Magic Ops
Magic Ops
Federal Agents of Magic™ Book One
TR Cameron
Martha Carr
Michael Anderle
Magic Ops (this book) is a work of fiction.
All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.
Copyright © 2019 TR Cameron, Martha Carr and Michael Anderle
Cover Art by Jake @ J Caleb Design
http://jcalebdesign.com / jcalebdesign@gmail.com
Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing
A Michael Anderle Production
LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact support@lmbpn.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
LMBPN Publishing
PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy
Las Vegas, NV 89109
First US edition, March 2019
The Oriceran Universe (and what happens within / characters / situations / worlds) are Copyright © 2017-19 by Martha Carr and LMBPN Publishing.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Author Notes - TR Cameron
Author Notes - Martha Carr
Books by TR Cameron
Other series in the Oriceran Universe:
Books by Michael Anderle
Connect with The Authors
Magic Ops Team
Thanks to our beta reading team
Nicole Emens, Mary Morris, Larry Omans, Crystal Wren, John Ashmore, James Caplan, Kelly O'Donnell
Thanks to the JIT Readers
Misty Roa
Diane L. Smith
Micky Cocker
Angel LaVey
Jeff Eaton
If we’ve missed anyone, please let us know!
Editor
The Skyhunter Editing Team
Dedications
From TR Cameron
For Laurel, my love, and Dylan, my life.
To those who have chosen to spend their precious time reading this work – thank you so much for joining me on this adventure! The stories we share fill in the spaces between us, linking us together in shared dreams for a short time, and connecting us as a community for all time.
Joys upon joys to you – so may it be.
From Martha
To everyone who still believes in magic
and all the possibilities that holds.
To all the readers who make this
entire ride so much fun.
And to my son, Louie and so many wonderful friends who remind me all the time of what
really matters and how wonderful
life can be in any given moment.
From Michael
To Family, Friends and
Those Who Love
To Read.
May We All Enjoy Grace
To Live The Life We Are
Called.
Chapter One
FBI agent Diana Sheen ducked under the yellow tape that secured the perimeter of the incident scene. A bounce in her step betrayed her excitement for what lay ahead.
One thing I can always count on is that the job is never the same two days in a row.
She’d caught her share of strange cases in the past, but this promised to be something special.
Magic is the ultimate wild card.
When a blue-clad patrol officer maintaining the outer perimeter moved toward her, she held up her ID and kept walking. She was often mistaken for a civilian. Her youthful looks and only slightly below average height caused others to chronically underestimate her. The leather jacket and boots she wore instead of the customary uniform might have contributed to the problem. She would acknowledge this to herself on a regular basis but would usually shrug it off.
Hey, I’ve gotta be me.
Diana’s target was about thirty feet ahead and near a V formed by two police cars. A gaggle of concerned people in suits peered at what looked like large sheets of paper spread out on the car hoods. Bystanders asked questions, and uniformed officers yelled answers in the crisp autumn breeze. Unfortunately, said breeze wouldn’t stop blowing her long black hair into her face.
She’d been a mile away, finishing up a guest-speaking session with the local university’s Intelligence and Security program, when the call came in. The darkly gorgeous gothic structure that loomed ahead was illuminated by replicas of nineteenth-century oil lamps that dotted its facade. A trip to the Antiquities Museum had been in her plans for months, but this wasn’t quite how she’d pictured it.
An afternoon outing, maybe a nice dinner after with someone interesting, but definitely not this.
Diana veered over the grass to intercept a tall man in an off-the-rack suit. The twilight was still bright enough to show the wrinkles in its unremarkable gray fabric. His tie was purple and his shirt crisp and white. His whole ensemble screamed “official.” So, naturally, she greeted him with a grin and a raised fist. “Rodriguez, fancy meeting you here.”
He returned the smile and bumped her fist familiarly as he fell in beside her. “Sheen. What are the odds?”
“I was at the U. You?”
“Physical therapy at the University med center.” He gestured vaguely over his shoulder toward the tall institutional office building that marked the corner of the campus.
The life of a Washington, DC, FBI agent was full of potential for injury. She grimaced and couldn’t remember a single time when the whole office was simultaneously healthy. “Do you know anything more?”
Rodriquez shook his head and his almost regulation-length brown hair flopped to the side. “Only what they said over the radio—hostage situation, vicinity response, special circumstances.”
She nodded. They both knew the code for magic. The two continued their trek toward the command post. They stopped and stared a woman down across a car hood. Her sharp suit and prominent gold rank badge confirmed that she outranked the other field officers. Diana tried to avoid inhaling the acrid fumes from the running motors as the agents reported in and asked the officer’s name.
“Thompson,” came the brusque reply. The woman’s voice was husky and reminded Diana of Kathleen Taggart in Body Heat. “A professor and his class were inside examining the museum’s special collection. At least two suspects entered, ejected the security guards, and locked the building down.”
“Any demands?” Diana’s flat tone betrayed none of the excitement her body had betrayed mere minutes before.
“None. Only crazy talk about how we’ve stolen things that don’t belong to us, how they’ll take them back, and how they’ll kill the class if we mess with him.”
She frowned. “’We?’ Who is
we?”
“I have no idea. Like I said. Crazy.” She twirled a finger next to her ear and exhaled a foggy breath into the chill of the October evening.
Rodriguez bent to examine the papers that splayed across the hood and finally recognized them as blueprints. “Are there any other people in the museum?”
The husky voice carried a note of tiredness. “No. It was closed due to the class’ reservation. Only guards and custodial staff were on duty. The professor teaches here every Monday.”
Diana put her hands on her hips and frowned. “It’s unlikely to be a coincidence, then.”
Thompson’s ponytail bobbed as she nodded. “I thought so too.”
“HRT?” Rodriguez asked. His finger pressed firmly on the front door access point on the blueprint while he fluttered his other hand over the rest of the schematics as though he could convince a better entry to materialize out of thin air.
The officer grunted. “More than thirty minutes away. Apparently, the backup team is training out of town and the primary was called to an incident on the other side of the city.” She raised dark eyes to look at Diana. “Before you say it, no. That doesn’t sound like a coincidence either.”
The agent dropped her hands to the car hood with a muted thump and bent to peer at the paper. “SWAT?”
“Wouldn’t you know it? Two separate calls. Our people at one, yours at the other.”
Diana shook her head. “This is bad.” She wasn’t sure if the comment originated from the situation, the access points, or both.
It’s all bad.
Rodriguez’s voice matched her pre-action excitement as he pointed at the blueprint. “The back door looks like the best way in. You said there are two of them, so if they’re smart, they’ll have eyes on it.”
“I said at least two,” Thompson corrected him. “There could be more.”
Diana had heard enough. “Can we borrow windbreakers?”
The woman nodded and a young patrol officer at her side darted away. He returned shortly with a pair of black coats with Police written in large white letters on the back. An older man followed purposefully, his hands in his pockets.
Thompson looked inquiringly at the officer.
“This gentleman wanted a word. He says he works inside,” he explained as he handed the jackets to the agents.
All the superior officers turned their gazes on the man. Diana slipped out of her leather jacket, set it carefully inside the patrol car through the open window, and pulled on the windbreaker. Rodriguez did the same.
Since neither agent seemed in a hurry to speak, Thompson took the initiative. “What do you know, Mister…”
His gruff voice matched his pocked complexion and stubbly face. “Beale. Stan Beale. I figured you might need to get inside and thought I should tell you ʼbout the tunnel.”
The agents spoke as one. “Tunnel?”
“This thing is ridiculous.” Rodriguez held the ancient ring up. It was easily as big as his palm and supported a cornucopia of metal keys that could have served as props in a gothic vampire film. His hands were barely large enough to hold the ring, his flashlight, and his pistol. Diana’s smaller hands only had to deal with her light and weapon respectively.
“Tough break, Rodriguez,” she sassed.
He rolled his eyes. “Come on. Let’s keep going.”
The brick tunnel was inky black, and the mini Maglites they carried sufficed to prevent tripping but didn’t offer much in the way of distant vision. The structure was probably twelve feet wide and a similar height, a throwback to a time when exhibits and artifacts traveled through the passage on the way to the museum to avoid potential theft. Now, the maintenance crew used it to stay out of the weather when they crossed from the museum’s warehouse to the main building. It bore a variety of earthy smells ranging from the dank of mold to the moist tang of clay and the less pleasant scent of rotting vegetation. All these mingled with the faint chemical odor of cleaning solutions.
They’d passed through two of the tunnel’s three doors. If the staff member was to be believed, the final door separating them from the museum basement lay somewhere ahead. The blueprints had marked the door sealed, but Beale laughed when he informed them that part of the job had never been completed. “Money troubles like everywhere else.” Given the man’s low status on the totem pole as a staff member, Diana couldn’t blame him for the amusement.
Being ticked at your employer is normal. Still, it’s worth remembering the attitude.
Rodriguez grunted to break the silence of their trek. A veritable beast grunted back as the echoes returned. “This tunnel is a lucky break.”
“Do you think it might not be?”
“They knew the museum was closed, and probably about the class. Why go through all the drama if they could have simply waited down here and stolen in during the night?”
Diana kept her voice soft and calm. “They can’t know everything. If they planned the robbery with the public schematics, they probably thought the tunnel wouldn’t work, the same way we did.” She pointed at the door ahead, then set her back against the wall outside the door’s arc. The position afforded her a perfect line of sight on anything it revealed when it opened. “There’s cautious and there’s simply paranoid.”
Rodriguez holstered his gun at the small of his back to free his hands for the mammoth key. He slipped it into the lock, grabbed the door handle, and nodded at Diana.
She tensed her finger to depress the trigger safety on her Glock 19M and whispered, “Three, two, one.”
Rodriguez twisted the key and wrenched the door open. She traversed her light and pistol in a Z pattern but encountered only crates and boxes. Most were neatly stacked to each side. Rodriguez drew his gun with a faint rustle and lowered the giant key ring onto a crate with a muted clank.
They advanced, covering one another, and cleared the room. The blueprints claimed the room’s other exit fronted a stairwell that rose to the main floor of the museum. Beale had given Rodriguez a much more reasonable keyring for the museum’s doors, but the knob turned freely in her hand. The door opened on oiled hinges to reveal the promised stairs.
The other agent could have been ordering lunch for all the concern he showed. “What’s the plan?”
Diana smiled. “Same as always. Go in and talk them down. If they won’t be talked down, try to shoot them in the leg.”
He chuckled. “What if they’re wizards or something?”
She leaned into the doorway to peer up the staircase. “Even better. Then we get to punch them in the mouth before or after we shoot them in the leg so they can’t do magic.”
Rodriguez’s shoulders shook with suppressed mirth. “Shoot them in the leg” had been a running joke since the academy. As a rule, they’d been trained never to aim anywhere other than center mass. Once he regained control of himself, he gestured for her to take point.
They crept up the stairs and emerged into a three-way intersection. A loud voice ranted nearby and filled the corridor ahead of them with echoes. Diana checked the crude map she’d drawn on the back of her hand. “It sounds like it’s coming from the main exhibit hall. Go straight, then take a left.” They stowed their lights. There was no need for them when the hallways were illuminated. When they reached the corner, a brighter patch of light stretched along the tiles to suggest the presence of a well-lit room beyond.
The insistent tone sounded male but was strangely high-pitched, more like an adolescent. Diana put her back against the wall and risked a quick look. Frightened students faced the rear of the building from where they sat in a line with black rope bound around their wrists.
She held her left hand to the side of her mouth and whispered as she turned to face her partner. “How many in the class again?”
Rodriguez held up five fingers, closed his fist, and raised four more.
“Okay. I saw five at the back of the room. The rest must be in front. Hopefully.” She pointed one finger at herself, then directed it to the left, an
d pointed two fingers at him and swung them to the right. He nodded, confirming her instructions to veer right when they entered. “Let’s listen in,” she mouthed. Again, he nodded.
It wasn’t that hard to focus on the ranting. Most people in charge of a hostage situation felt the need to monologue at one point or another. This perpetrator didn’t disappoint, and his voice carried shrilly from the vaulted ceilings and along the tile floors to their ears.
“You gather these things as if they belong to you or are objects to be studied, locked away, and admired. You are nothing but thieves, stealing that which belongs to the Oricerans.” His voice rose from an accusatory barb to a seething screech. “Worse, you don’t have the slightest comprehension what the artifacts are, what their purpose is, or who they are meant for! You appropriate our culture but do not even so much as appreciate it!”
She exchanged a glance with Rodriguez, and his face registered the same bemusement.
What the hell?