Family (6 page)

“How do you inadvertently give away the cell phone numbers of agents in a manner that gets them killed?” Kurt asked.

“Simple enough,” Zollers said. “My work cell phone, for instance, contains the numbers for almost every agent in the Directorate’s Minneapolis campus. All it would take is for my cell phone to be viewed by another party for them to have all the numbers for every single person who’s been hunted and killed in the last few days. The person whose phone was viewed wouldn’t even necessarily have to know about it – perhaps they simply…” He hesitated. “…were deceived. They might have…slept with someone, stepped into the shower and allowed them access to their cell phone…”

I felt scarlet creep up my cheeks, hot embarrassment at Zollers’ words, at the suggestion. All it took to get people killed was the numbers of every agent they wanted tracked down, pilfered from a Directorate Operative’s cell phone by someone from Omega, unsupervised. Someone like James Fries.

“We could search through everyone,” Ariadne said, “for months, and still come up dry. This is…so much data. So many people. How do you even start?”

“You don’t need to start,” I said, feeling the dark cloud settling in over me. “It was me. I left my cell phone in my hotel room last night with an Omega operative,” I said, “while I was on the conference call with you, Ariadne. I didn’t know he was Omega at the time, and I didn’t know what would happen, but it was me…I left it in there with him for at least a half-hour.” I shook my head, and pummeled myself inside for my supreme stupidity. “It was me.”

Chapter 6

The room seemed to freeze around me, the life drained out of it like air all exhaled in one great breath. I didn’t want to look up at any of them, but when I did, I saw Ariadne staring at me in numbest shock, her mouth open and trying to move, caught comically agape. Zollers cleared his throat and looked away, which was, I think, the worst reaction of them all. I heard Kurt snort on the bed behind Zollers, but I didn’t much care about him.

“What…” Ariadne stumbled over her attempt to speak, then recovered, her face going through several changes of expression. “What were you…” Her eyes rolled back, like she was trying to recall something, and I saw her white-knuckle the railing of my bed, before she finally managed a full sentence. “What…was he doing there?”

“Waiting for me,” I said. I caught a hint of disappointment from Zollers, though he hid it well. “He was an incubus, and so he could – we could—”

“I don’t need to hear any more,” Ariadne said, waving a hand in front of me to cut me off. “I’m going to send our staff investigator to debrief you. He’s going to start putting together a picture of what you know about Omega, and how this happened.”

“If I may,” Old Man Winter said, in a tone that let us know he wasn’t so much asking for permission to interject as he was warning everyone else to shut up. “While this…Omega operative may have gotten access to your cell phone, it was not the cause of our recent setbacks. The ambush of our agents was in motion prior to your call with Ariadne, and the battle in Kansas was already underway.” He looked at me, boring into my eyes. “You are not responsible for this. The fault rests with someone else.”

Ariadne seemed to think about this for a moment. “Very well. They couldn’t have gotten the data from her phone. I still want our investigator to talk to you about this – this – this—” She stopped, closed her eyes, and exhaled. “All right.” She shook her head again. “Anything else, tell the investigator. His name is Michael Mormont.” She shook her head and turned to leave.

Old Man Winter waited, still staring me down, but after another moment he broke off and followed her. He stopped at the door and turned. “You saw your mother.”

“I did,” I said, afraid to meet his eyes. Why did I feel this overwhelming sense of shame? Probably because I got suckered by an Omega operative who damned near got me to lose my virginity to him less than twenty-four hours before he beat the hell out of me.

“Did she say anything?” he asked. “Anything of consequence?” His hand was on the door, on the metal frame around it, and I saw a small sheen of ice spreading out on the steel in a light spiderweb pattern, radiating out from his hand across the metal wall.

“No,” I said. “Just told me I’d screwed up and that I’d screw up again.” I clenched my fist and felt pain shoot through my arm where I’d been shot. “Just like always,” I whispered.

Old Man Winter nodded. “She has always been…a hard woman. My chosen surname is Winter,” he said, with the slightest smile, “but she is the very definition of it – harsh, unrelenting, unforgiving.”

“You used to work with her at the Agency?” I asked, referring to the government-controlled precursor to the Directorate. No one had ever really explained to me what happened to the Agency, other than that it was destroyed.

“Our paths would cross occasionally. She was an agent, one of the best. I was in…administration. I knew her only in passing.”

“What happened?” I asked, in genuine wonder. “What happened when the Agency was destroyed? Why did she flee, give up her name and everything and hide for almost two decades?”

“Fear, I would think,” Old Man Winter said, possibly breaking some kind of personal record for number of consecutive sentences in a row. “Fear for you and your safety. It is a dangerous world for metas.” His eyes narrowed. “And especially for a succubus.”

I opened my mouth to ask another question about the Agency and its destruction, but as though he sensed he didn’t want to answer it, he left, the doors sliding shut behind him. “What was that supposed to mean?” I asked Zollers, who chewed his lip as he watched Old Man Winter leave.

“I don’t know. Not being a meta myself, I suppose I’m not down with the lingo.”

“‘Down with the lingo’?” I asked. “Did you really just talk like a geek fanboy?”

“Naw,” he said, “that was totally street.” He paused, tried to keep a straight face, and then smiled. “The street where the comic shop is located, anyway. So…” he said, “I need to talk to you.”

“Why?” I asked, distracted, staring at the doors that Old Man Winter had just walked out of. “Did I do something wrong?” I asked mockingly.

“Sounds like,” Zollers replied, “but that’s not why I want to talk to you. Standard Directorate procedure after you’ve been through a firefight. Gotta make sure you’re not suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.”

“I’m suffering from multiple gunshot wounds,” I said. “I’m suffering from a lack of answers and an abundance of questions—”

“Something I’m sure you’ve never dealt with ever, at any point in your life.”

I let that hang in the air for a second, then blew air out of my lips and shook my head, only mildly amused. “You know me too well, Doctor.”

“I try,” he said. “You could make it easier, though. Come see me when you get out. And you know.” He looked at me with a narrowed, piercing gaze that was coupled with a knowing smile to devastating effect. “If you don’t, I will hunt you down.”

“I’ve been made aware of that before, yes.”

“All right, then,” he said with a nod, then hesitated, as though he remembered or realized something. He looked at me somewhat tenderly, then nodded again and walked out, his posture stiff. I started to ask him what that was about, but shrugged. We all act a little weird sometimes.

As the doors shut, I heard movement to my left and turned to look. Reed was still asleep in the corner of the medical unit closest to Dr. Perugini’s office, but there was motion in the bed next to him.

It was Zack. His eyes were open and fixed on me, and his face was crumpled in a way that caused my heart to drop in my chest. His lips were twisted, eyes squinting, emotion plastered over every inch of his handsome face, and I had another jolt of realization – he had been listening when I told the others about James, about what I had done.

“I’m sorry,” I said. He didn’t reply. He just shook his head, bowing it down. After a moment he looked back at me in silent accusation, then closed his eyes and rolled over, giving me nothing but a view of his back.

Chapter 7

I got discharged from the medical unit a few hours later. Zack still wouldn’t speak to me, and I didn’t bother trying very hard because truthfully, I was more than a little ashamed. I mean, I was nearly in bed with another guy less than twenty-four hours after breaking up with Zack. Not my best day ever.

I stepped out of the headquarters building to find the sun shining, fluffy white clouds draped intermittently across the sky, with a warm wind pushing them along. It was a beautiful summer’s day and not too hot, for once. The scent of fresh cut grass permeated the air in front of headquarters.

Dr. Perugini had had someone retrieve clothes from my room, so I was walking out of the medical unit in a pair of jeans and a loose fitting long-sleeved T-shirt. My arm still felt a little painful, but the place where the bullets had been pulled out only the day before were now simply angry red spots, just a little scabbing giving any indication that there was ever any deeper injury there.

I didn’t want to think about the internal pressure I had weighing on me – not about Mom, nor Zack, nor James, not about Omega, or anything, really. I knew Ariadne’s investigator, Michael Mormont, would find me sooner or later, and I was sure that would be a joyous exploration of my many screw-ups, but I counted myself lucky that I’d been unconscious when he’d stopped by the medical unit earlier.

No, I needed a distraction right now. I didn’t have an assignment, and I was done with training—

I stopped walking. Parks had hammered it into our heads, over and over, that we were never done with training. “Training never ends,” Parks had said, his dark eyes visible beneath his gray, bushy eyebrows. “Not for the true professional. Training’s a way of life for the prepared, for people who are always looking for the edge in a fight. And you never know when that fight will come.”

I understood him in a way that Kat and Scott had never quite come around to. It made sense to me. Probably because my mom had the same philosophy, and we had trained every day, on martial arts, on weapons, on fighting.

I found my feet carrying me past the newly rebuilt science labs, past the gym, to a nondescript building tucked at the far side of the sprawling Directorate campus. The gym housed workout equipment, suitable for employees to exercise and maintain physical fitness. But this was the training center, a three-story boxy building of concrete and metal. It housed a gun range, a full martial arts studio, and a dozen classrooms with materials suitable for any lesson you wanted to learn.

I walked through the double glass doors and into the gray-carpeted hallway. The carpeting was thin, like it was just barely stretched over the concrete floor. I entered a drab hall that was all glass windows on both sides. I looked through the windows, which were bulletproof glass, down onto the firing range below. The stalls where the shooters stood were all empty, the range quiet.

I pushed open the heavy door that separated me from the range. All was quiet; I walked down the staircase, my tennis shoes squeaking against the rubber-plastic substance coating each stair. When I reached the bottom, the smell of gunpowder greeted me, the sweet smell of fired bullets. To my right was the rangemaster’s armory, and I pulled open the door and walked in, drawing a raised eyebrow from the man behind the counter.

“I didn’t expect to see you here,” Glen Parks said, his lips puckered, giving his rugged face a skeptical tilt. “Being newly discharged from the medical unit, I assumed you’d have other things to do.”

“I didn’t enjoy being shot,” I said, “and maybe some practice will help keep it from happening again.”

“Not losing your gun next time would probably help more than target practice.”

“I didn’t just lose one, I lost two. And a backup knife.”

It was hard to suss out his reaction, his face remaining masklike even as his fingers drummed out a steady rhythm on the counter in front of him. “Good girl. You’ll be needing some new ones, then?”

“I’d like to stick with my Sig and my Walther,” I said, sidling up to the counter and leaning on it with my uninjured arm. “And I’d like to get some practice in; a couple hundred rounds with the Sig at least.”

“And the Walther?” he asked.

“Fifty or so,” I said, and he pulled boxes of bullets off the back shelves and set them on the counter, then walked to a cabinet behind him and opened it, rummaged around for a minute before coming back with two gun cases. He opened the first to reveal a Walther, then the second to reveal a Sig Sauer that was exactly like the one I had lost.

I took both pistols, their cases, and the bullets, along with the ear protection and eye protection, and went out onto the range. There was something therapeutic about having the gun in my hand. I pulled targets out of the bin in the corner; they were all black and white outlines of a vaguely man-shaped person. I hung the first from the clips and sent the target downrange with the little button that caused the hanger to zip along the cord. The paper target waved, fluttering along until it was a good fifteen feet away from me.

I put in ear plugs, then slipped the muffs over my ears. Having been exposed to a small war’s worth of gunfire and explosions over the prior few days, I wondered if this would make any difference. I put on the eyewear, then pulled the Sig out of the sleeve. I smelled the unique hint of gun oil as I brought the slide up to my nose and took a deep sniff. I know it sounds weird, but I’ve always thought that after a while, the faded smell of gun oil smells just a little like curry.

I fired through a hundred rounds pretty quickly, stopping a few times between magazines to change the target. I looked at my results every time I reeled in the silhouette outlines. I visualized James Fries as the outline in the targets and it seemed to help. There could be no doubt I needed more practice with a gun. Even though I felt fairly confident I could put a severe hurting on someone, my mother would have viewed anything less than flawless results as an indicator that we needed to practice more. Flawless results only meant you needed to maintain your skills in this area, and focus on becoming better somewhere else.