Staying Dead. Laura Anne Gilman

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      Wren hit the disconnect button, not bothering to say goodbye. Swinging her legs back down to the floor, she winced a little at their stiffness. Time to hit the gym—she had gotten a little too out of shape over the winter again. Too many of their recent cases had been deskwork, not action.

      She filed the thought under “when I have a spare hour,” pulled out the keyboard drawer and went to work composing and sending out e-mails to contacts, some human, and some not quite so, looking for any chatter happening in the Cosa Nostradamus.

      The one advantage to being part of a community that the majority of the world didn’t even know existed was that you didn’t have anywhere else to talk about what was going on. So the gossip network was tight, fast, and frighteningly efficient. She’d lay decent odds with her own money that she’d have a lead by lunchtime.

      Speaking of which…Wheels set in motion, she sat back and dialed the phone again.

      “Hi, yeah, it’s Valere in 5J. Medium sausage, and a liter of diet ginger ale. Just slap it on the tab.” She listened for a moment, laughed. “Yeah, you too. Thanks.” Taking off the headset, she draped it on its stand, running fingers through her hair to fluff it up again.

      Her mother’s photo managed to emit waves of disapproval despite the smile still fixed to her lips. “Ah, come on, Mom. Breakfast of champions, right? What’s the point of having a 24-hour pizza place on the corner if you don’t take advantage of it?”

      Besides, it was either that or leftover Thai from the back of the fridge, and she’d mentally tagged that for lunch.

      She had about half an hour before Unray’s buzzed with her pizza. Might as well make it a billable half hour. Pulling the ’corder out of her jacket pocket, she put it on the desk and swung the keyboard into position. With a quick, silent prayer that her moderate use of current while the ’corder was in her pocket hadn’t totally futzed the batteries, she hit Play and began to transcribe her notes, wincing a little at the static that had crept into the tape just because it was near her body.

      “Come on, brain cells,” she muttered as her fingers hit the keys. “Give me something I can use. Momma wants to wrap this up fast and have the weekend free, for once!”

      three

      The room was remarkable for being completely unremarkable. The walls were painted a soft matte white, the floor made from wide planks of fine-grained wood. The lighting came from discreet spots that directed attention rather than illuminated.

      There was one door. No windows. The overall impression was of endless space somehow made cozy. An architect had labored over the lines and arches of this space, a designer had meditated on the perfect shade of white for the walls and ceiling, a feng shui specialist had dictated the ordering of the floor’s wooden planks, the exact placement of the three objects which resided therein in relation to the door.

      It was for those three objects that the room existed.

      In one corner, reaching from floor to ceiling, was a simple green marble pillar, three feet around and seven feet high. Etched onto its surface were crude symbols that hadn’t seen the light of day for over three thousand years.

      In the opposite corner, an ebony wood pedestal was lit from above, highlighting a chunk of clear, unfaceted crystal that looked as though it had just been pulled from the ground, hosed down, and dropped onto that base.

      And in the farthest corner, two men maneuvered a low wooden tray set on wheels into position. It was a mover’s trolley, its bed covered with a quilted pad similar to the kind used for fine furniture and grand pianos. Another pad wrapped up over a four-foot by six-foot square, and was sealed with heavy gray tape. The hard rubber wheels moved soundlessly on the floor, despite the weight they bore.

      The two men were burly, but not brutish looking. One was perhaps forty, with graying hair cut short. The other was ten years younger, and completely bald. They wore simple white coveralls that had only one pocket in the left sleeve, too small to carry anything larger than a cigarette lighter. There were no names sewn over the chest: no logos, cute or otherwise on their backs.

      They finished adjusting the trolley, and the younger man knelt by its side, producing a slender but sharp-looking pocket knife from his sleeve pocket, carefully cutting through the tape, peeling it away from the pad and unfolding the pad from its enclosed prize. About the length of a small bench, the marble’s silvery-gray surface was marked and pitted, making the once-glossy surface look dull and battered. A smaller rectangle on the top surface looked as though it had been carved out and then filled in with concrete.

      “All this, for that?”

      The older man sounded disgusted. No one else was in the room, but his partner cast a worried look over his shoulder, as though expecting someone to appear there and overhear the criticism.

      “If the owner says it’s art, it’s art,” he told his older companion firmly. “Let’s just get it settled, and get out of here.” Personally, the object gave him the creeps. Hell, the entire place gave him the creeps. But he was a professional, damn it. He was going to act like one.

      A low matte black platform, installed when the room itself was built and unused until now, waited to receive its burden. The two men took wide canvas slings that had been hung on the trolley’s handle, and fitted them around two corners of the marble block. The younger man’s hand brushed the surface of the stone where the cement plug was, and he shuddered involuntarily, stopping to look down at his hand as though expecting to see a spider, or something else less pleasant on top of it.

      “Will you stop that?” the other man snapped. “Concentrate on the job. I don’t need you getting sloppy and dumping it all on me.”

      Stung, his co-worker glared at him, shook his hand out unobtrusively, as though to get feeling back into a sleeping limb, and counted to three under his breath, just barely loud enough to hear. On three, they heaved, and with a seemingly effortless movement and a pair of grunts that destroyed that illusion, the stone settled into its new home.

      “That’s strange. Wonder if it’s been hollowed out? I thought marble that size would be heavier.”

      “Don’t complain, man, don’t complain! And for God’s sake, don’t ask,” the younger man begged, his eye closed against the sweat that was rolling off his forehead. “We on the mark?”

      The stone was square on its base, with a full three feet between it and the walls on two sides; room enough for a person to walk around it, should they so desire.

      “Yep,” the other workman replied. “Perfect, as always.” It was as close to a compliment as they would get from anyone. They were hired via the company’s Web site, informed of the details by e-mail, paid by wire transfer, and never knew what any of it was all about. And they liked it that way. Some folk you just didn’t want to know any more about than you had to.

      Their work completed, the two rolled up the quilted pad and tossed it onto the trolley, pushing it out ahead of them as they left. They didn’t look again at the object they had delivered, nor did they pause to consider the other two objects already in place.

      No one waited at the door to show them out; they had been given their instructions before arrival, when they were assigned the job. They would walk down the bland, security-camera-lined hallway they had entered through, down a flight of stairs, and follow a row of lights through a basement maze that would deposit them through a four-inch-thick metal СКАЧАТЬ