The Veil War

Three weeks earlier

I walked up to a nondescript building in downtown Pittsburgh. I was still buzzing from three weeks in the Aegean Sea, burning through a platinum-hued credit card and Australian coeds. I checked the signboard on the wall in the lobby, but between shady-sounding accountants and shady-sounding law firms there was nothing that seemed remotely like anything that Tactical Beardman and the Chad would ever be caught dead in.

I walked up to the reception desk. I pulled the tattered business card from my pocket. “Excuse me, ma’am. I was told to meet someone here,” I said, and handed her the card.

The woman had been through the wars. Her makeup looked like it had applied by an apprentice mason’s trowel. Her scalp glistened through her thinning purple hair. She reached and took the card and squinted through her bifocals.

“One minute, please,” she said in sing-song tone.

She picked up the phone and dialed three digits. “A man to see you,” she said.

She listened for a moment. She looked up at me with cataract-hazed eyes. Her voice reached out through bourbon-scarred vocal chords, “Fourth floor. Room 415.”

“Uh, thank you.”

She returned to her Seventeen magazine and I ceased to exist to her.

I crossed the cracked marble floor to the bank of elevators at the back of the lobby. Four floors up, I stepped onto tattered carpet. The wallpaper screamed high fashion. In 1947. To the right, two doors showed 411 and 413. On the left, a single door had a bronze 415. I consulted my internal compass. The two doors to the right would face to the front of the building. They’d be small offices, only a couple dozen feet between where I stood in the fourth floor lobby back to the street.

I turned, braced myself, and walked to the right. A small plaque on the door read, “Greater Pennsylvania Association for Medieval Literary Scholarship.”

You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, I thought.

I knocked on the door. Before I finished rapping on the door, it opened silently inward. A bent and spindly old man pulled the door away from my hand.

“We’ve been expecting you.” His voice sounded like death itself. He let go of the door knob and gestured to the interior. “Do come in, Sergeant.”

Right. I stepped across the threshold. Behind the thick wooden door was an expanse of rich, red carpet dotted with Persian rugs. Mahogany bookcases lined the walls, their glass doors obscuring the leather-bound books within. A sepia-toned globe rested in a polished silver and teak stand. The window treatments were stunning.

I heard the door click closed behind me. The butler or whatever-the-fuck shuffled around in front of me. “Please have a seat, sergeant.” He indicated a comfy-looking leather arm chair, and waved me into it. I couldn’t resist his Jedi mind powers. I sat, and laid my bag of fun next to the chair.

He sketched a spare and no doubt well-calibrated bow. “Someone will be with you presently,” he said. He looked at me for a moment. I feared he was going to drop some sort of Morgan Freeman magic negro wisdom on me, but he just nodded and crossed to the single door at the back of the room and left.

The room was a Hollywood set-dresser’s dream of a London gentlemen’s club. The globe, the bookshelves. The paneling that looked a foot thick if was an inch and waxed for what to a shine that must of have been centuries in the making. Just everything in the room screamed wealth and privilege held for time out of mind. Which made it totally fucking incongruous seeing as it was in Pittsburgh.

I waited. Then I waited some more. I pictured in my mind Anna and Marcy from Melbourne, and their remarkably wide-ranging skill sets. I remembered Leutnant Bohm and his razor sharp fangs, with my own Private Idaho’s blood running down his neck.

I waited some more. Five minutes or an hour later, the door opened. The doorman walked in and sketched another measured bow in my direction. “Sergeant? If you would please follow me?”

I stood and collected my bag. We trudged through several rooms of gold-foil portrait frames, deeply carved woodwork and Persian rugs that probably took wizened peasants a hundred years each to make. We fetched up in an office occupied by a weaselly little fuck with pince-nez glasses and a severely receding hairline. I don’t know suits, but I’m guessing his tailor wasn’t working out of a mall in Altoona or a sweatshop in Indonesia.

The doorman faded out the door. The platonic form of accountants stared me down like I was a recalcitrant column of figures.

“Please, Sergeant, have a seat,” he said finally. Feeling saucy, I plopped down on the overstuffed leather chair. Air hissed faintly from the seams as it took my weight.

Accountant man straightened a stack of papers on his desk. There was no computer. There was no phone.

“I am Mr. Smithers.”

A laugh snuck through my defenses. “Are you fucking serious?”

A pale and faded simulacrum of a smile took shape on his lips for a moment. And… it’s gone, I thought.

“I am Mr. Smithers,” he repeated. “Despite all indications to the contrary, you impressed certain of our… well-respected field operatives. You happened upon information that we have strived to keep… out of common knowledge.”

The pauses in his speech were already starting to piss me off.

“As you may have surmised… we are an organization dedicated to protecting the world from… threats of a uncouth and unusual nature.”

“Yeah, fascist dinosaurs and tanks the size of battleships. I grok it.”

He pursed his lips. “Yes. Even here, we prefer to be more discreet.” He obviously preferred not to include me on that ‘we.’

“I have been informed that there is a personnel need. Our mutual acquaintences further indicated that you might be suitable to fill this need.”

“Right, man. Thanks to our ‘mutual acquaintences’ I got shit-canned from the Army. So, yeah, I’m sort of available right now. In the market. If you’re selling dinosaur safaris, I’m buying.”

He pursed his lips again. He shifted his eyes and regarded the world map on the wall to my right. It had pins in it, randomly spread over the lands pictured there in four faded pastels.

“Very well, Sergeant. There is some… paperwork… you will need to fill out and sign.”

“You offer dental with this gig?”

He pursed his lips like there was a black hole hiding at the back of his throat.

“Yes. We have a dental plan.”

“Where do I sign?”