Justice Keepers Saga--Books 1-3, page 55
“What do you want then?”
“You.”
Anna felt her face heat up. “All right,” she whispered. “You want me? I'll give you a night you'll remember to your dying day.”
“Now that's more like it.”
“After the guns are in my possession,” she insisted. Of course, she had no intention of going through with her end of the bargain. By that point, this asshole would be rotting in a prison cell. “Do we have a deal?”
He leaned against the shelf with arms folded, appraising her in a way that made her skin crawl. “Yes, we have a deal,” he said. “But I'm just the broker. My friend will likely want some of that Overseer tech.”
She turned and left the small building, stepping into the narrow street where several automated carts were driving toward the ship parked on the landing pad. “How will I get in touch with you?” she asked.
A silhouette approached from behind, visible to her mind's eye. She was careful not to let him get too close. “You won't,” he said. “I will get in touch with you if and when I have something to tell you.”
“And how will I know you?”
He stood there with his head turned, no doubt frowning at the ground. There were some Keepers who could extrapolate facial expressions from a silhouette, but she wasn't one of them. “You can call me Karl,” he said. “When I contact you, it will be using that name. Now, let's get you on your way.”
She provided him with fake contact information that would forward his messages to her multi-tool, then set off on a leisurely walk back to her ship. The whole time, she kept scanning the forest with her Nassai's spatial awareness, searching for any trap that might be sprung on her. Luckily, there were none to be found.
When she finally made it back to the secondary landing pad, she found her ship – a small, box-like cargo-hauler that flew like the brick it was – sitting undisturbed upon the concrete.
A quick check of the ship's sensor data and a scan with her multi-tool revealed that no one had tampered with any of her instruments. That was always a concern in places like this. Cargo-haulers didn't have the same security measures as Justice Keeper shuttles; a little extra care went a long way, but even with all the precautions, she was in the air in less than five minutes.
Now all she had to do was wait for Karl to make contact.
The crime lab in the bowels of the RCMP's office was a room with white tiles on the walls and bright lights that shone down on long metal tables. One of those tables supported a dead man's corpse. The smell of harsh chemicals was hard to ignore.
Jack stepped through the door in jeans and a black trenchcoat that fell halfway to his knees. “Dr. Bhardwaj?” he called out, scanning the room. “I'm Agent Hunter with the Justice Keepers.”
A man in a white lab coat stood facing the back wall. By the sudden shiver that went through him, it was clear he had been startled. “Yes…Detective Carlson told me you'd be coming.”
He spun around.
Pradeep Bhardwaj was a slim fellow with olive skin and dark hair that he wore cut short. A small birthmark just above his right eye was his most distinguishing feature. “He said you had some questions.”
Biting his lip, Jack shut his eyes tight. He nodded slowly. “I wanted to discuss the party,” he said, moving into the room. “I'm told you've completed an autopsy on the guard who was killed.”
The dead man was lying face-down on the table with a blanket pulled up to his hips. His back was marked by a hole about the size of a golf ball with dried blood spread out in a corona around the wound.
Dr. Bhardwaj frowned, glancing over his shoulder at the corpse. “Yes, we do,” he said. “But as you know, we've been instructed not to share our findings with the Justice Keepers.”
Oh, Jack knew all about that! The prime minister's recent proclamation that all law-enforcement agencies would withhold information from the Justice Keepers had caused him all sorts of grief.
Stupid, reactionary politicians! If there was ever a better example of the 'busy hands fallacy,” he couldn't imagine it. Even if Keepers had been involved in getting Leo through the door, it was foolish to think that the entire organization was culpable. They'd be better off pooling their resources, but giving Leyrians the boot was doing something, and it was better to be proactive than to look helpless during a crisis. “Detective Carlson said you'd speak with me,” Jack replied in the mildest tones he could manage.
Pradeep Bhardwaj scowled, bowing his head to stare down at the floor. He let out a grunt. “Yes, I will,” he said. “But only at Detective Carlson's request. I used to work with him some years back.”
Jack found himself looking at the corpse and noted his lack of queasiness when he inspected the wound. After several years, he'd seen his share of dead bodies, and though the sight still brought a flare of rage to his chest, he no longer felt the urge to empty his stomach every time.
“This man's name was Victor Hanson,” Bhardwaj said. “His wounds are consistent with a high-velocity round from a Leyrian X-7 pistol. Examination of the point of entry reveals Kevlar fibres embedded in the man's skin, suggesting that the culprit used a high-impact setting.”
Closing his eyes, Jack tilted his head back. It was difficult to keep his voice steady. “Only Keepers and certain LIS operatives carry X-7s,” he said. “The Leyrians generally don't like arming people with guns that can chew through body armour.”
“Indeed.”
Bhardwaj lifted a small metal slug with a pair of tongs, grimacing as he studied it. “Investigators found this bullet just outside the back gate. From the trajectory, it's clear the shooter was already inside the security perimeter.”
The evidence for an inside job just kept piling up. Sure, it was technically possible that Leo might have hopped the fence, then shot the guard to prevent himself from being seen, but that kind of scenario seemed unlikely when you considered Leo's MO.
Stealth was not one of his virtues. If Leo had been confronted with resistance while trying to enter the banquet hall, he would have made a big spectacle of killing the guard and used that to whip up a frenzy.
Jack sat down on a stool.
He folded his arms with a sigh, then hung his head. “So we have a weapon that most Keepers use,” he said, “and a shooter who was already past the main security checkpoint.”
“Correct.”
Jack felt his face twist. He shook his head with a growl. “Something's not right here,” he muttered. “There were sophisticated weapon scanners at every single entrance to the property.”
“Yes?”
“So how did our shooter get a gun inside?” That should have been impossible. He remembered passing through a scanner only to be hassled by a security guard who had decided to accost him with a hand-held device. Every single Keeper had been required to remain unarmed while attending the party.
Bhardwaj frowned, his brows drawn together as he pondered the question. He paced over to the table. “The most logical answer,” he began, “is that the gun was already there before the security equipment was in place.”
Meaning this had been planned.
Lifting his forearm, Jack tapped away at his multi-tool and brought up log entries on the preparations for Peter Tomb's party. A hologram materialized in front of his face, and he found himself reading a long list of e-mails from Breslan to the security staff.
As he suspected, his former supervisor had made several trips to the banquet hall in the last two weeks. Any one of those could have been used to smuggle a weapon onto the premises. “Not good.”
Through the transparent screen of blue light, he saw Dr. Bhardwaj standing by the table with hands in his pockets. “I take it you have a lead on who might be responsible for this shooting?” he asked.
“I have a suspicion.”
“Would you care to share?”
The hologram winked out, and he found Bhardwaj waiting patiently for an answer. Would it be wise to share? Under normal circumstances, he would advocate cooperation, but the RCMP had cut the Keepers out of the loop.
Jack stood up with a sigh, hunching over in exhaustion. “'I'm afraid not,” he said, shaking his head. “Right now, it's just a hunch, and I don't want to say anything until I have more to go on.”
As he turned to go, the door swung inward, and he saw a man in a nice black suit step into the room. This guy was trim and fit with pale skin and dark brown hair that was graying at the temples. “Agent Hunter,” he said.
“Hello,” Jack replied. “And you are?”
The newcomer looked up with an angry scowl, his face slowly turning red. “Who I am does not matter,” he said, moving forward like a wolf on the hunt. “You are no longer permitted to be here; so be on your way.”
Grinning triumphantly, Jack bowed his head to the other man. “And here I thought we'd be such good friends,” he said, making his way to the door. “Don't worry; I've got what I need.”
“And what's that?”
Jack paused in the doorway, pressing one hand to the frame. He kept his back turned to signal his contempt. “Well, I might have been persuaded to share,” he replied. “But then you gave me such a warm welcome.”
He left the other man to chew on that.
Through the window behind her bed, Jena saw a field of stars. The station's current orientation made it impossible for her to look down on Earth. That would change in just a few moments, but she found that watching the rotating scenery too closely could leave you with a nasty case of vertigo.
She wasn't really paying attention to the stars; her mind was fixated on the things she had learned earlier this afternoon. Jack's unexpected trip to the RCMP's forensics lab had all but confirmed her suspicions of a traitor in their midst. And as things stood, it was starting to look like Breslan was the culprit.
She'd debated bringing this information to the senior directors, but Slade had been so supportive of his little pet Breslan, it was a good bet that he was in on it too. And the news Ben Loranai had brought only made things worse.
A rogue Keeper on Palisa?
In all likelihood, the woman he had encountered was another Wesley Pennfield. Somehow, people who had no business bonding a Nassai had managed to get their hands on symbionts. She wasn't stupid; she knew what that meant.
If the Justice Keepers no longer held a monopoly on Nassai symbionts, the galaxy had become a far more dangerous place. The most pressing question was why the Nassai would cooperate with ruthless men like Pennfield.
Asking her symbiont had produced no answers.
The Nassai she carried insisted that it knew nothing of these events. No symbionts were unaccounted for. Every other Keeper that she had trusted enough to question told her the same thing. The Nassai had no idea how Pennfield had managed to bond one of their own. Could they be lying?
A burst of disgust that was not her own told her that she had offended her symbiont by considering the question. Nassai barely understood the concept of lying. They existed in a society where thoughts and ideas were shared openly.
Hunter and Lenai had done a good job of bringing in Pennfield three years ago; then, one day, he was just gone. Oh, there had been a frenzy when his disappearance became common knowledge. The Keepers were beside themselves with anger.
Rumors of Pennfield's miraculous escape spread from Alios to Petross Station. Everyone expected the criminal with a symbiont to pull off some major act of terrorism, but it never happened.
Pennfield dropped off the radar completely.
As the months went by with no sign of the man, people began to speculate that he had been killed and his body disposed of. Over the course of three years, people wrote him off as yet another unsolved mystery. Jena herself had been convinced that Wesley Pennfield was long dead until Reena tried to assassinate her.
So, Pennfield was still in the game. If that was true, then where had he been all this time? Why choose now to reappear? And why try to assassinate her of all people? So far as she knew, Wesley Pennfield had been unaware of her existence.
She had avoided discussing this topic with Jack for several reasons, not the least of which was the fact that he had personal experience with Pennfield. The last thing the kid needed was the fear that his old nemesis had resurfaced on top of everything else. Of course, it was quite possible that the real Pennfield was dead and that whoever had hired Reena was simply using his name.
But no…She knew better.
Jena knew perfectly well why she had been targeted. The horrors she had seen on that troop carrier flashed through her mind. Paranoia had always been the sort of thing that she would scoff at, but in the last two months, she had come to feel as though there was no safe place where she could hide. Did she dare tell Jack the truth when doing so might put him in danger too? They had tried to kill her, and she had allowed them to believe that they had been successful.
Now that they knew better, they would try again. Again and again until they got it right. In her heart, Jena knew that she was living on borrowed time. She dared not speak her fears out loud, but she knew that they were monitoring her every move. She knew they would come for her sooner or later.
The Overseers were watching.
18
Bathed in sunlight that came in through the window behind him, Harry sat hunched over with his elbow on the desk, his face in his hand. “So let me get this straight,” he began. “You want to do what?”
“Take the girls some place safe,” his ex-wife said.
Craning his neck to squint at her, Harry shook his head. “You mean to say they're not safe with me,” he muttered, sitting back. “Della, I know this Leo has everybody on edge, but you're overreacting.”
She stood in front of his desk in a plain black dress, silver-blonde hair framing her pale face. “You can't guarantee their safety,” she said. “I can take them to my father's place out west.”
Harry bared his teeth, shaking his head slowly. “And once they're there,” he said, “they'll get settled in. Suddenly, Alberta will feel like home, and I'll see them twice a year if I'm lucky.”
Della crossed her arms, standing firm and implacable like a sculpture made of ice. “You told me you would always put their welfare first, Harry,” she insisted. “They aren't safe in this city.”
He wheeled his chair back.
Harry stood and made his way around the desk with hands in his pockets, shaking his head. “I am putting their well-being first,” he countered. “You can't ask kids to just pick up and relocate.”
The blinds on the window that looked out on the hallway were open, but he saw no one standing outside. He hated it when his ex decided to visit his place of work; any one of a dozen topics might set her off on a tirade, and the last thing he wanted was to have to wonder if his colleagues were gossiping about his personal life.
When he turned, Della was sitting on the desk with her hands folded in her lap, her head bowed almost reverently. “Look, Harry, I don't want to argue with you,” she said. “I worry about them.”
“I do too.”
She looked up at him with the most earnest expression, blinking tears away. “Then you'll let me take them someplace safe,” she said. “Last night, Claire asked me if the terrorist would start targeting suburban neighbourhoods.”
Harry shut his eyes, his own tears welling up. “We've had similar conversations,” he said, backing up until his body was pressed to the wall. “But I think taking them away will only make them more afraid.”
“How do you figure?”
“Think about it, Della,” he replied. “It will send the message that even with all the resources at our disposal, we can't protect them. If a terrorist can come to Ottawa, what makes Calgary any safer?”
“It's not the nation's capitol.”
Well, she had a point there. Calgary wasn't exactly a high-profile target for anyone looking to stir up trouble. Then again, terrorists rarely cared about such things. Chaos in one city was as good as chaos in any other. “Just give it some thought,” Della pleaded. “I don't expect it to be a permanent move. They can come back once things settle down.”
“Okay.”
She was gone less than two minutes before his computer started beeping at him. Checking the monitor revealed the words “incoming call” blinking at him in bright green letters. Harry took a seat and answered.
A woman's face filled his screen from corner to corner, pixelated at first but slowly resolving into a solid image. She had smooth copper skin and long black hair. “Detective Carlson?” she inquired.
“Speaking.”
“My name is Gabrina Valtez,” she explained. “I'm a field agent with the Leyrian Intelligence Service, currently working with Director Jena Morane. I've been doing some research into our terrorist problem.”
Harry closed his eyes, leaning his head against the seat cushion. “Is that so, Agent Valtez?” he asked. “So what have you learned about our friend Leo? Anything that will get him out of my city?”
Resting her chin in the palm of her hand, she smiled at him through the computer monitor. “Well, that depends,” she said. “I have a few ideas, but I'd like to get your input. Would you be willing to meet with me?”
“I think I can manage that.”
“Excellent,” she said. “Station Twelve in half an hour?”
“See you then.”
A single metal briefcase sat in the middle of a long rectangular table, right beneath the light in the ceiling. On the far side of the room, slanted windows looked out on a vast expanse of stars. Harry still marveled at that. He'd been in space several times now, but the experience still felt new. Just a few short years ago, he'd have believed that going into orbit was impossible for him.
Harry stood over the table with arms folded, frowning down at the briefcase. “If you'll pardon my impatience, Ms. Valtez,” he began. “Just what the hell is that supposed to be?”
The young woman sat in a chair at the head of the table, smiling as she swiveled around to take in the sight of everyone present. “The answer to our problems,” she said. “We're going to use it to bring in the terrorist.”
“You.”
Anna felt her face heat up. “All right,” she whispered. “You want me? I'll give you a night you'll remember to your dying day.”
“Now that's more like it.”
“After the guns are in my possession,” she insisted. Of course, she had no intention of going through with her end of the bargain. By that point, this asshole would be rotting in a prison cell. “Do we have a deal?”
He leaned against the shelf with arms folded, appraising her in a way that made her skin crawl. “Yes, we have a deal,” he said. “But I'm just the broker. My friend will likely want some of that Overseer tech.”
She turned and left the small building, stepping into the narrow street where several automated carts were driving toward the ship parked on the landing pad. “How will I get in touch with you?” she asked.
A silhouette approached from behind, visible to her mind's eye. She was careful not to let him get too close. “You won't,” he said. “I will get in touch with you if and when I have something to tell you.”
“And how will I know you?”
He stood there with his head turned, no doubt frowning at the ground. There were some Keepers who could extrapolate facial expressions from a silhouette, but she wasn't one of them. “You can call me Karl,” he said. “When I contact you, it will be using that name. Now, let's get you on your way.”
She provided him with fake contact information that would forward his messages to her multi-tool, then set off on a leisurely walk back to her ship. The whole time, she kept scanning the forest with her Nassai's spatial awareness, searching for any trap that might be sprung on her. Luckily, there were none to be found.
When she finally made it back to the secondary landing pad, she found her ship – a small, box-like cargo-hauler that flew like the brick it was – sitting undisturbed upon the concrete.
A quick check of the ship's sensor data and a scan with her multi-tool revealed that no one had tampered with any of her instruments. That was always a concern in places like this. Cargo-haulers didn't have the same security measures as Justice Keeper shuttles; a little extra care went a long way, but even with all the precautions, she was in the air in less than five minutes.
Now all she had to do was wait for Karl to make contact.
The crime lab in the bowels of the RCMP's office was a room with white tiles on the walls and bright lights that shone down on long metal tables. One of those tables supported a dead man's corpse. The smell of harsh chemicals was hard to ignore.
Jack stepped through the door in jeans and a black trenchcoat that fell halfway to his knees. “Dr. Bhardwaj?” he called out, scanning the room. “I'm Agent Hunter with the Justice Keepers.”
A man in a white lab coat stood facing the back wall. By the sudden shiver that went through him, it was clear he had been startled. “Yes…Detective Carlson told me you'd be coming.”
He spun around.
Pradeep Bhardwaj was a slim fellow with olive skin and dark hair that he wore cut short. A small birthmark just above his right eye was his most distinguishing feature. “He said you had some questions.”
Biting his lip, Jack shut his eyes tight. He nodded slowly. “I wanted to discuss the party,” he said, moving into the room. “I'm told you've completed an autopsy on the guard who was killed.”
The dead man was lying face-down on the table with a blanket pulled up to his hips. His back was marked by a hole about the size of a golf ball with dried blood spread out in a corona around the wound.
Dr. Bhardwaj frowned, glancing over his shoulder at the corpse. “Yes, we do,” he said. “But as you know, we've been instructed not to share our findings with the Justice Keepers.”
Oh, Jack knew all about that! The prime minister's recent proclamation that all law-enforcement agencies would withhold information from the Justice Keepers had caused him all sorts of grief.
Stupid, reactionary politicians! If there was ever a better example of the 'busy hands fallacy,” he couldn't imagine it. Even if Keepers had been involved in getting Leo through the door, it was foolish to think that the entire organization was culpable. They'd be better off pooling their resources, but giving Leyrians the boot was doing something, and it was better to be proactive than to look helpless during a crisis. “Detective Carlson said you'd speak with me,” Jack replied in the mildest tones he could manage.
Pradeep Bhardwaj scowled, bowing his head to stare down at the floor. He let out a grunt. “Yes, I will,” he said. “But only at Detective Carlson's request. I used to work with him some years back.”
Jack found himself looking at the corpse and noted his lack of queasiness when he inspected the wound. After several years, he'd seen his share of dead bodies, and though the sight still brought a flare of rage to his chest, he no longer felt the urge to empty his stomach every time.
“This man's name was Victor Hanson,” Bhardwaj said. “His wounds are consistent with a high-velocity round from a Leyrian X-7 pistol. Examination of the point of entry reveals Kevlar fibres embedded in the man's skin, suggesting that the culprit used a high-impact setting.”
Closing his eyes, Jack tilted his head back. It was difficult to keep his voice steady. “Only Keepers and certain LIS operatives carry X-7s,” he said. “The Leyrians generally don't like arming people with guns that can chew through body armour.”
“Indeed.”
Bhardwaj lifted a small metal slug with a pair of tongs, grimacing as he studied it. “Investigators found this bullet just outside the back gate. From the trajectory, it's clear the shooter was already inside the security perimeter.”
The evidence for an inside job just kept piling up. Sure, it was technically possible that Leo might have hopped the fence, then shot the guard to prevent himself from being seen, but that kind of scenario seemed unlikely when you considered Leo's MO.
Stealth was not one of his virtues. If Leo had been confronted with resistance while trying to enter the banquet hall, he would have made a big spectacle of killing the guard and used that to whip up a frenzy.
Jack sat down on a stool.
He folded his arms with a sigh, then hung his head. “So we have a weapon that most Keepers use,” he said, “and a shooter who was already past the main security checkpoint.”
“Correct.”
Jack felt his face twist. He shook his head with a growl. “Something's not right here,” he muttered. “There were sophisticated weapon scanners at every single entrance to the property.”
“Yes?”
“So how did our shooter get a gun inside?” That should have been impossible. He remembered passing through a scanner only to be hassled by a security guard who had decided to accost him with a hand-held device. Every single Keeper had been required to remain unarmed while attending the party.
Bhardwaj frowned, his brows drawn together as he pondered the question. He paced over to the table. “The most logical answer,” he began, “is that the gun was already there before the security equipment was in place.”
Meaning this had been planned.
Lifting his forearm, Jack tapped away at his multi-tool and brought up log entries on the preparations for Peter Tomb's party. A hologram materialized in front of his face, and he found himself reading a long list of e-mails from Breslan to the security staff.
As he suspected, his former supervisor had made several trips to the banquet hall in the last two weeks. Any one of those could have been used to smuggle a weapon onto the premises. “Not good.”
Through the transparent screen of blue light, he saw Dr. Bhardwaj standing by the table with hands in his pockets. “I take it you have a lead on who might be responsible for this shooting?” he asked.
“I have a suspicion.”
“Would you care to share?”
The hologram winked out, and he found Bhardwaj waiting patiently for an answer. Would it be wise to share? Under normal circumstances, he would advocate cooperation, but the RCMP had cut the Keepers out of the loop.
Jack stood up with a sigh, hunching over in exhaustion. “'I'm afraid not,” he said, shaking his head. “Right now, it's just a hunch, and I don't want to say anything until I have more to go on.”
As he turned to go, the door swung inward, and he saw a man in a nice black suit step into the room. This guy was trim and fit with pale skin and dark brown hair that was graying at the temples. “Agent Hunter,” he said.
“Hello,” Jack replied. “And you are?”
The newcomer looked up with an angry scowl, his face slowly turning red. “Who I am does not matter,” he said, moving forward like a wolf on the hunt. “You are no longer permitted to be here; so be on your way.”
Grinning triumphantly, Jack bowed his head to the other man. “And here I thought we'd be such good friends,” he said, making his way to the door. “Don't worry; I've got what I need.”
“And what's that?”
Jack paused in the doorway, pressing one hand to the frame. He kept his back turned to signal his contempt. “Well, I might have been persuaded to share,” he replied. “But then you gave me such a warm welcome.”
He left the other man to chew on that.
Through the window behind her bed, Jena saw a field of stars. The station's current orientation made it impossible for her to look down on Earth. That would change in just a few moments, but she found that watching the rotating scenery too closely could leave you with a nasty case of vertigo.
She wasn't really paying attention to the stars; her mind was fixated on the things she had learned earlier this afternoon. Jack's unexpected trip to the RCMP's forensics lab had all but confirmed her suspicions of a traitor in their midst. And as things stood, it was starting to look like Breslan was the culprit.
She'd debated bringing this information to the senior directors, but Slade had been so supportive of his little pet Breslan, it was a good bet that he was in on it too. And the news Ben Loranai had brought only made things worse.
A rogue Keeper on Palisa?
In all likelihood, the woman he had encountered was another Wesley Pennfield. Somehow, people who had no business bonding a Nassai had managed to get their hands on symbionts. She wasn't stupid; she knew what that meant.
If the Justice Keepers no longer held a monopoly on Nassai symbionts, the galaxy had become a far more dangerous place. The most pressing question was why the Nassai would cooperate with ruthless men like Pennfield.
Asking her symbiont had produced no answers.
The Nassai she carried insisted that it knew nothing of these events. No symbionts were unaccounted for. Every other Keeper that she had trusted enough to question told her the same thing. The Nassai had no idea how Pennfield had managed to bond one of their own. Could they be lying?
A burst of disgust that was not her own told her that she had offended her symbiont by considering the question. Nassai barely understood the concept of lying. They existed in a society where thoughts and ideas were shared openly.
Hunter and Lenai had done a good job of bringing in Pennfield three years ago; then, one day, he was just gone. Oh, there had been a frenzy when his disappearance became common knowledge. The Keepers were beside themselves with anger.
Rumors of Pennfield's miraculous escape spread from Alios to Petross Station. Everyone expected the criminal with a symbiont to pull off some major act of terrorism, but it never happened.
Pennfield dropped off the radar completely.
As the months went by with no sign of the man, people began to speculate that he had been killed and his body disposed of. Over the course of three years, people wrote him off as yet another unsolved mystery. Jena herself had been convinced that Wesley Pennfield was long dead until Reena tried to assassinate her.
So, Pennfield was still in the game. If that was true, then where had he been all this time? Why choose now to reappear? And why try to assassinate her of all people? So far as she knew, Wesley Pennfield had been unaware of her existence.
She had avoided discussing this topic with Jack for several reasons, not the least of which was the fact that he had personal experience with Pennfield. The last thing the kid needed was the fear that his old nemesis had resurfaced on top of everything else. Of course, it was quite possible that the real Pennfield was dead and that whoever had hired Reena was simply using his name.
But no…She knew better.
Jena knew perfectly well why she had been targeted. The horrors she had seen on that troop carrier flashed through her mind. Paranoia had always been the sort of thing that she would scoff at, but in the last two months, she had come to feel as though there was no safe place where she could hide. Did she dare tell Jack the truth when doing so might put him in danger too? They had tried to kill her, and she had allowed them to believe that they had been successful.
Now that they knew better, they would try again. Again and again until they got it right. In her heart, Jena knew that she was living on borrowed time. She dared not speak her fears out loud, but she knew that they were monitoring her every move. She knew they would come for her sooner or later.
The Overseers were watching.
18
Bathed in sunlight that came in through the window behind him, Harry sat hunched over with his elbow on the desk, his face in his hand. “So let me get this straight,” he began. “You want to do what?”
“Take the girls some place safe,” his ex-wife said.
Craning his neck to squint at her, Harry shook his head. “You mean to say they're not safe with me,” he muttered, sitting back. “Della, I know this Leo has everybody on edge, but you're overreacting.”
She stood in front of his desk in a plain black dress, silver-blonde hair framing her pale face. “You can't guarantee their safety,” she said. “I can take them to my father's place out west.”
Harry bared his teeth, shaking his head slowly. “And once they're there,” he said, “they'll get settled in. Suddenly, Alberta will feel like home, and I'll see them twice a year if I'm lucky.”
Della crossed her arms, standing firm and implacable like a sculpture made of ice. “You told me you would always put their welfare first, Harry,” she insisted. “They aren't safe in this city.”
He wheeled his chair back.
Harry stood and made his way around the desk with hands in his pockets, shaking his head. “I am putting their well-being first,” he countered. “You can't ask kids to just pick up and relocate.”
The blinds on the window that looked out on the hallway were open, but he saw no one standing outside. He hated it when his ex decided to visit his place of work; any one of a dozen topics might set her off on a tirade, and the last thing he wanted was to have to wonder if his colleagues were gossiping about his personal life.
When he turned, Della was sitting on the desk with her hands folded in her lap, her head bowed almost reverently. “Look, Harry, I don't want to argue with you,” she said. “I worry about them.”
“I do too.”
She looked up at him with the most earnest expression, blinking tears away. “Then you'll let me take them someplace safe,” she said. “Last night, Claire asked me if the terrorist would start targeting suburban neighbourhoods.”
Harry shut his eyes, his own tears welling up. “We've had similar conversations,” he said, backing up until his body was pressed to the wall. “But I think taking them away will only make them more afraid.”
“How do you figure?”
“Think about it, Della,” he replied. “It will send the message that even with all the resources at our disposal, we can't protect them. If a terrorist can come to Ottawa, what makes Calgary any safer?”
“It's not the nation's capitol.”
Well, she had a point there. Calgary wasn't exactly a high-profile target for anyone looking to stir up trouble. Then again, terrorists rarely cared about such things. Chaos in one city was as good as chaos in any other. “Just give it some thought,” Della pleaded. “I don't expect it to be a permanent move. They can come back once things settle down.”
“Okay.”
She was gone less than two minutes before his computer started beeping at him. Checking the monitor revealed the words “incoming call” blinking at him in bright green letters. Harry took a seat and answered.
A woman's face filled his screen from corner to corner, pixelated at first but slowly resolving into a solid image. She had smooth copper skin and long black hair. “Detective Carlson?” she inquired.
“Speaking.”
“My name is Gabrina Valtez,” she explained. “I'm a field agent with the Leyrian Intelligence Service, currently working with Director Jena Morane. I've been doing some research into our terrorist problem.”
Harry closed his eyes, leaning his head against the seat cushion. “Is that so, Agent Valtez?” he asked. “So what have you learned about our friend Leo? Anything that will get him out of my city?”
Resting her chin in the palm of her hand, she smiled at him through the computer monitor. “Well, that depends,” she said. “I have a few ideas, but I'd like to get your input. Would you be willing to meet with me?”
“I think I can manage that.”
“Excellent,” she said. “Station Twelve in half an hour?”
“See you then.”
A single metal briefcase sat in the middle of a long rectangular table, right beneath the light in the ceiling. On the far side of the room, slanted windows looked out on a vast expanse of stars. Harry still marveled at that. He'd been in space several times now, but the experience still felt new. Just a few short years ago, he'd have believed that going into orbit was impossible for him.
Harry stood over the table with arms folded, frowning down at the briefcase. “If you'll pardon my impatience, Ms. Valtez,” he began. “Just what the hell is that supposed to be?”
The young woman sat in a chair at the head of the table, smiling as she swiveled around to take in the sight of everyone present. “The answer to our problems,” she said. “We're going to use it to bring in the terrorist.”
