The SF Site Book Excerpt: In Golden Blood by Stephen Woodworth

In Golden Blood

Stephen Woodworth

excerpt courtesy of Random House

2
Wolves at the Door
   NATALIE LINDSTROM DID NOT RECOGNIZE THE CORPS Security agent who followed her to the movie theater that May afternoon: a man not much taller than she, of Southeast Asian Indian extraction, with slick black hair and sideburns. His gray suit seemed to blend chameleonlike into whatever background he passed.
   She sighed and pretended not to notice him as she purchased her ticket, for which she used one of the few credit cards she hadn't already maxed out. The N-double-A-C-C must be having higher turnover these days, she thought. They must also have instructed their people against becoming overly familiar with the Violets they were ordered to intimidate, for the new agents never spoke to her. She actually became nostalgic for the days when she at least knew the names of the three agents assigned to her: George Langtree, Arabella Madison, and Horace Rendell. George used to share pizza and gossip with Natalie during his surveillance shift, and had even helped rescue her daughter, Callie, from the serial killer Vincent Thresher. George had since quit Corps Security, while Rendell had evidently been killed by Thresher when the murderer kidnapped Callie. That left Madison, catty fashion diva, as the only agent Natalie knew personally.
   But there was one advantage to having these nameless rookies following her: they didn't know her tricks as well as the veterans and so were easier to lose when necessary.
   Chameleon Man proved no exception. Natalie waited until the theater had lowered the house lights, then took her seat during a scene when the screen went dark to make it difficult for the agent to see where she was. The movie was one of those three-hour-plus epics Hollywood seemed increasingly fond of, and she left to go to the women's restroom twenty minutes into the picture, the canvas bag containing her pantsuit and alternate wig slung over her shoulder.
   Satisfied that the agent hadn't followed her into the lobby, Natalie went into one of the stalls in the lavatory and changed into her suit. With no hair of her own, she easily swapped her blond wig for the chestnut brown one. Because her current clients demanded SoulScan readings to prove that her inhabitations were real, she'd kept her head shaved, enabling her employers to attach the machine's electrodes directly to her bare scalp and monitor the souls she summoned. Since she did not want Callie to be ashamed of being a Violet, Natalie no longer hid her violet irises on a daily basis, but today she needed to operate incognito, so she completed the disguise with a pair of contact lenses that turned her eyes a conventional shade of brown.
   As scheduled, the car from Daedalus Aeronautics awaited her in the cinema's parking lot—an unmarked black Cadillac. The moment Natalie emerged from the theater, the driver started the engine.
   Fifteen minutes later, they arrived at a tower of mirrored glass, home to the high-profile law firm retained by Natalie's client's company. After parking in the underground garage, they took a private, high-speed elevator up to the structure's top floor. At one time, such a ride would have made Natalie sick with fear about what would happen if the carriage suddenly plunged twenty stories. But that wasn't the fear that squeezed her stomach today.
   I shouldn't do this, she thought, not for the first time. The North American Afterlife Communications Corps had never forgiven her for quitting the service. You can forget about getting another job, Delbert Sinclair, the Director of Corps Security, told her at the time. He had made good on his threat. The Corps blacklisted her from seeking conventional employment, and she found that even temp agencies mysteriously turned her down when, in desperation, she applied for ordinary office jobs. The Corps also did everything in its power to keep her from obtaining freelance Violet work in the private sector, and if the organization discovered that her current job was not only unauthorized but also illegal, she could end up in jail. Or, worse, the Corps could take custody of Callie, forcing the girl to become a new member of the NAACC.
   Keeping herself and her daughter out of the Corps extracted an increasingly high price. Personal summoning sessions garnered a few hundred dollars here and there, not enough to feed and house a single mother and child. Natalie had already taken out a second mortgage on the condo as a debt consolidation loan, only to run up new credit-card balances to make ends meet when she couldn't hustle any under-the-table Violet gigs.
   She watched the number on the elevator's digital floor counter rise to twenty, wanting to blame someone for her present predicament. Sid Preston, that slimy reporter from the New York Post, had promised her six figures for a posthumous interview with the victims in the Hyland murder case. If he'd paid up, she wouldn't have had to bother with the likes of Daedalus Aeronautics. Unfortunately, the journalist wasn't satisfied with the headline-making revelations she'd provided. When she refused to collaborate with him on a tell-all book about the Corps, Preston welched on her. The modest advance he'd given her hadn't lasted long, so she had to scrape up what work she could. The Daedalus offer paid as much as a hundred sessions with little old ladies who wanted to talk to their dead husbands, so she took it, praying that no one from the Corps recognized her in disguise.
   Daedalus Aeronautics appreciated her discretion. The aircraft manufacturer, too, could lose a great deal if anyone discovered that it had employed Natalie Lindstrom.
   The company driver led Natalie into a large, dim corner office and shut the door behind her. The tinted windows that formed two sides of the room glowed with the sunlit panorama of the city twenty stories below them. Three people sat at an elongated table, silhouetted by the aerial view, while a fourth hastened to greet Natalie.
   "Ms. Lindstrom! Arnold Jarvis, Daedalus Aeronautics. We spoke on the phone." The man lifted his hand as if to offer it to her but shied from her touch, choosing to smooth his thinning hair instead. "Um, did you have any ...problems?"
   "No."
   "Great, great." He did not introduce the three people at the table—a blond woman in a shoulder-padded business jacket flanked by two men in dark suits. "Well, we know you're on a tight schedule, and we're all set to go."
   "So I see." Natalie circled around to examine the chair he indicated. Positioned opposite the long table, it resembled the chairs found in barbershops, only this one had been adapted for Sweeney Todd. Thick leather belts with metal buckles lolled from the chair's back, armrests, and footplate, ready to lash the writhing occupant to her seat. On a pushcart next to the chair rested an electronic device about the size of a microwave oven, six flat glowing lines tracing across its green monitor screen.
   A SoulScan unit.
   Jarvis took a coiled cable from the cart, plugged the jack into a port on the SoulScan, and fumbled to untangle the twenty jumbled electrodes at the cable's other end. "If you want to make yourself comfortable . . ."
   Natalie settled herself in the chair and removed the wig from her shaved head. She was anything but comfortable, though, particularly when it became clear that Jarvis had never dealt with either a Violet or a SoulScan before.
   "Ah! Sorry." He yanked off the first electrode he'd stuck to her scalp in order to position it more carefully over the tattooed node point.
   She twitched as the electrode's surgical tape tore at her skin. "Here, let me."
   Exhaling gratitude, Jarvis handed her the bundle of electrodes. She applied them with the help of a compact mirror from her purse, until her head resembled a bomb wired for detonation. The three backlit figures at the table watched the procedure without comment, even as Jarvis strapped Natalie to the chair with flustered clumsiness.
   When he'd finished, Jarvis turned to the SoulScan unit and smoothed his hair again, a puzzled look on his face. The top three lines of the unit's screen now jittered with Natalie's brain waves, while the bottom three remained dormant, awaiting the presence of the summoned soul's consciousness. "Um...the manual said something about a button. Y'know, in case of emergencies."
   Natalie extended the index finger of her bound left hand toward the glowing red disc on the SoulScan's control panel. Commonly known as the Panic Button, it could jolt the electromagnetic energy of the inhabiting soul out of her brain with a flood of electric current.
   "Only push it if I start to die," Natalie instructed Jarvis.
   He bobbed his head, blanching.
   "Do you have a touchstone?"
   "Huh? Oh ...yeah." He dipped his thumb and forefinger into the breast pocket of his dress shirt and pulled out a small plastic pouch. "They used this to identify the body. The National Travel Safety Board crash investigators summoned him with one just like it."
   Before she could object, he turned her right hand upward and poured the object onto her palm. Small and hard as a pebble, it glinted with yellow metal, like a nugget of stone laced with gold.
   But this gold happened to be a dental filling and the pebble a human molar, its roots broken off and its enamel blackened with soot.
   Natalie wanted to drop the thing, to shout that she wasn't ready yet, that she hadn't even started reciting her spectator mantra, but it was too late. Her fist closed on the tooth as if she'd just grabbed a high-tension power line, and the bottom three lines on the SoulScan screen zigzagged into spiky fangs of panic.
   The soul was already knocking.
   In an instant, Natalie forgot about Jarvis, about the office with its three silent observers, about herself. She now sat at the controls of an airliner, sticky with sweat, her breaths hot and rapid in the plastic cup of the oxygen mask that covered her nose and mouth. Through the dust pelting the windshield before her, she saw the plane's nose dipping as the cloudscape outside shifted to the right.
   Next to her, the copilot jabbered distress messages to air traffic control in between long drafts of oxygen from his own mask. From the cabin behind them came the shrieking of men and women, the yowling of a baby.
   With her thick, hairy-knuckled hands, Natalie pulled back on the stick, turned the wheel to the left, and pushed down on the left rudder pedal. The plane leveled off, but continued to yaw to the right.
   Tail rudder's out, she found herself thinking. Can I straighten out if I cut thrust in the right wing engines? Wait ...I tried that before.
   Natalie separated herself from the dead pilot's desperation long enough to realize what was happening. The pilot was replaying his final struggle in endless variation, confining himself to an eternal flight simulator in which he sought a way to rescue an airliner that had already crashed.
   Her objectivity restored, Natalie commenced reciting her spectator mantra:
   Row, row, row your boat,
   Gently down the stream.
   Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily!
   Life is but a dream . . .
   The repeated verse enabled her to retain consciousness while the pilot's soul inhabited her and, if necessary, to reassert control over her body if he refused to leave.
   In the meantime, she could share the dead man's thoughts and perceptions. He opened her eyes to discover Jarvis with his palm hovering over the SoulScan's Panic Button, his face more peaked than ever. "Ms. Lindstrom?"
   "Lindstrom? My name's Newcomb." The pilot righted her body in the chair, and Natalie groaned with him at the twinge of a pulled muscle in her back.
   That's gonna hurt, she thought. The epileptic contortions of inhabitation must have been particularly nasty this time.
   "Ah, Captain Newcomb!" Jarvis smiled. "We hoped you could answer a few questions for us."
   "Please ...drop the ‘Captain.' Call me Bill." Newcomb looked down at the female body in which he resided, at the leather belts that immobilized his limbs, then at the three figures who watched from the shadows on the other side of the table. "For the love of God, can't you people leave me alone? Haven't I already told you everything I know?"
   "That's what we want to find out." In his element now, Jarvis took a clipboard and pen from the pushcart's lower tier and checked off the first of several queries. "Could you describe for us exactly how the accident transpired?"
   Natalie could feel Newcomb wither inside her. They'd called him back from the dead only to have him relive the same horror and guilt that tortured him in his personal purgatory.
   He drew air into Natalie's lungs as if the room had suddenly become depressurized, and her voice became gravelly with his sadness as he spoke. "As I told you before...we were climbing at an altitude of about eleven thousand feet when we heard a loud thump and the whole plane shuddered. I thought something had hit us."
   One of the men at the table picked up a sheet of paper and bent toward the blond woman, tapping the page. "Collapse of the rear lounge area."
   She nodded.
   "When I tried to regain control of the plane," Newcomb continued, "the rudder pedals became stuck in the full left-rudder position."
   "And what did you do to try to land the craft safely?" Jarvis asked, making another check mark on his clipboard list.
   "Everything." Newcomb let Natalie's head drop back against the chair's headrest. "We radioed Detroit to clear us for a gradual descent and emergency landing. We almost made it, too. If I could have slowed us more after we touched down . . ." He couldn't bear to finish the thought.
   The blond woman consulted one of the papers the man on the left handed her. "Captain Newcomb, do you remember a preflight consultation you had with the maintenance supervisor in charge of inspecting your aircraft?"
   "Vaguely." The pilot remained distant, as if longing to disappear back into the void.
   "And did the supervisor confer with you about a problem that one of his ground crewmen had securing a cargo compartment door?"
   Newcomb sat up. "Door?"

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   "Yes." The blond woman read from the sheet in front of her. "The investigators have concluded that the cargo door blew off in flight. The rapid depressurization that resulted caused the aft passenger lounge to collapse, thereby severing hydraulic lines to the tail and incapacitating the tail rudder."
   The pilot shook Natalie's head. "He told me they had secured that door."
   "The door itself, yes. But a smaller vent door within the larger door remained open a crack, even when the crewman forced its latch into the locked position."
   The vehemence of Newcomb's denial increased, but Natalie could feel his fear tighten around her heart. "The cargo door warning light never came on. I checked it both before and during the flight."
   "Nevertheless, the supervisor alerted you to the problem and you agreed to let him sign off on the logbook to avoid delaying the flight. Isn't that correct?"
   "Yes." Natalie heard the screams of the passengers echo in Newcomb's memory.
   The blond woman folded her hands, a prosecutor's pinpoint gleam in her shaded eyes. "Captain Newcomb, are you familiar with the term ‘pencil whipping'—the deliberate falsification of airline safety inspection reports?"
   He sagged forward as far as the leather restraints of the chair would allow. "Why couldn't you leave me in peace?"
   Natalie ached with pity for him. It's not your fault, she told him in the mind they shared. They're trying to blame you, but it's their plane that's at fault.
   But she knew Newcomb would not be consoled that easily. Thanks to Daedalus Aeronautics, he now blamed himself not only for failing to save the plane but also for causing the accident in the first place.
   "I think we've got what we need," the blond woman told Jarvis.
   He glanced from Newcomb's stricken expression to the SoulScan's Panic Button as if debating what to do. Natalie knew she had to send the pilot away before Jarvis zapped both of them.
   You did your best to save those people, she reminded Newcomb, for whatever good it might do. You're not responsible for their deaths.
   Then she shifted from her spectator mantra to her protective mantra, the Twenty-third Psalm, and gently nudged Newcomb's forlorn spirit from her mind:
   The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want . . .
   Natalie regained control almost immediately; the pilot seemed only too eager to sink back into the Pit and be forgotten. When she opened her eyes again, Jarvis smiled at her with evident relief.
   "Ms. Lindstrom? Excellent work! Now, let's get you out of that chair . . ."
   She barely noticed him as he carelessly ripped the electrodes from her scalp and unfastened her restraints. Instead, she eavesdropped on the three anonymous figures at the table, who ignored her as if she were a computerized presentation screen that had just gone dark.
   "You really think this will shield us from liability?" the man on the left asked the blond woman.
   "Absolutely. If it goes to court, we'll pin it on maintenance and make it the carrier's problem."
   The man on the right, who had so far remained silent, pushed his eyeglasses back up to the bridge of his nose. "What about the vent door latching mechanism? Shouldn't we...?"
   "We'll issue a standard service bulletin," the woman replied. "If the airlines want to fix the problem, let 'em. Either way, we should be covered in case of another incident."
   "Incident." Was that what they called the killing of more than a hundred people?
   If another crash happens, I'll be as much to blame as they are, Natalie thought, and for a moment, she shared the full weight of Newcomb's guilt. But she couldn't tell anyone without exposing herself to prosecution, and Daedalus Aeronautics knew it.
   "We can't thank you enough for your assistance." Jarvis helped her to her feet and pressed a folded slip of paper into her hand. "For services rendered."
   She didn't look at the paper until she sat in the black Cadillac while the company chauffeur drove her back to the movie theater. A cashier's check, so it couldn't be traced directly to Daedalus Aeronautics or its law firm. Fifteen thousand. Not bad for a day's work. But not enough for selling her soul.
   Natalie removed her contacts and changed out of her disguise in the theater restroom and sat through the rest of the movie without really watching it. Immediately afterward, she let Chameleon Man tail her to her bank, where she deposited the check despite a nausea that nearly made her retch. At least she'd be able to cover the checks she'd already written.

Excerpted from In Golden Blood by Stephen Woodworth. Excerpted by permission of Dell, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.