Chapter 5: Intelligentia sine Sapientia

January, 1994

Brother Tyrone drove us through the streets of downtown Washington, D. C. as if he were a tour guide. He never let us get more than a car length and a half behind him. He never let any of the lights catch him on the other side of the intersection from us. And he kept to no more than five miles over the speed limit and often not even that fast. As he said, the area we drove to was a bit rundown but there were obvious signs of gentrification ongoing in the neighborhood. The building was a three story brick structure, half of which was remodeled to look like a townhouse that had been stretched and spruced up. The other half was remodeled to look like what it once was: a very old warehouse.

"As you can see, it is a bit rough down here," Tyrone said when we got out in front of a large, red loading bay door that was new enough that I was betting it had a better than even chance of stopping a tank from driving through it. Tyrone pressed a few buttons on a key pad next to the door and the door parted with a mechanical rattle. "Follow me in and then try to park next to me with enough space to open the doors fully. The rooms we want are in the basement and there will be a few brothers in residence who can help us move them."

We all got back in the vehicles and drove into the darkened interior. The first two floors of the warehouse side of things looked to have been gutted to provide a large space in which was very little. Three other vehicles were parked inside; a large box truck and two worn sedans. There were also several cabinets and lockers that looked like you would need a blowtorch to get into them and a desk behind which was a middle-aged woman in a pants suit of wine silk with suede boots of the same color. Her blonde hair was trimmed into a neat bob that left a very Slavic face glaring at us.

"Tyrone, vat are you doing bringing dis lot of trouble vit you?" she demanded sternly as we all got out of the vehicles, her gray eyes snapping with ire.

"Sorry Tascha, but this is something of an emergency," Tyrone said with a smile, his eyes twinkling. "Are any of the guys downstairs?"

"Da, dere are two. Broder Jericho is vorking on his research and Broder Antonio is cataloguing dat collection ve received last veek," she snapped, her eyes suddenly studying my face.

"Are any of them awake?" I asked, walking around the embassy Land Rover to peek in the back only to see two very angry faces glaring at me while they yelled that we couldn't do this to them. "Yeah. We need blindfolds before they see any more than they need to and certainly before we move them. Gags might be appropriate, too."

Tascha's eyebrows nearly disappeared in her amazement. "Vat haf you brought us, Tyrone?"

"Never mind. Call the boys up and tell them to bring blindfolds and gags and ready the interrogation rooms, please. We have a bit of work to do before the young lady is missed," he told her more firmly.

It was almost scary how efficiently three monks and two bodyguards blindfolded, gagged, carried down two flights of stairs, and bound to chairs four people. Brother Jericho was a large man who looked like he meant to go to a football camp and wound up at a monastery instead. He was a couple inches over six feet with a heavily muscled body sheathed in tight black jeans and a blue t-shirt that was screaming for help, it was so tight on his sculpted arms and shoulders. He had ash blonde hair and green eyes that sparkled with an impish wit. Brother Antonio was a wiry Hispanic kid not much older than me with a classic profile and dark good looks he tried out on me even as he was helping to manhandle our prisoners to my satisfaction. He was wearing a Jesuit cassock, which made the flirting more than a little disturbing.

"Hey, the Order doesn't require celibacy, chica," he groused when I glared at him for the third time.

"Well, I am not buying what you are selling so pay attention to business and keep your eyes where they belong before I decide I want one for a souvenir of my time here," I growled back, walking out of the room in which we stashed the last of our guests, the only one still unconscious.

The basement of the old warehouse was a cold, dank warren of concrete hallways and rooms that were often used for temporary storage by the archdiocese. The actual work rooms were in the sub-basement, the floor beneath the one we were in. Each of the impromptu interrogation rooms were about ten feet square with a stout metal door and a heavy lock on the exterior. There were no vents or windows and only bare light bulb sockets in wire cages for illumination. And I don't know if it was reassuring or scary that the metal chairs were welded to plates bolted to the floor and had rings specially made to loop handcuffs into them. Or that these "monks" had handcuffs aplenty for our purposes.

"With whom do you wish to start, Dame Alice," Edgar inquired when we were all out in the hall again.

I thought about it for a long second before walking to the third room, where the driver of their SUV was now cuffed to a sturdy metal chair with his gag and blindfold firmly in place. "I think we will start with this one," I replied quietly but sternly before turning to the monks. "Tyrone, I don't want you three being seen by these people in case we have to let them go. If they happened to have a good reason for following me around, I want to be able to truss them back up and drive away without them knowing who you are or where we went."

He smiled grimly. "Do you really think these are people we are going to be letting go?" he asked with a condescending smile, as if I were being naïve.

"Stranger things have happened in my life so stick with my program, if you please. And put oiling these doors on the list of whomever maintains this place," I snapped before pushing him out of my way and opening the door to the sound of moaning hinges.

I walked into the room and closed the door behind me. It was going to get very stuffy in that room very fast. There were desiccated bones on the floor from critters unfortunate enough to be stuck inside after the doors were closed. I walked over and pulled the blindfold off, stuffing it into my pocket, and loosened the gag, allowing it to hang around his neck. The older man blinked owlishly in the light and his eyes did a quick circuit of the room before settling on me, studying my every feature. He was on the down side of forty and was a little soft around the middle. His left eye was a little swollen and there was an egg on the back of his bald head. He had iron gray eyebrows over dark, dark brown eyes and very generic features on a clean shaven face. A face that was giving nothing away. "So, are we going to verbally dance around each other or are you going to tell me why you were following me? Keep in mind I have your three colleagues in rooms similar to this one and in similar shape: bruised but relatively unharmed."

A brow rose and he smiled. "I hear Australian below the English but the syntax and usage are not quite right for either. If you took my colleagues that means you took out one of my people by yourself, which means you are good. Very good. And from what our people have on you, you are very intelligent and very good at getting into and out of deep trouble with little damage. So, what I am wondering is," he rattled off with very little expression or color to his tone, almost as if we were sitting in an office or a living room having this discussion, "how did Alexandra McKiernan become an Australian heiress and Knight of the Realm?"

A few years ago, that would have rattled me. I would have gasped or paled or raised my brows in shock. I was a veteran of the game now, however. I have parleyed with Vampires and Demons and various other creatures with far more experience at rattling people than this admittedly good player of the game.

"And who, pray tell, is Alexandra McKiernan?" I inquired lightly, my hands behind my back and my posture relaxed.

He smiled again. "Your father would be very proud of you, my dear. You learned well and practiced what you learned," he replied sincerely. He looked up at me and shook his head. "You might be able to play it off with someone who never met your mother, but I had that honor and you are the spitting image of your mother. And I have known your father for longer than you have been alive. So, having said that, where do we go from here?"

I gave him my coldest smile and shook my head, pacing slowly around him. "I guess you didn't hear my question, and it is my questions that matter here. Neither you nor your friends in the other rooms will be leaving here with a pulse unless you can satisfy me as to who you people are and why you were following me and trying to distract me with extraneous nonsense will avail you not."

Those gray brows rose and his eyes darkened. "You would kill an unarmed and helpless prisoner? Have the last six years changed you that much?" he asked, looking deep into my eyes as if there were a book with the answers to his questions hidden therein. He blinked and beads of sweat popped on his forehead. We had not been in the room long enough for it to get that stuffy. He laughed bitterly. "You have grown hard, child. Harder than even the daughter of Sean McKiernan should be.

"To answer your question, we, my men and I, were asked by the Secret Service to keep an eye on you while you are here," he replied wearily, rolling his head as if to loosen it. "They read the State Department file on you and panicked. They were not sure you would not get into the kind of trouble that seems to follow you while you studied here for the next six months. We were supposed to be a sort of first tier of defense against assassination attempts, kidnappings, or anything else that would come your way."

My brow rose disdainfully and he snorted. "Yeah, well. How were we supposed to know Alice Spencer-Killdare was a highly trained and dangerous individual who could take care of herself?" he snapped, flushing with what was probably embarrassment. "Even after having read the file I wouldn't have credited you and your people with being able to pull this off. And where the hell are we? You have more than just the two bodyguards you left the hotel with helping you."

"That is not your concern," I retorted with a grim smile as I pulled the blindfold back out. I walked up to him and gazed into those dark, dark eyes. "What should concern you is whether I get the same story from the others. Because if I don't, my face will be the last thing you see ere standing before St. Peter." With that I slipped the blindfold back on. I didn't bother with the gag; the rooms were practically sound-proofed thanks to the thick concrete and the heavy, sealed doors.

A half an hour later, I found myself sitting in a small office that Brother Antonio used for his work. It was cluttered beyond belief with very little in the way of clear space to sit. The young monk hastily began shoving things carefully into various boxes and crates, slowly revealing six chairs scattered around the room at random. Tyrone, Edgar, John, Jericho, and (surprisingly) Tascha sat around Antonio's equally cluttered desk. It turned out Tascha was more than a secretary; she was the manager of the warehouse facility and was the boss of both Antonio and Jericho. Antonio's dark face blushed even darker the minute Tascha walked in and saw the disaster area that was his office.

"Every single item on the catalogue better match the register that came with this collection, boy, or you will find yourself in Outer Mongolia with the yak herders," she said severely as she sat down next to me, her accent suddenly much less apparent. "Now what the hell have you brought me, Tyrone?"

"Tascha, I would like to introduce you to Dame Alice Spencer-Killdare," he said grandly, his café au lait face split by a wide, mischievous grin. "You might know her better as Alexandra McKiernan, the Left Hand of God."

I glared at him, wilting his smile some. "That name and that title had better never leave this room or your mouths ever again," I growled direly. "Am I understood?" Seeing I was serious, Tyrone swallowed convulsively and nodded spastically. My eyes traveled around the room and received nods from everyone, even my very confused bodyguards. "And you should never have said that without checking whether it was news to anyone with me or not, dammit!"

Edgar frowned. "Am I to understand you are not Sir Eoin's niece?" he inquired crossly. Then his expression darkened. "And is he aware of this?"

I sighed. I knew it would be impossible to keep this from anyone who was around me for long. I guess I should have been glad it took more than a year for Edgar and John to catch on. "No, I am not Eoin's niece, strictly speaking, and of course he knows. He is the one who set me up with this identity when I needed to disappear from my old life. It was very convenient (as well as sad) that his brother's family in Australia died in the flooding six years ago and I had to be talked into taking over Alice's life. Eoin and Ambrose were both very convincing and I was out of options. Besides, I think I have done Alice rather proud; the Killdare family as well. Now, can we get down to business without any more of my secrets being aired, if you please," I replied, waspishly glaring at Tyrone.

He ducked his head away from my gaze and muttered, "Sorry." under his breath. He looked at his colleagues and told them how it was we came to be in possession of the bodies downstairs and what said bodies claimed to be. "So now we have to figure out if they are telling the truth or are very well coached in case Alice or her security caught on to them."

Tascha snorted. "This is easy," she said and pulled out the first cell phone I ever saw. Hey, it was 1994! And while Eoin and I were rich, wealthy people stay wealthy by not buying every new thing that comes out. I had a pager and that was good enough. She flipped the phone open and looked at the screen with a frown. "Sorry, no signal down here. Give me a minute; I will be right back."

She left the rest of us staring after her. "Was that a phone?" I asked incredulously.

Tyrone grinned. "You never saw a cellular phone before? I thought you were like richer than God," he jibed before turning serious again. "Kidding aside, what do you plan on doing if she comes back and says their story is legit?"

I flashed a raised brow at him. "Remember what I said before I went in to talk to the first guy? If their story checks out, Edgar, John, and I will be wrapping them back up and driving them across the river. There should be plenty of nice places to dump them over in Virginia and I can be back to the apartment in time for dinner."

"How did you know they would be something other than a minion to the Rudelles?" Jericho inquired, the first time he had spoken to me since we were introduced.

I shrugged, ignoring the confused looks on my guards' faces. "I didn't. Like I told Tyrone before I went in there, stranger things have happened to me."

Jericho smiled and nodded knowingly. "Now that I know who you are, I can easily understand that," he said compassionately, dark knowledge in his eyes seeming to suggest he knew more about me than I did.

"What the bloody hell do you mean by that?" John demanded, having caught the suggestion.

The large monk shrugged apologetically. "My apologies, but I am a researcher and the Warriors of God are a particular interest to me. I did not mean to imply anything untoward about your liege," he replied with a deferential nod to me.

I was about to ask what the hell he meant by that when the office door opened and Tascha walked in with a strange smile on her face. "They are who they say they are, my Lady," she told me with a strangely dignified curtsy before holding out a card and adding, "As are you. My contact says they belong to an obscure agency that works under the umbrella of the National Security Agency. Should you ever need these facilities again, give me a call. I am sure Brother Jerome and Brother Tyrone can get you anything you need but this is always a safe place to lay low or bring guests for private conversations."

Tascha Rachmaninoff (202)555-7777, the card said rather simply in gold letters on textured white card stock. Her turn from cranky older woman riding herd on a bunch of fractious boys to well-mannered society lady was strange, strange enough to draw raised brows from the men.

"Thank you, Tascha. I guess we won't take up any more of your time. Edgar and I will go rewrap the guests and we can be out of your hair," I told her graciously. Who knew when her offer of help or sanctuary would come in handy? I looked at Edgar and John as I stood. "Shall we gentlemen?"