Bite Back 05 - Angel Stakes (23 page)

“Amber! Are you…are you well?”

Even an alpha wasn’t sure quite how to phrase the question.

Have you stopped being crazy yet?

Alex would have kept him reasonably up to date on that side of me, and I needed to talk about more personal things first.

“I am so sorry about Martha and Silas,” I said. “And all the others.”

A vision of the little cemetery behind Coykuti appeared in my head. His sister Martha had been the one to tend it. Who would do it now?

And Silas, his huge lieutenant, never one for words, now silent forever.

I am the sum of all the things I’ve ever done…

My eyes blurred.

“It was my fault,” I finished.

If I hadn’t gone rogue and chased Amaral down the hill, Calling the Denver pack to me… Amaral was already beaten. There was no need for the pack to attack him and his well-armed security.

“Yes, it was your fault,” Felix said. “It was also your fault that the Confederation were turned back when they were in a position to overrun us. Your fault that Diana was rescued, and Altau kept their leadership of Panethus and Emergence. Your fault that Amaral and the Taos Adepts died. Your fault that my pack now includes a sub-Pack, and that we have pack members who can’t decide which pack they’re in, let alone which skin they prefer to be wearing when they change.” He paused and when he went on, his voice was quieter. “Your fault that Olivia is alive. Martha and Silas gave their lives so that all of these things could happen, and to claim it was all your fault is disrespectful to them.”

“Felix, I’m not even sure I can do the ritual again.”

“You will be able to,” he said, without a trace of uncertainty. “You know that deep down. You’ll feel it again, as soon as you see them. We’ve got a couple of dozen of the halfies here, at Coykuti, living in tents in the old meadow.” He snorted. “Each with a friend from their pack. Never had so many visitors at the same time. All those marques. It’s driving Duane insane.”

I cleared my throat. “Which packs are they from?”

“The ones you know: Cimarron, and their two allies, Clayton and Mills. Glen Canyon, our neighbors in Utah. Our new friends in Cheyenne, Medicine Bow and Rock Springs. Then there’s others: a few from the Kansas Plains Alliance and Crescent Lake from Nebraska.”

Not all of those had been friendly recently. I remembered the Kansas and Nebraska packs had tried expanding into Colorado.

“They’ve all made some kind of deal with you?”

For all he was my ultimate alpha, Felix got defensive. “I’m not the Confederation, Amber, I’m not making them subordinate. I don’t want their territory. Just an understanding about mutual problems like the Confederation, agreements on exact territories, rights to pass. Simple, sensible stuff like that.”

“I’ve made an offer to the LA packs to get them to start negotiating some kind of agreement.”

“I know, Alex emailed me. Five packs. Helluva mess there,” he said. “That’s fine.”

Fine.
Meaning he gave me permission. Meaning he was in control of who came to the ritual.

I was getting along better with Felix than Skylur, and I didn’t want to ruin that, but I knew if I let it pass this time, it would get harder and harder to challenge.

“This ritual, the one I’m not even sure I can do again,” I said, “I know some things about it in my gut. One of those things is, it won’t work if I pick and choose who I offer it to.”

“But…”

“I have to offer it to anyone who asks. Otherwise it’ll stop working.”

I didn’t really know that, any more than I knew it would work at all, but it felt right.

“We can’t. The pack is twitchy enough as it is,” Felix said, “with all the different marques right here. We couldn’t have Confederation halfies coming on our territory.”

“I understand. I’d need to visit them there. I guess I’m asking you to understand where I’m coming from; it’s not the halfies’ fault the packs are fighting.”

He grunted. “I understand, but don’t go there, Amber. Don’t go up to Montana. Get them to come to you at some neutral place.”

Sound advice.

“Okay. I’ll see. And I’ll start closer to home. Maybe Cameron will allow me to go back to Carson Park for the New Mexico halfies.”

Mentioning Cameron to Felix wasn’t a good idea.

“That madman! You know he’s trying to gather up the southern packs?”

“Yes, of course I know. Pack Deauville is associated with the New Mexico packs.”

“About that…” Felix started.

“Cameron just wanted to come up here to talk to Altau. I didn’t really have a choice.”

“Well, he doesn’t need to come here for that now. He’s got Bian down in New Mexico. He can deal with her.” Alex had obviously given him a full update, and Felix sounded much happier about that.

“Come out to Coykuti now and we can start preparing,” he said.

Last time, we’d done the ritual in the Carson Park, right on the Colorado-New Mexico border, in a place Martha called simply ‘a sacred area’. A place where the wind itself seemed to be the breath of spirits. Coykuti had some of that. I could picture the cool, dark line of pines above the ranch there, the watchfulness of the mountain behind them. But there was a place that was even better. Where the trees stood tall and you crept beneath them in cathedral quiet. Where I’d stood on a rock and felt the wolf seep into me for the first time.

“No. Take them all to Bitter Hooks tonight. You know Falcon’s Bluff?”

“Yeah,” he said. “The top end of the property.”

“Get them up there by midnight tonight. Set up bonfires like we had in Carson. I need Nick and Ursula, Ben from the Cimarron pack, and any of the other cubs that helped out in the ritual. Olivia, of course.”

“Got it,” he said. “I’ll contact the LA alphas as well. I’ll give them details and offer an escort from the airport.”

“Thanks, Felix.”

“Anything else?”

He’d gotten right behind this. I was on a roll. “Uhh…yeah. I need to borrow some of the pack this afternoon…”

At 4 p.m. exactly, I watched as Agent Ingram exited the doors of the CBI building in Lakewood, and got into his rented black Chevy Impala.

As he pulled out, two agents followed him in a dark blue Honda SUV with tints.

Good. Easy car to spot even in traffic.

The tail was what he’d meant when he’d emphasized ‘secure’ in our telephone conversation. As the senior agent on the Anthracite team he’d had to acquire permanent guards once it had become active and taken down the Ops group.

Joy.

I had to separate him from his security detail. Messing with the FBI had a real potential to blow up in my face, so this needed to be done with care. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a squad of my Ops 4-10 buddies, who’d been trained for this kind of operation. I had twelve untrained teams of boisterous Were on loan from Felix, who I’d sworn to return unharmed and unblemished by criminal activity. Or at least, uncaught. I had Victor and a rented helicopter. I had Yelena. And I had me. It was going to have to be enough.

Ingram turned west on 6
th
, heading out of the Denver sprawl toward Golden. Traffic was moving slowly.

Good, again.

“We got eyes on him and his tail,” came through on the commset. “Ah…Bird One. I mean Whiskey One to Bird One. Over.”

I rolled my eyes. Victor snorted. Still, amateurs were better than nothing.

The FBI hadn’t trusted the security in Denver, not even in the CBI building. Matt—my go-to guy for finding information from the internet—wasn’t available, but earlier data dumps he’d provided to me had given me a list of possible FBI safe houses in the Denver area.

Ingram’s westerly direction pointed at a four-bedroom house at Eagle Ridge, tucked away in the Lakota Hills with good access to the CBI. It had been bought at the same time Project Anthracite set up an office at the CBI in Denver, and soon afterward it had an installation of oversized satellite comms dishes, all screened from neighbors by fast-growing shrub hedges.

Not the easiest of the list of possible safe houses for what I had in mind, but not the hardest.

“Teams November, Echo and Sierra, thank you and goodbye,” I said. The teams for the other directions Ingram might have taken went home. Now I was down to one team, Whiskey, all of them on the highway near Ingram.

The convoy approached the junction with Colfax.

I spoke into my commset again. “Whiskey One, Whiskey Two, box the SUV.”

A panel van pushed in between Ingram and the blue SUV, and a second blocked it from leaving the slow lane.

It was nothing unusual in the level of traffic; it probably happened more often than not on this route at this time. The driver of the SUV didn’t try to get out of the blind spot we’d put him in.

Traffic sped up as the snarl around Colfax fell behind and 6
th
angled north, then slowed again as the effect of upcoming traffic lights rippled back.

Ingram took the left lane to turn south onto the County Parkway.

Any second, the SUV would have to get out of the trap to head across and get behind Ingram again. Or they might think it would be okay to turn right on the Parkway and make a U turn.

Either way, a little delay needed to be introduced.

Here goes.

“Whiskey One, Whiskey Two, hard stop.”

The panel vans hit their brakes hard. The agent driving the blue SUV managed to skid to a stop, as we expected he would. The old Plymouth following him didn’t.

Perfect.

I hadn’t counted on the crash, but it helped.

“Whiskey One and Two, thank you and goodbye,” I said. “Whiskey Three, close that junction.”

The panel vans headed to Golden, apparently oblivious to the accident behind them. From Golden, they’d take the Freeway back to I-70, and by the end of the evening their plates and colors would be changed.

Meanwhile, a long, flat-bed truck ponderously turned onto the County Parkway behind Ingram, taking so much time that the lights changed before the next car could turn.

As it played out, the agents in the blue SUV had chosen to stay with the accident. Which meant one of them would be calling ahead so that a backup team at the safe house would set out to meet Ingram.

“Whiskey Three,” I said, “thank you and goodbye.”

I watched the truck head south. It would undergo the same transformation as the vans. Just in case.

An expensive operation, all in all.

Ingram continued heading in the direction of the safe house at the same speed.

Good. It had been a possibility that he’d stop and wait for his tail, and that would have made things a whole lot harder.

“Yankee, confirm situation.”

“Pickup point, ETA two minutes,” Yelena said. She’d complained about the Yankee designation, but this was my op.

“Time to throw me out, Vic.”

He muttered something that was probably
crazy bitch
, knowing him, but he didn’t argue and the helicopter swooped down toward an empty section of the road ahead of Ingram.

At fifty feet, I went out the door on a rappel line. The instant I touched the ground, I freed the line and Victor was gone.

It was a lot harder to hide the use of a helicopter from law enforcement, but we’d hired it using fake ID. And with luck, no one was going to make any connection between the vans, the truck and the helicopter.

Unless the FBI got real thorough, which they would if an agent went missing without explanation.

It was up to me to see if I could persuade Ingram to stop any investigation.

Predicting the actions of the agents, the traveling public and even the Were teams had been hard. But here was where it got really difficult.

My reward for doing this: Naryn would probably kill me, however it turned out. Especially after I handed him the bill.

I walked into the road in front of Ingram’s Impala. Everything from now on was uncertain.

He stopped. I hadn’t been sure he would.

The window slid down.

“You can stay in that car and never see me again, Agent Ingram.”

“Or what?”

“Run with me down that trail over there and find out things that’ll make your eyes pop.”

“Running will make my eyes pop on their own just fine,” he grumbled, but he got out of the car.

We trotted on the trail, which looped underneath the highway and up into a small gully called Deadman Gulch. Yelena was waiting at the end.

Ingram’s backup team from the safe house hadn’t arrived yet. Once they saw his car, it wouldn’t take long for them to start a search, nor would it take a genius to figure out which way I’d taken him. Maybe even someone had seen us. But we’d be long gone, and hopefully, we could persuade Ingram to call off any search before the full weight of the FBI got rolling.

We got in Yelena’s car, a white Ford Fusion. I decided I didn’t want to know where it had come from. All I’d asked Yelena was to make sure it was unremarkable and untraceable. Maybe I should have asked how she was going to get it back to wherever it had disappeared from.

“I sincerely hope you realize how much I’m staking on your judgement,” Ingram wheezed as Yelena took off up the road.

“I do, and that makes me feel real bad doing this.” I had a blindfold for him.

“Making me blind as well as dumb,” he snorted, but he was half-smiling as I put it on. Agent Ingram was a man with a deep addiction to finding things out.

Well, he was going to have that addiction satisfied tonight. Not from me though. All of it, the whole damn thing, I was about to kick upstairs.

Naryn is going to kill me.

The words were echoing through my head like a jingle I couldn’t get rid of.

Haven had built its strength back up as the security requirements in LA decreased, but there was still only a single guard on the gate, who greeted me and called it in.

The answer came back: a floor level and office number to find Naryn.

Inside, Yelena and I maneuvered Ingram, still wearing the blindfold, into the elevator and down corridors until we were outside Naryn’s office.

“Take a seat,” I said to them. I took a deep breath, rapped on the door and went in.

Naryn was seated at a table spread with reports. He had a lot on his plate and I felt a twinge of remorse for adding to it. Only a twinge—I couldn’t spare any more.

“Who’s that outside?” he asked, without any attempt at small talk.

“Possibly the most dangerous man in the world for us,” I replied, and hurried on as Naryn’s eyebrows lowered. “His name’s Harold Ingram. He’s the agent in charge of the FBI project called Anthracite, which you’ll have read reports on.”

That got his attention.

“He’s stumbled onto something? I told you your House gave the FBI too much—”

“Not exactly, no.”

I sat down without being invited.

“Y’know, Naryn, what sucks about being part of House Altau isn’t the secrets, it’s keeping all the secrets in the right compartments.”

He leaned forward on his table, lacing his fingers together, and stared at me.

“You know that Diana has projects that cannot be reported to Skylur?” I said.

“Yes.” He looked as if he was going to leave it there, but I waited until he went on. “In the old Assembly, Skylur had to be able to deny involvement with significant projects that hadn’t been approved by the Assembly, or its committees. So…” he shrugged.

“Yeah, because the Truth Sensors would rat on him if he told a lie. Good.” I looked around, spotting the coffee machine. “It’s gonna be a long night; can I make us some coffee?”

He waved me toward it.

“That was the old Assembly,” I said. “Is the new Assembly going to have the same setup?”

“It’s likely,” he said. “What has this got to do with—”

“I’m getting there. Diana recruited me into a scheme, and I don’t know if she recruited you, or that she ever expected me to have to recruit anyone else.”

His machine made a vicious cup of coffee. It came out black and thick as the stuff you get in Turkey.

I made two of his small cups and gave him one.

“Since she’s not available, and we’ve gone critical, I’m recruiting you.”

“You don’t know if she’d approve of recruiting me. Surely, if she did, she would have already.”

“Well, if you can get Diana to call and give me instructions…”

Bullseye.

He twitched. Whatever had happened that put Diana out of contact, Naryn was in on it. And he had instructions to keep me out of it. Peachy.

He tried to recover. “You drop this on me without warning and you say it’s gone critical. How critical?”

“If I hadn’t kidnapped him on the way to his FBI safe house, by now he would have handed over everything he’s gathered on paranormals to his boss, who happens to be the Deputy Director. I gather the Director was waiting in line for his report as well.”

Naryn had a Mediterranean complexion that didn’t do going pale easily, but he managed it.

“Killing him wouldn’t have helped. He’d have his files where his boss could get to them in an emergency.”

Naryn held me in his steely glare. “Binding him or kidnapping him would be no more than a temporary reprieve.”

I nodded.

“So…” I dragged the word out. “The last option seems to be what I would have suggested to Diana anyway: recruit him. Make him aware of the danger to everyone from Emergence without preparation. Get him to work with us.”

“This ties into your project with Diana?”

“It does. Diana recruited me to open a line of communication that would end with the President of the United States. She wanted me to use Colonel Laine and the military. When the Ops group got taken down by the FBI, it seemed to me that the lead agent of that operation would be a much better starting point. That’s Ingram.”

Naryn was silent. He leaned back in his chair and studied the ceiling.

I
had
to pass this to him. He knew that. I was too junior, too unsure of my abilities, to be trusted with this task. However busy he was, he couldn’t dodge this. He looked down.

“I see,” he said finally, grudgingly. “We build a relationship with him, so he can introduce us to his boss, and then to his boss, and so on. You have to hand this to me, and I have to accept the restrictions of not reporting to Skylur at the moment. So until Diana is…available again, I have to manage her secret project.”

Yes!

I tried not to leap out of my chair with joy.

Naryn wasn’t about to let me off everything else.

“What about your tasks, the Were negotiations?” he said.

“The LA packs have agreed to discuss making an alliance with House Tarez. I’ve had to leave Alex as main liaison on that because they’ll respond better to him than me.”

In my imagination, a ghost of a smile passed Naryn’s lips and disappeared.