I think we might have a lock on Victoria’s location,” Oliver said grimly. Since their trip to the blood house, he had received permission from Duchesne to miss class and was back to spending all day and night holed up in the Repository, reviewing the tapes, and had finally found a clue as to where she was being kept hostage.
“Ma’am? Will you be joining us?” the usher asked, looking impatient, with his hand on the double doors while Scott fiddled with his cuff links.
“Hold on,” she told Oliver, weighing the possibility of whispering into her cell phone while the tenor began his aria. But Trinity had raised her too well. Mimi waved her date inside. “Go ahead, I’ve got to take this. I’ll meet you at intermission.”
She walked away from the doors, toward the fountain. “We’ve found her?” she asked, pressing the phone to her ear in hopeful anticipation.
“Not yet. But we’re on our way.”
Mimi glared at the ushers who were shushing her. “Where?”
“The Carlyle Hotel.”
“I’ll meet you there.”
The sidewalk in front of the Carlyle was swarming with Red Bloods. As Mimi walked through the crowd she heard whispers of “bomb threat” and “evacuation.” She flashed her Conclave badge to the security team and entered the newly emptied lobby. Oliver was standing with a group of Venators, who had cleared the area by the elevator.
“Sorry about Parsifal. It’s my favorite opera,” he said as a greeting.
“Where is she?” Mimi snapped. She didn’t have time for Oliver’s clever little commentary right now.
“We think in the penthouse. It’s been rented for the month to some actor, but it’s been empty for weeks, according to the hotel manager.”
“How do you know she’s here?”
“We don’t. We’re just guessing.” Oliver pressed the elevator button for the top floor. “I know the Venators are concentrating on those subliminal images, but I thought maybe we should take a closer look at the main video itself. I watched it frame by frame and found something in the shadows. I had tech magnify part of the screen.”
He showed her the image on his phone.
“What am I looking at here, exactly?” Mimi asked. It looked like a bunch of squiggles and nothing to get excited about. Certainly not enough to clear an entire hotel lobby and disrupt an evening at the prestigious hotel. Wendell Randolph, the Blue Blood tycoon who owned the Carlyle, was surely going to get annoyed. Mimi saw that she had several messages from him already.
“That’s from the wallpaper behind her head. The shine from the Venator rope illuminates it a bit. It’s called Cabbage and Vine. It’s a famous William Morris design, which went out of production in the 1880s. But when this hotel was built in the 1930s, they had the same textile factory produce it for the hotel. After the renovation last year, only a few rooms kept the original wallpaper. We’ve already checked the other two. This is the last one.”
“We’re here because of wallpaper?” Mimi asked. “You guys cleared an entire hotel—used a massive compulsion on all those Red Bloods—because of some wallpaper?” She tried not to sound too incredulous.
“It’s all we’ve got,” Oliver said apologetically. “You said no one dies on your watch. We have to try everything, don’t we?”
The elevator door opened, and Mimi saw Sam and Ted take position in front of a door to the suite. The rest of the team were arranged in the hallway.
“We have a green?” Ted asked.
Mimi didn’t know what to say. At this point they had acted without consulting her, so why adhere to protocol now? It was too late to back out. Maybe it was just courtesy since she had arrived on the scene. It was better than Helen Archibald’s rudeness. She would humor her Venators. “Affirmative.” She nodded. “Go.”
The strike force burst into the room, swarming into the space, setting off glom bombs, their swords held aloft and gleaming.
There was a girl tied up in a chair.
Alas, it was not Victoria.
They had surprised the actor, a movie star, who’d returned the night before with his new girlfriend. At the sight of the black-clad, armored Venators, he dropped a magnum of champagne and fainted.
TWENTYTHREE
The Pub