Revenant Read online

  It was still early for rush hour, but the station was busy and we got a little turned around finding our train and buying tickets. Once we were on the metro, the ride was only a few minutes long. It almost seemed ridiculous not to have walked it, but we did have the advantage of being in a crowd and therefore harder to spot.

  We exited the metro outside the Cais do Sodré rail station, which had another breathtaking view of the river—when you could see it past the trains and the people. I was momentarily disoriented by finding myself walking through the ghostly hull of an ancient wooden ship instead of the halls of a modern train station.

  “I’d guess this used to be a shipyard,” I said.

  Quinton shrugged. “I’m not sure, but it would make sense. Right here where the river widens before joining the sea would be ideal and Portugal was, once, the greatest maritime nation in the Western Hemisphere. That required a lot of ships. You know—Vasco da Gama, Henry the Navigator, and guys like that sailing off and discovering India and Japan and a quarter of Africa, and so on. I’ve never really been able to figure out how they went from being the masters of the seas—the greatest navigators in the world—to this.”

  “What do you mean . . . ‘this’?” I asked.

  “Saudade—which roughly translates as ‘yearning.’ Maybe you haven’t been here long enough to notice, but there’s a sort of sadness to the Portuguese—especially the Lisboans. Sometime after the earthquake and the loss of Brazil and before the Great Depression, they began to look backward instead of forward. Terrible things happened and although they rebuilt, they didn’t spring back. There are still ruins of the earthquake here in Lisbon—like that church you saw from Rossio. Two hundred and fifty years later, the shells of buildings, the arch of a church doorway . . . They’re still as they were, not cleared away but not really memorialized, either. If you didn’t know what you were looking at, you might think they were just urban blight—people paint graffiti on the walls as if they were the remains of burned-out tenements in South Central L.A.”

  “No wonder all the history I see replaying here is of the gruesome variety.”

  “But the Portuguese are mostly friendly folks. They’re the sort of people who fix broken dolls for kids and make pencils that smell like orange blossoms and sing sad songs about loss and yearning in tiny bars on the beach where the liquor will kick your legs out from under you. At the same time, some believe there’s a ‘Sleeping King’ who’ll come back to make things right some day, and old women crawl a tenth of a mile on their knees to reach the shrine of Our Lady of Fátima. They’re an odd mix, modern and medieval and generous and sad.”

  “I wonder what your father has in mind for them.”

  “He may not have much in mind at all aside from snatching Soraia. I haven’t been able to figure out his larger plan beyond ‘sow chaos and reap destruction.’ I haven’t seen much sign of the paranormal, even though I know it’s a big part of whatever he’s up to. I think we may have destroyed a lot of his progress in that respect back in Seattle, but he’s been successful with the ghost boxes at least enough to plant one in most of his units. The way he manages to get information and set people up is uncanny, and I can’t think of any other way he could be doing it.”

  “You mean like the box that Sergeyev was stored in—imprisoned ghosts who act as spies and agitators?”

  “Yeah. But I can’t see ghosts like you can and it’s one of the things I need you for.” He seemed frustrated at acknowledging that he needed anything, and furious with himself. “I’m missing something—missing too much, obviously, if I missed his taking Soraia.”

  I was on the point of telling him to stop blaming himself when he turned to me sharply and started for the train station, saying, “We need the train to Cascais.”

  “We do?”

  “We won’t be going that far. Sam lives in Carcavelos. It’s on the coast before you get all the way out to the famous parts around Estoril—that area is full of fancy resorts for the wealthy for the most part and always has been. Carcavelos is more famous for its surf. The Tagus River still has an effect at that location, so the waves are a lot more defined. And it used to be a British communication depot, so there are still a lot more English speakers there than in most small towns in Portugal. Come on,” he added, urging me into the building.

  The station was sleek and modern inside, all cement and steel, but there were still bits of art here and there, like a row of giant anthropomorphized rabbits in blue suits rushing across the platform walls from the metro to the train station. It took a while to figure out which train we needed since there were several types of service. Quinton found a clerk who spoke excellent English and who explained the various trains running on the Cascais line and which one would get us to Carcavelos quickest. Then we had to purchase passes from a vending machine and go through various turnstiles and validate the pass, find our track . . . and miss our train by seconds. The next would leave in twenty minutes.

  We doubled back to a small food vendor selling a sort of spicy pork sandwich called a bifana. The smell reminded me that I hadn’t eaten since Seattle. I didn’t appear to be the only one who was ravenous: The area was busy and we were jostled by hurrying commuters and hungry customers. Several men with ominous clouds of Grey energy around them passed as well. I tried to watch them and figure out what they were up to or who they were, but I couldn’t guess. We received our sandwiches wrapped to go—which had caused some sighing as if there was no understanding the silly ideas of tourists—and I asked Quinton what he thought of one of the men and if any were familiar.

  “Haven’t seen them before specifically,” he said, “but they remind me of the guys from one of the units I didn’t work with at a certain agency. Mostly young agents from the KGB and Stasi, who suddenly didn’t have a job when the wall came down in Berlin. They were at loose ends, not particularly idealistic, but well trained and resentful of being unemployed. Most of them were willing to work for the highest bidder or the government most likely to let them emigrate. By the time I met any, they were middle-aged, cynical, and mean as snakes.”

  “Sounds familiar.”

  “If you mean they remind you of my dad, I’d say these guys were less charming and had limits even they wouldn’t exceed—which is not something I can say about Dad anymore. Not after this business. Who kidnaps his own granddaughter . . . ?”

  I had worked on parental kidnapping cases and I knew that there were plenty of people in the world who didn’t find the idea of snatching their own child, grandchild, niece, or nephew to be out of the question. Some did it for what they thought were altruistic reasons, like getting a child out of a bad situation when the law hadn’t. But most did it for selfish and often crazy reasons, like getting back at an ex-spouse, or believing that their methods or motives for raising the child would be better. Some of their reasons were less sane and far more terrible—which I hoped wasn’t going to be the case with Papa Purlis.

  “So, what would men like that be doing here?”

  “Europe’s in upheaval—at least partly thanks to Dad, but also just the circumstances he’s taking advantage of. Most of it seems fairly normal most of the time, but it’s a complex problem that’s widespread. There’ve been a lot of economic problems and those have bred a lot of social and political unrest—not just things like Ukraine, but smaller and surprisingly vicious. Guys like that always show up where the opportunity for violence or political or economic advantage is high. Right now, there are a lot of those opportunities. The Portuguese people haven’t been pleased with their government’s austerity measures—which seem to hit the taxpayers a lot harder than the politicians and government bureaucrats. They almost broke out in riots near the first of the year. That was avoided, but there’s still a lot of discomfort about the situation and that means there are people who are ready to use that turmoil and discomfort to their advantage—people who’d pay to have others make the situat
ion worse in strategic ways. That’s what those guys are—the hired guns.”

  “Do you think any of them work for your father?”

  “Probably, but they don’t know who we are. At least not yet. There’s no way of knowing which of these guys, if any, are in Dad’s employ, though, so we need to avoid them if we can. Just play tourist for now. They aren’t looking for a nice couple on their way to the beach.”

  I frowned, thinking as I ate my bifana. As a fanatic—and he was—James Purlis was willing to do whatever he thought necessary to achieve his goals. He hadn’t caviled at trying to trap and manipulate Quinton, nor had he been unwilling to harm—or possibly kill—his son when Quinton had refused to play along. Quinton had been monkey-wrenching his plans for a while and it sounded as if he might have managed to stop a few of Papa Purlis’s attempts at economic and social disruption. That would make Quinton a thorn in his side worth plucking out, but whatever Purlis was planning to do with Soraia was probably a lot bigger and more horrible than just using his grandchild as short-term leverage against his son.

  The sandwich stuck in my throat and I felt a lump of fear harden in my chest. It weighed on me for the entire trip, making it hard to appreciate the beauty of much of our route along the riverbank and out to the edge of the sea.

  The rails wove in and out of the riverside fringes of Lisbon, past developments dated by their architecture, including an area of swooping cement buildings that looked a little like leftovers from a world’s fair. We passed a stretch of churning water where the river clearly met the surging sea, creating a choppy band of waves even in the mild weather. A square tower of the same butter-colored stone as the castle above Alfama stuck out of the sea nearby. Our yellow-faced train rushed on, clacking and spitting sparks from the overhead wires.

  Once we were ensconced in seats as isolated as we could manage on the train, I prompted Quinton to restart the story he’d dropped in Lisbon.

  “So, tell me what happened. Your dad snatched your niece. . . .”

  Quinton let out a heavy sigh, the colors of his aura dimming and flashing red for a moment. “Soraia. Yes. Three days ago I picked up a message from Sam—that’s my sister. Her name is Samantha. Samantha Elizabeth Rebelo. She doesn’t use ‘Purlis’ or ‘Quinn.’”

  “I’m following you,” I said.

  “Sam married a Portuguese guy. Well, he’s half Dutch, but that doesn’t matter. Piet Rebelo. His dad was with the diplomatic corps and they met while she was taking care of our grandparents in Rhode Island and he was visiting some of his family that lived there—lots of Portuguese in Rhode Island. Piet is kind of like me—went into the family business in a manner of speaking. He works with one of the ever-changing EU trade-negotiation groups. Travels in fits. So . . . he’s currently out of town on business and Sam didn’t want to get the local cops involved in this because, while the Portuguese authorities are pretty serious about crimes involving children, she was worried about Dad’s government contacts hearing about it. She was afraid he’d find out through them if she’d reported it and maybe do something to her or Piet or the baby.”

  “Baby?”

  “She has a baby boy—Martim. He’s almost two and Sam was thinking about going back to work part-time. Soraia’s six, so she’s in school a lot of the time now and that makes it easier on Sam, but taking care of kids is a big job and Sam fears that if she calls attention to herself, Dad will find a way to spin it so she looks like a negligent parent instead of a victim. Neither of us thinks it’s a coincidence that Dad took Soraia right after Piet left town, so even if Sam had called him and he’d turned right around to come home, it would have been a day or more before Piet got here, and that’s extra time to Dad’s advantage.”

  “So your sister didn’t call her husband? That’s kind of strange.”

  “Not for Sam. She’s the supercompetent one. She rarely calls for help and she couldn’t even reach Piet initially. By the time I got in touch with her, she’d decided she didn’t want to let him know because he’d insist on getting the government and police involved. Sam believes that would play into Dad’s hands in a worst-case scenario and put her in a position of being unable to do anything herself. She doesn’t want to think the worst, but she does. Dad is up to something terrible.”

  I felt a little odd about the situation. On the one hand, Purlis was dangerous and crazy enough to do everything his children feared. On the other, going after him alone and without any help from the police was going to be rough. But this wasn’t a typical kidnapping, so Sam might have been right in feeling that the police would be more of a hindrance than a help. The most important thing was that there was a six-year-old girl in the hands of a man I thought wasn’t safe or stable.

  I nodded. “I wouldn’t put anything past your father.”

  “Me, neither. But the thing that worries me is that I haven’t been seeing much sign of the paranormal side of his project and I’m afraid Soraia may be why.”

  I frowned at him. “In what way?”

  “I have a bad feeling that whatever he’s up to is just waiting on some triggering event, and the timing of this makes me think Soraia is meant to be part of that.”

  I felt ill and fell silent, thinking about all the horrible things magic could make of a six-year-old girl. . . .

  SIX

  It was nearly five o’clock when we disembarked in Carcavelos. The houses were mostly plastered and painted in soft colors like smaller versions of the grand Baroque buildings I’d seen in Lisbon, but the town reminded me of Manhattan Beach, an upper-middle-class beach suburb of Los Angeles. The architecture and the light were totally different, but the laid-back surfer kids, the well-heeled family houses in yards filled with shaggy palm trees behind stuccoed walls covered in purple bougainvillea, and a practical but recent-model car in the driveway were entirely familiar. The sidewalks were stone tile here, too, and, as Quinton had said, the street signs were mostly plaques mounted on the corners of buildings at the intersections. Only a few major streets with no convenient location for such signs had the kind of signboards I was more familiar with. I also found it strange that the stop signs read STOP and not some other word.

  Quinton watched me puzzle over them. “It’s the universal traffic sign—everyone uses it.”

  I felt quite provincial for not knowing that and I think I blushed, but it was hard to be sure since although it was cooler on the ocean coast than it had been in downtown Lisbon, I could no longer kid myself that the air was less than warm. I’d been too long in the cool, moist air of the Pacific Northwest and had lost my California-girl tolerance of the heat.

  We walked around for a while, trying to figure out where Sam’s house was, since neither of us had been there and we didn’t have the convenience of a cell phone with GPS navigation. We found a shop that sold trinkets and books for tourists to read on the beach, bought a local map, and asked the way to the international school, which Quinton knew was quite close to Sam’s house. The clerk directed us to Saint Julian’s with a lot of hand gestures and English that wasn’t quite as good as his speed of spitting it out.

  We walked down the tree-lined Avenida Jorge V, past a long stretch of empty land on one side and houses on the other. An old stone wall painted with fading graffiti separated the pedestrian walkway from the vacant acreage that rolled lower than the street level. The area beyond the wall wasn’t cultivated or maintained except in a very basic way, so it didn’t seem to be a park. The tourist map identified the area as a former quinta—an estate in this case that had once been the vineyard and country home of a Portuguese nobleman. The school was housed in the old manor house, according to the tourist guide, so we were heading in the right direction. The slightly overgrown area and the trees made for a pleasant walk in the gently weeping music of the Grey—a gentler version of the sound in Lisbon—though I’m not sure either of us appreciated it. The magical energy of the area was less busy, swirli
ng like currents in a lazy stream and sparking light greens, clear blue, and lemon yellow, which was a relief after so much horror lining the streets of downtown Lisbon. The area was mostly ghostless, but I supposed that a place that had been used only for agriculture for a few hundred years hadn’t acquired the depth of life and death that towns and cities do.

  After a very long block, we turned and crossed the street to follow a smaller road into the residential area. The houses were all different from one another in size and grandeur. Some were huge, two-storied cubes with balconies that sat in the middle of massive walled yards, while others were narrow at the front and ran deep into a small yard like a shoe box. The only thing the houses had in common was plaster. Every house—even the few that were obviously built of stone—was covered in a coat of painted plaster under a red clay tile roof. One impressively large house and its surrounding wall were painted the same bright magenta as the bougainvillea that flowered in the yard next door, but most were painted in softer colors. Not every house had a wall, but it was common enough that those without were the noticeable exception.

  Sam’s house had a wall and palm trees, but I couldn’t tell anything more about the place from the distance at which we had paused. I sank a bit into the Grey, while Quinton kept an eye on the area in the normal world. The illuminated corona of Sam’s house was spiked with jagged red bolts of anger that seemed at odds with the gleaming bands of bright blue that curled around the house and yard and drifted up over the edges of the wall like a cloud. Streaks of black and white that looked like old barbed wire made paths around the outside of the wall, cutting through the blue only at the front gate in thin traces.