Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

Playing Chechen

Max came out of the back patio’s scorching sunlight into the house’s cool dark shadows.

Garry, aka Gandolph, was in the kitchen, literally whipping up lunch. Max sat on a stool to watch his mentor in magic and counterterrorism whisk egg whites into a bowl-topping foam. The process was tricky, so he nibbled on some red grapes and kept quiet.

Gandolph finally looked up from under his salt-and-pepper eyebrows, now shaggy and quizzical when in his youth they had been devilishly peaked and cynical.

“Working two nighttime undercover jobs is putting maroon circles under those baby blues of yours, my lad.”

“Working two nighttime jobs up in the rigging, period, is putting circles under my eyes. One blink too many and it’s splat.”

“You are fanatically precise about the care and feeding of your equipment.”

Max grunted. “There’s been an ugly turn in the New Millennium situation.”

“The dangling dead man wasn’t enough?”

Gandolph turned to put the dish into the preheated oven. Cooking was his form of meditation, and he was damn good at it.

“Now they’re speculating the victim could be a Chechen rebel, or at least someone tied to them.”

Gandolph’s pudgy form (with time and retirement from the stage, the gourmet cooking had won the battle for Gandolph’s physique) whirled around to face Max.

“And you know this from—”

“A little bird.”

“Ah, your little bird, the redheaded PR chick.”

“Blond, temporarily, as you recall. She couldn’t know that I knew she was working on this PR assignment so I had to act, surprised. Damn! Why did she have to get hired on a project that I’m being forced to muck up? She is very proud of this New Millennium exhibition, thinks this could be the plum PR assignment of her career, and is afraid that things might turn really ugly and political.”

“And she went right to you for advice. Good thing for us!”

“Possibly.”

“What’s not to like about a tip-off?”

“One ugly fact. Not only has the murder drawn higher hotel security and the LVMPD’s attention to our little heist site, it implies that we’ve got a lot more to worry about than some greedy low-end would-be jewel thief. This might mean that if some terrorists plan to use this exhibition for a political statement, we’ll have the FBI all over the place as well. I’m supposed to nip a large and valuable cultural artifact from under the noses of hotel security, the Vegas cops, hidden anarchists, the FBI, and God knows who else?”

Gandolph set the oven timer and hopped up on another stool like a chubby adolescent bellying up to a soda fountain. He grinned.

“We always did our best work against impossible odds. You love ’em.”

Max grinned and ate another grape.

The grin faded fast as he considered how much this last, demanding, double-edged masquerade to infiltrate and topple the Synth was imperiling his long-held and deep love for Temple.

Maybe, he thought, it was high time to love impossible odds less and to spend his energy loving Temple more. Only a month more, surely. Once he was an inside man. Which he wouldn’t be without stealing the scepter. Which would damage Temple’s job performance.

Damn, sometimes there wasn’t any which way to go, including loose.