Page 48 of Concluded (The Bureau #13)

“I’m not sure. Sometimes I sense… a whisper. An almost-scent. Not enough to connect to, which is just as well. Without access to booze, I doubt I could hold them off.”

Achilles frowned in confusion. “What do you mean by that? Are they hostile?”

“Not necessarily. But some of them…. It’s difficult to be without a body.

So some of them try to shove themselves into one.

Fortunately, they usually can’t. The spirit of the living person takes up too much room.

A few of us, though, we’re susceptible. It’s easier for us to be possessed, and I don’t know why.

A quirk of some kind. Alcohol helps keep the spirits out. ”

Although none of this had any obvious relevance at the moment, it was interesting. Better than collapsing in existential fear, at any rate. Also, something was nibbling at the edge of Achilles’ mind, something he couldn’t yet identify.

“What happens when a spirit takes over?”

Achilles felt Abe shudder. “It’s not pleasant.

It happened to me once, and I’d rather not talk about that.

Some spirits are worse than others. Dybbuks, they bring no end of misery.

But an ibbur can be benign, even helpful.

Possession by an ibbur prolongs life and can bring strong powers.

” He snorted. “Still not necessarily nice for the host, though.”

Prolongs life . Maybe that explained Abe’s longevity. Of course, lots of Bureau agents were long-lived for a variety of reasons. Townsend, for instance, had remained seemingly unchanged for many decades.

That nibbling morphed into something more like a vigorous gnawing. “Chief Townsend. Was he?—”

“Possessed by an ibbur. Yes.” Abe sounded old and tired. “Originally Townsend was a chazer, a true pig of a man. But an ibbur, the spirit of a mensch, a righteous man, possessed him, and he became the chief you knew.”

Well, that explained some things. Achilles wondered why Abe had never shared this tidbit of knowledge with anyone. Generations of Bureau agents had speculated fruitlessly about Townsend’s secrets.

“Okay. So Townsend gets possessed by a good guy and he becomes… everything that Townsend was. But when someone gets possessed by a bad guy, a dybbuk, are they equally powerful?”

“They can be.”

Shit. Oh, shit. “Spurling.”

Abe sucked in his breath. “What makes you think this?”

“Just a hunch. I didn’t spend a lot of quality time with the guy, but he reminded me of something. Not exactly the same, but similar. I couldn’t put my finger on what, but now I know. He reminded me of Townsend.”

“I interacted with him only briefly. Something was certainly off, but I didn’t have a chance to evaluate it.”

“I didn’t have much time either. But the more I think about it, the surer I get.”

Abe responded with what sounded like a string of curses in Yiddish, and Achilles added a few in Greek for good measure. Because Townsend had been very powerful and, even though they were on the same side, scary as hell. They both sat silently for a while.

“What are we going to do about this?” Achilles finally asked.

“You’re asking me?”

“You have way more years of experience than I do. And you know much more about Townsend, which means much more about Spurling.”

Abe made a dismissive sound and let go of Achilles’ hands, but only so he could lie down beside him, Abe’s elbow resting against Achilles’ knee.

“I don’t know anything. I’m just a tired alta kocker—an old shit—who got careless.

” He sighed, loudly. “I didn’t truly know that much about Townsend.

I didn’t like him, and to be honest, I felt guilty because I’m the one who made him.

But Thomas and I, we avoided him as much as possible. ”

“He was really creepy. It was weird. I never knew whether to believe anything he said, or whether anything he did was what it seemed. But I also trusted him to be on the right side, ultimately. Although maybe he was willing to experience casualties along the way.”

“I’d agree with that assessment.”

Now it was Achilles’ turn to sigh. “I wish he hadn’t gotten killed. Thomas makes a good chief under ordinary circumstances, but he doesn’t have Townsend’s… spooky ibbur gifts.”

At first Abe was very quiet, and then he sat up suddenly, startling Achilles. “Gotten killed,” Abe echoed. “Tell me more about how that happened. When you’re retired, the gossip isn’t as good.”

“Honestly, I don’t know all the details either. It was kept kind of hush-hush.” Achilles frowned as he tried to recall the most reliable information he’d heard, ignoring all the idle speculation. “So, Dash Cooke. Do you know him?”

“Met him once or twice. Handsome man. Not very chatty.”

That was a concise summary. “I’ve worked with him over the years.

He’s the kind of agent who gets sent in when things really need to be obliterated, you know?

Not much subtlety to him, but he can best anyone at the firing range.

” Achilles had always thought of him as a goon—an enforcer—which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Sometimes a goon was needed to get a job done.

“Anyway, he got an assignment in Sacramento. A poltergeist, supposedly, except it wasn’t.

It turned out to be Henry, a house spirit of a previously unidentified type. ”

“That seems an odd assignment for someone like him.”

“Well, yeah. But you know Townsend. He always had his reasons.” The import of Achilles’ own words struck him as he said them.

“This… this is significant. We’re onto something.

I don’t know what.” It felt good, though.

A step up from despair. He probably should have followed this train of thought earlier, except that Townsend had done so many inexplicable things that it was easy to simply shrug and accept.

“What happened with Cooke and this house spirit?” Abe prompted.

“Cooke brought him to HQ. And I don’t know whether the two of them became an item up in Sac or whether it happened in LA, but it happened.

And the thing you have to know is that Henry is the sweetest, least dangerous person you could imagine.

He dresses in bright prints and decorates offices and rescues spiders, for gods’ sake.

” Achilles smiled at the memory. Then he grew serious.

“But Townsend tried to kill Henry. Nobody knows why. Cooke shot Townsend to protect Henry. He was cleared of any wrongdoing, and last I heard he was still working for the Bureau. When we still had a Bureau to work for.”

Abe gave a dry laugh. “So the mamzer caught the bullet. It sounds as if Townsend deliberately orchestrated his own death, nu ?”

It kind of did. “But he never struck me as the suicidal type. And if he was, why drag Cooke and poor Henry into it? Why not just do it himself?” Achilles really wanted to pace, which always seemed to help him think, but he was afraid he’d lose Abe if they separated.

He didn’t want to risk not being able to reunite; that they’d connected at all might be a temporary fluke.

“These are good questions. The thing he became when Birdie possessed him—Birdie was the ibbur—was no longer human. I don’t know if a name exists for such a creature.

He was that thing for nearly a century, gathering power over the years.

Perhaps it was physically impossible for him to end his own life—directly, in any case. ”

That made sense to Achilles. Especially since Townsend left clear directives for the future of the Bureau, including naming Charles as the next chief. Which implied that he’d known what was coming.

Instead of pacing, Achilles drummed his fingers on his leg. “Okay, so maybe after a hundred years or so, he was sick of it all and just wanted to retire. Like, really retire. I tried to retire myself recently, only less dramatically.”

“That doesn’t seem to have worked out well for you.”

“Not really. I couldn’t stay away, though. Not with Dee, and not with the stakes so high. Jesus, Townsend had been going on for years about how something really big and bad was coming down the line, but I don’t know if he did shit all to prepare for it.”

“Boychik, what if his death was the preparation?”

Achilles gasped. “Townsend knew he’d be more useful dead than alive! He sacrificed himself for the cause.”

Abe patted Achilles’ knee. “Seems to be going around, doesn’t it?”

Shit. The key to this puzzle lay in figuring out how a now-dead possessed creature could help.

“Can we assume that a lot of the other things he’s been doing over the past decades—maybe stuff that doesn’t seem to make much sense—those were part of his grand plan too?

” A rush of anger filled his veins. “He’s been moving us all around like goddamn chess pieces. ”

“He may have set up the game, but I think we’ve moved ourselves.”

Achilles sneered. “Free will, huh?”

“Back when your… your great-grandparents were children, maybe, I held seances—they were in vogue then. I wasn’t bad at it.

Between the seances and my stage shows, I made a living.

The seances were my game, nu? But I never forced any of my marks to do anything.

I simply made educated guesses about how they’d behave, and I based my spiel on those guesses. Townsend did this on a larger scale.”

If this was supposed to make Achilles feel better about being manipulated, it didn’t. In fact, he was indignant on behalf of dozens of agents—maybe hundreds—whose personality traits and personal circumstances Townsend had capitalized on.

Except… recent events notwithstanding, things had eventually turned out well for a lot of those agents. They’d found meaning. In some cases, they’d found partners. Dash Cooke, for instance, was madly in love with Henry, whom he met only because of Townsend.

Achilles groaned. “I don’t know what to think.”

“How about if we deal with the moral crisis later and concentrate now on what to do? Can we use Townsend’s death to our advantage somehow?”

Achilles wasn’t smart enough for this kind of thing. He wasn’t a master chess player and, unlike Abe, had no real experience in moving the pieces around. Hell, he had no extraordinary talents at all, unless you counted stubbornness. He couldn’t fly or grant wishes or talk to dead people.

Wait.

“Dead people,” Achilles whispered.

“Pardon?”

“There are a lot of dead Bureau agents.”

“I’m aware,” Abe said softly, his sorrow clear. He hadn’t only lost a husband, Achilles realized. Abe, over the course of his long life, must have had lots of his Bureau friends die, whether in the line of duty or otherwise.

“What if they could help us?”

There was a long silence. Although Achilles couldn’t see Abe, he imagined that his expression showed bewilderment. “They’re dead ,” Abe finally said. Slowly and firmly.

“Right. But you told me yourself that Townsend became powerful after he was possessed by the spirit of a righteous man. So that dead guy did a lot, right?”

“Poor Birdie,” Abe whispered. And then, more loudly, “How do you propose we do this? In this place especially?”

“I don’t know.” Achilles’ mind was whirring like a food processor blade.

He hoped the slicing and dicing would prove productive.

“But we’ve got you, right? You can communicate with spirits.

And, gods, I have to think that Townsend got himself killed for a reason.

What if it was so he could rally the troops on the other side? ”

“This….” Abe gave a lengthy pause. “Feels less impossible than it should. You’re a persuasive man. But even if we weren’t in this place, and even with my abilities, there’s a wide gulf between the living and the dead.”

Gulf. Abyss. Chasm.

A memory surfaced in Achilles’ spinning mind, an assignment he’d been given during his early years in the Bureau.

This one had taken him to a tiny community in Alaska, where most of the town clustered near the harbor.

But there were a handful of houses halfway up a steep mountain, accessible by a single road.

A few of the locals had gone missing, and there were reports of an unearthly woman in a white dress lurking nearby.

It had turned out that the woman was in fact an osenya, a creature from Eastern Europe who was known to seduce men and lead them to their deaths.

She had probably arrived in Alaska along with Russian immigrants at some point.

Achilles and his partner had trapped her and sent her to the Bureau’s prison in Nevada—and Achilles didn’t want to think right now about what had happened to all the inmates there, now that the Bureau was dissolved.

At first, he didn’t understand why he was thinking of her at all, since she had nothing to do with the urgent current problem.

But then it struck him. There was a deep gorge between the harbor village and the mountainside homes, and that was where the osenya lured her prey: she would stand on the bridge over the gorge and wait for someone to drive up to her.

“A bridge,” Achilles said to Abe. Confidently, because he was once again relying on hope. “We need a bridge between you and Townsend. And I know someone who can build it.”