest of the world and were desperate to catch up. They weren’t willing to sell Beach their goods, but they allowed him access to them. His intention was to build up a spy ring, but only if he could get to the source of these things, if it still existed. The Europeans assured him that it must. They showed him more documents, written on modern paper. That told him that the creators of these goods must be somewhere around.

  There was more. He’d read contemporary accounts of people who claimed to have eavesdropped on voices heard in hollow hills and under tree roots. Most statements of that kind would be dismissed by skeptics as the ramblings of the insane or the attention-hungry, but they were remarkably consistent in kind. A few contained transliterations of what they had heard. Beach had put a couple of his linguists on the job. His first thought was that the subjects had overheard isolated spy installations, but they couldn’t find a correlation with any language they knew, nor did the spoken transliteration appear to coincide meaningfully with the written documents.

  Stefan had also produced Maria and her psychic gifts. Dowsing with a pendulum was her specialty, alongside occasional clairvoyance. She’d done a reading for Beach that impressed him enough to commit resources, at least for now. They had never convinced the skeptical Everette that they weren’t chasing rainbows, but that wasn’t his problem. If it was enough to get him to his goal, that was all that mattered.

  One might say he was a spy, but he was a sincere spy. Human nature being what it was, he assumed that everyone else was committed to the cause partly out of naked self-interest. He was taking a fee from Stefan’s bosses for a share in the results, true, but it was a tiny fraction of what he could earn doing corporate espionage for any of the enormous international corporations that were large enough to be considered countries in their own right without worrying about such artificial boundaries as borders. They did battle without armies, in the media, in the boardrooms and on the stock exchanges, destroying lives and depleting resources with the stroke of a pen or a computer key. He especially hated advertising. It was the devil. It told lies about inferior products to sell them to the hordes of feebleminded, hypocritical people who cared about nothing further than instant gratification, the satisfaction of the moment. Bleat, bleat, bleat about human rights, until you asked capitalists to pay more for a pair of designer sneakers because the underage, foreign child worker that made them only earned fourteen cents an hour, then they shut up quickly, not liking to be held accountable for their choices. Why with all its resources the United States, for example, didn’t have colonies in space at that very moment was that they couldn’t focus on the future because the pretty baubles of the present were too enticing to ignore, and their weak-spined government didn’t want to risk getting tossed out of office to pursue the issue.

  Everette pushed his idealism back. He was there to get whatever it was they were chasing, or destroy it so it couldn’t be used by the powers that
be. The West didn’t need any more advantages than it already had.

  But Beach wasn’t relying solely upon the powers of one unreliable psychic. He had a team of other operatives in this country. Some had been here for years, like his chief communications operative, just waiting to be activated. Ming Na-seh hailed from Sydney. She was now a naturalized citizen and a highly placed executive within one of the telephone companies. Others, such as most of his enforcers, had to rely upon tourist visas. Lying about seeking employment while within the borders of the United States, Beach chided them in his mind. Tch tch. Beach hoped that he could accomplish his mission before their visas ran out. He didn’t want to have to activate another shift.

  In the meantime, Ming was proving invaluable. She had provided the latest piece of evidence that brought Beach to the United States.

  Most of the newspaper-reading public had by now heard about a computer program being run by the Central Intelligence Agency called Carnivore. It scanned millions of e-mail messages and other electronic communications every day. It was supposed to be used only to inform the C.I.A. about drug-runners and other criminals, but self-interest being what it was, Beach doubted that they stopped there. With a combination of favors and cash, he’d staked a couple of young hackers to create a better program than theirs, which he nicknamed “Omnivore.” Capable of worldwide infiltration of the Internet, it scanned graphic and multiple language transmissions as well, and it excerpted the surrounding text of any reference it found.

  It turned out to be money well spent. Omnivore had detected e-mail messages containing that alphabet rocketing back and forth across the Atlantic. The gateway servers turned out to be of no help. They were supposed to provide the source location of messages, but his people were unable to discover the senders. They pinned down a part of Europe as the most likely point of origin. It was far easier to try and trace the American side of the correspondence.

  They had been lucky. The coding on the e-mail showed that both sides were using a smaller server gateway instead of one of the huge services. Ming had turned Omnivore to search for the name across all e-mails being sent. The closest she had come so far to pinpointing its location was somewhere in central Illinois. But here was Maria saying that the source wasn’t in the center of the state at all. Beach was frustrated.

  “Are you certain you aren’t sensing any magic?” he asked Maria again.

  The woman deployed her pendulum once more, swinging it out on its chain over the section of map. It reacted as though it had a mind of its own, though. Instead of describing a circle or oval, it leaped and hopped erratically. Maria captured it in her other palm, hiding it from the keen eyes of the two men. “There is nothing.”

  “Try again.”

  “I cannot,” she insisted. “The powers have stopped speaking to me. I must try again later.”

  Beach regarded her with exasperation. “We’re not here just to chase some linguist’s wet dream of a lost language. We’re here for the goods, if there are any.”

  “We will find it,” Stefan assured him. “When Maria finds it, she will know. She will be positive.”

  “Good! Then we will take our … advantage home with us.”

  “Be careful,” Stefan cautioned him. “You don’t want the U.S. State Department knowing what you are doing.”

  “Why?” asked Beach humorously. “It is not illegal for us to be in this country. We are tourists. It says so on our visas. Besides, they think you are Bulgarian.”

  “Perhaps we can go shopping,” Stefan said. “Since Maria must rest, I would like to look for things for my wife. She has given me a list of many things she has seen on the Internet. It would be good to bring her at least one of them.”

  Bourgeois. Beach rolled his eyes.

  ***

  Chapter 6

  Keith was almost buzzing with nerves by the time he followed Dorothy into the boardroom. He was excited to be back at Perkins Delaney Queen. The suite of offices hadn’t changed much since Keith’s last day as a student intern several months before, except perhaps to replace the modern art sculpture made of tiny pieces of brass and steel in the glass-walled foyer with another equally weird abstract construction of colored aluminum cut into elongated zig-zags. Keith thought of the graceful, curved lines of the Little Folk’s carvings and thought how well they could do in the mass market. Perhaps later he could drop in on a few galleries and feel them out. He had a few photographs in a portfolio of some of Enoch’s and Tiron’s latest creations. The works would sell themselves; all he would have to do is hold up the pictures and take orders. At the moment, though, Keith felt his mind sliding into “ideation” mode, ready to pop creative notions out one after the other. He hoped he could come up with something that would stick. Dorothy was counting on him.

  Dorothy Carver, her chic suit-dress of coral-red picking up warm highlights in her medium-dark complexion, introduced Keith to the men and women around the table. She deferred to the plump man at the head of the table. His very black hair was tousled, and his small mouth was framed by a neatly trimmed Van Dyke beard. “Bill Mann, president of Gadfly Technology Corporation. Jennifer Schick, vice-president in charge of sales,” was the slender, brown-haired woman with intense, blue eyes beside him. The tall man with the domelike head fringed with the remnants of bronze hair was “Theo Lehmann, head of engineering. Mr. Mann, you’ve met W. Jason Allen, our president,” she nodded toward the elegant, bearded, strawberry-blond man wearing an Ungaro suit and a collarless shirt at the other end of the table, “and Peggy Gilmore, our executive creative director; Doug Constance, creative director; Rollin Chisholm, art director and Janine Martinez, copywriter. Keith Doyle, one of our … freelance copywriters. And you know Paul Meier, who will be the group director for your account.”

  Keith grinned at Paul, a medium-sized man with black-brown hair and sallow-tan skin who had been Keith’s supervisor during his semester there. Doug Constance, about Paul’s age, had thick blond hair and a pale gray silk Italian jacket, both elegant and expensive-looking. By contrast, Peggy, a slim woman with light-brown hair, Rollin, a burly but muscular dark-skinned African-American, and Janine, tall and heavyset, were casually dressed. Everyone shook hands. Keith sat down in the empty seat beside Dorothy, perching on the edge of the chair, ready for whatever was to come. She gave him a warm smile, looking poised and ready. In the several months since the two of them had worked together she had grown in confidence. Out of a soft leather briefcase she took a sketch pad and a pencil, and Keith remembered that her artistic ability was one of the skills that had qualified her for the internship. She doodled when she was nervous. She didn’t touch pen to paper; instead she waited patiently for everyone to settle down.

  “Gadfly?” Paul asked.

  “All the good names were taken,” Ms. Schick said with a wry grin. Everyone chuckled. That was a good sign, if the client was willing to break the ice so soon. One of Paul’s current crop of interns from the boardroom up the hall took orders for coffee. Keith, who liked his very sweet, was glad to see no one watched him while he poured four packets of sugar into the cup.

  Bill Mann nodded politely as his coffee was set down before him, but he kept his arms folded while Ms. Schick dealt out sheets of paper to everyone.

  “Just a reminder that we can’t proceed until we have nondisclosure agreements from everyone,” Mann said. After a glance, most of the others pushed the sheets away or tucked them into their notepads, but a couple of the PDQ executives joined Keith in filling out the form. Keith read through the paragraphs above the lines asking for his name, address, and date of birth. The language of the document alarmed him with its threats of penalties, fines, legal fees and so on if he broke any of the clauses therein contained. He looked up. Paul caught his panicky gaze and nodded slightly, understanding his concerns without having to ask.

  “Standard boilerplate,” Paul said very casually. “I see the same thing every day.” Gratefully, Keith scrawled his name and pushed the paper toward Ms. Schick.<
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  Mann reached over to take the paper off the table, leaving the wide expanse of shining black marble open. Once the papers were collected and put away, Dorothy stood up and faced the clients with the same anxious expression she might have if she was about to dive off the high board into an unfamiliar pool. More than just her job was at stake. A big campaign for a big client could mean millions of dollars for PDQ. Failure might mean half the staff in the room could be looking for work within days. Keith found he was holding his breath, and let it out silently, not wanting to be the one to attract attention. Dorothy smiled at the visitors.

  “We want to thank Gadfly for giving us this opportunity to offer our services. We understand that your company’s primary focus is personal technology. That’s an exciting field. We have the experience you’re looking for to promote your product, and we have the numbers to prove it. We know that if you hire us we will give you the best possible exposure, and bring in the maximum number of customers in the demographics. PDQ can present advertisements in any medium, and we welcome customer involvement. You tell us what you want, and we’ll do it.”

  Mann and the others nodded. Keith knew from Dorothy’s hasty briefing that PDQ was only one of a dozen or more agencies that were being given an audience, and almost certainly not the first to present that day. The primary approach had been made to Gadfly by the upper management of PDQ. The real test that determined whether they got the account would come later.

  “So …” Allen said when the silence went on too long, “what is the product?”

  “One thing at a time,” Bill Mann said, his resonant voice slow and unhurried. “You know the old saying about how you only get one chance to make a first impression. We want your first impression of our baby.”