Clearly, we’re doing something wrong. We need to change gears.
Naomi opens the document containing the master case file we’ve been compiling for months, which is only accessible to a handful of people, most of whom are in this room. We’ve been desperately trying to plug the leak in our intel, to stymie the flow of information to the mole and then outside DSI, to our enemies, but so far, our efforts have been worthless.
Clearing her throat, Naomi says to Riker, “Do you want to start with your updates, sir?”
“Sure, why not?” Riker, at the head of the table, drops his interlocked hands onto his lap and sighs. “Bollinger and I have, unfortunately, been unable to penetrate the curtain Delos has drawn between us and the ICM. We know he and his ‘entourage’ have arrested upward of fifteen practitioners suspected of colluding with the Methuselah rogues, but they continually refuse to allow DSI access to these individuals, claiming ICM jurisdiction and interests outweigh us in this matter. Something that is patently untrue. But we can’t force the issue unless Mayor Burbank is willing to take a stand. And so far, the threat of additional instability in the practitioner community that would result from butting heads with Robert ‘Iron’ Delos has him shaking in his boots. He won’t make a move.”
Amy snorts. “Coward.”
“My thoughts exactly, Major.” Desmond shakes his head. “So how do we proceed then, Captain? If we can’t reach the accused rogues by going straight through Delos, is there another avenue we can pursue?”
Riker thinks on that question for a moment, then nods. “We already are. The commissioner is appealing directly to the High Court in order to strike a sort of truce that will allow the ICM and DSI to work together against the Methuselah Group, until such time as they are no longer a threat to either party or the public.”
“Tall order,” Naomi says. “Do you think the Court will bite?”
“Depends on how badly they’re hurting.” Ella raps her knuckles on the table. “According to this vampire spy, Lucian Ardelean, the ICM has been at war with the MG in Europe for years. The fact they haven’t stamped out the rogues yet, despite having a virtual monopoly on powerful practitioner membership, means the MG is much stronger and more resilient than they want us to believe.
“It’s possible and likely, in my opinion, that behind the scenes, all over the world, the Court is quickly losing support. And as a consequence, losing even more ground against the rogues. Confidence in the ICM as an organization capable of controlling wayward practitioners has seriously eroded not only in Aurora, in the aftermath of the Wellington disaster, but across the United States. Supernatural crime stats have quintupled in recent months, according to our allies in the FBI’s Paranormal Squad. I imagine it’s much the same abroad.”
“But Aurora is our stomping ground,” says Newman, seated next to Naomi. “Practically speaking, we don’t have the resources to look far beyond Michigan for answers to our rogue practitioner problem. Unless we commandeer resources from other DSI branches; but doing so would leave other metropolitan centers understaffed and too many criminals could walk their streets unhindered. So if Commissioner Bollinger is unsuccessful in his appeal to the High Court, then what do we do?”
“Not what we’ve been doing so far.” Amy crosses her arms. “That farm business was ridiculous. Somehow, we have to get ahead of that goddamn mole. Maybe that should be our priority. If we can plug the leak and stop the flow of information to the MG, we might be able to mount a successful assault on our persons of interest.” She gestures to the pictures taped to the whiteboard behind Naomi’s team. “One resounding success is all we need to vastly improve our position in this cat-and-mouse game.”
The room falls quiet as we process the idea of changing our strategy to such a degree. It’d be a massive reallocation of resources, and would raise more than a few eyebrows—DSI agents scrutinizing other DSI agents—but none of us, me most of all, can deny Amy has a point. We’ve been trying to work around the mole’s influence for months, thinking if we just tighten the fold enough, cut off the flow of vital intel beyond the teams directly involved in our MG plans, then maybe we’ll be able to one-up the bastard who keeps haunting our shadows.
The farm incident proved that strategy isn’t working.
But to do a one-eighty, round back on ourselves, and leave the MG unimpeded for a significant period of time, or leave a weaker DSI force in their way, innocent agents waiting to be trampled…? Is that a wiser strategy or a worse one? If we leave lower-level teams standing in their path, the body count will rise on our end, a cold, heartless move, the kind of tactic we could never justify. But at the same time, if we leave no one to defend Aurora, we’ll be sacrificing innocent civilians who don’t even know supernatural beings exist.
Our prerogative is to protect civilians.
Which means we have no choice but to sacrifice our own.
“I’m not comfortable with where this is heading,” I murmur.
“Me either,” replies Ella as she rises from the chair to my right. She smacks her palms on the table and stares at the scratched wood surface for almost half a minute before adding, “But we may not have a choice in the matter. We can’t keep running in circles. We have to start advancing on the MG presence in this city. We have to start winning. Every time we lose, they grow a little stronger, a little more confident, prove to a few more on-the-fence practitioners that the Methuselah Group has the upper hand, recruit a few more to their cause. We have to stop this vicious circle before Aurora burns down inside it.”
“I agree with you, Ella, but…” Naomi leans back in her chair. “Who do we put on the sacrificial altar? Who do we risk while we’re busy chasing down this mole? Delarosa? Ramirez? Nakamura? Some underprepared auxiliary team that won’t know what hit them until their souls get Called to the afterlife? How can we justify throwing anyone to the wolves?”
“We can’t,” Riker says, voice like stone. “But that doesn’t mean we won’t if we have no other choice. Our job is not to protect the people in this building. It’s to protect the people outside it. And every field agent in this building accepted that fact when they accepted the badge.”
Desmond rubs his cheeks, looking more disturbed in this situation than he was when the farmhouse blew up in our faces. “I honestly can’t believe we’re discussing—”
Someone knocks on the door. And like that, all the tension evaporates.
Hastily, we file away that conversation, like a bunch of doomsayers caught red-handed discussing the end of the world in polite company.
Ella, the only one standing, heads to the door and tugs it open, just wide enough to reveal the person in the hall. Brittany Regent, the analyst who’s been tirelessly crunching our numbers and researching even our weakest leads, working at least as much overtime as us. She taps the top of a manila file folder clutched to her chest and says, “I have the reports Captain Riker requested earlier this morning.”
Ella opens the door the rest of the way, allowing Brittany to scurry inside and set the file folder on the table in front of Riker. “All the background checks you asked for, sir.”
“Thank you.” He gives her a flat smile. “That’s all for now. You can return to your regular duties.”
“Of course.” She backs halfway across the floor, not quite willing to look any of us in the eye, much less glimpse the vital case information plastered all over the whiteboards (even though we’ve explicitly vetted her and given her access to the basic intel). With a muttered “If that’s all,” she whirls around and hurries back to the door.
I’ve never known Brittany Regent to be shy or anxious, not even in a task room meeting with all attention zeroed in on her face. But in the months Teams Sing and Riker have been conducting business in this task room, much of which doesn’t leave the room in any public form, a lot of agents have developed a degree of wariness when in our presence.
Beyond our two teams (and Cooper), no one knows there’s a dangerous mole inside DSI. But plenty of people suspect, ba
sed on the way our recent casework has suffered, and their suspicion makes them cagey. Everyone has a nightmare scenario firmly situated in their mind: What if the mole is someone I know? What if they’re one of my friends? Or worse, what if the target falls on me? What if I’m framed for something I didn’t do? What if I end up in prison, convicted of a crime I didn’t commit? What if—?
A resounding smack startles us all out of silence, and everyone wheels around toward the doorway. Ella, who’d been in the process of closing the door, hauls it open again, and to her shock, finds Brittany Regent sprawled across the hallway floor. Gasping, Ella lunges out the door and drops next to Brittany, checking her pulse and shaking her shoulder and urging her to respond.
“What the hell?” Amy stands up. “Did she slip and fall?”
“She’s burning up.” Ella checks her forehead, then her neck. “I think she’s sick.”
“No,” I say, frozen in my seat. “This is…This is what happened at Kelly’s. With that woman I told you about.”
Naomi and her teammates throw me confused looks, but Amy and Desmond bolt out the door to join Ella in the hall, and after a cursory check for injuries, Desmond scoops Brittany’s unconscious form into his hefty arms. “I’ll take her to the infirmary.”
“I’m coming with you,” Ella says, bounding up from the floor. “I’ll tell Navarro this is the second case today, have him contact the hospital where the woman at Kelly’s was taken, get some information on her status.”
Both of them race off toward the elevator, leaving Amy to pace in circles, frustrated.
“Um,” says Naomi, “I don’t understand. What’s happening?”
“I wish I could tell you.” I grip the rim of the table. “But I honestly have no idea.”
Riker hobbles over to my chair and strikes the floor with the tip of his cane. “Two people falling out from the same mystery illness in under an hour in two different places. You think they had a common location between them? Ran into one another earlier this morning? At a gas station, maybe? Or even somewhere yesterday?”
“You think this is an infection?” I ask. “But it strikes so fast. The lady at Kelly’s showed no signs of being sick until she collapsed. She was fine one second, and dying the next. What kind of virus or bacteria works like that? Even today’s nastiest superbugs don’t work that fast…do they?”
“I don’t think so.” Amy leans against the doorframe. “Unless there’s some new disease going around we’ve somehow missed hearing about because we’ve had our heads shoved so deep into this Methuselah shit.”
Joe Adelman, picking at the scar on his neck, says, “If there was something this dangerous going around, the whole country would be in a panic.”
Jake Adelman helpfully adds, “Maybe it will be, after today.”
The normally quiet Li raises his hand to get our attention and then gestures at the spot on the hallway floor where Brittany passed out. “I don’t really want to be the one to point this out, but, uh, if we’re operating under the assumption that the analyst succumbed to a communicable disease, then shouldn’t we also assume we’ve all been exposed? If this thing is airborne…”
Riker drops his gaze to me, frowning deeply. “You were exposed twice in a row.”
That queasy feeling in my gut grows stronger, and I bite my tongue to stop myself from gagging. I knew I shouldn’t have eaten.
“Meeting adjourned, sir?” Naomi pushes her chair back and signals for her team to follow her lead. “I think it’d be wise if we all went to the infirmary, immediately.”
“I agree.” Riker scans all the case information on the whiteboards one last time, and his shoulders slump. “Just what we need on top of a city-wide practitioner incursion. A goddamn plague.”
Chapter Three
The infirmary is locked down for over an hour while Navarro and the rest of the medical staff thoroughly inspect everyone who came into contact with Brittany Regent over the course of the morning. Naomi’s team is processed first, followed by my own—we’re all released with a clean bill of health—and then they move on to three cafeteria workers, six other analysts, and four people from General Admin who were part of an early meeting with the analysts.
While those agents are being checked, the rest of us linger outside the hastily erected quarantine zone along the back wall of the infirmary, a fifteen-foot-wide section of the room walled off with thick plastic and plastered with yellow hazard symbols. All the doctors inside are decked out in hazmat suits; embedded in those suits is an assortment of protective charms created by Navarro and the other minor practitioners who work in the infirmary. They’re going all out, maybe too far out, I think, over what could easily be a false alarm, a coincidence.
But then, in our line of work, when is anything ever a coincidence?
I shift my weight from foot to foot, anxious as I lay my eyes on Brittany again. She’s completely sealed off from everyone else, lying in a lonely bed surrounded by monitors that keep beeping at uncomfortable rates, suggesting the poor woman they’re attached to is barely hanging on. The two doctors attending her, one a practitioner, are still performing tests. Drawing blood. Checking for injuries. Casting spells. The whole nine yards.
Once Navarro finishes up with the last analyst and releases him back into the wild—the spooked agent charges out of the infirmary like his ass is on fire (not that I blame him)—the doctor exits the quarantine area, removes his hazmat gear with the help of two nurses, and marches over to us. He comes to an abrupt stop in front of Riker and Naomi, who’ve been whispering to each other for the past fifteen minutes, and inhales sharply before saying, “I don’t know what’s wrong with Agent Regent.”
Naomi frowns. “But we’re all good to go, right? You didn’t find anything when you examined us?”
“That’s just it.” Navarro runs a hand through his curly black hair. “I found no signs of an infection in any of you, and I don’t see any obvious pathogens in the blood samples I’ve examined so far, not in Kinsey’s, despite his repeated exposure, and not even in Regent’s, despite the fact she’s deathly ill.”
“I hear a but coming,” Riker says.
“But,” Navarro continues, “I can’t be sure I’m looking in the right place. Whatever this disease is, it strikes the body very hard very quickly. It’s tearing that poor analyst apart. Her core temperature keeps rising, her heart rate keeps diving, her blood pressure is all over the place. Even though we’re pumping her full of every applicable medication and using every potion and charm I have in my spell book.”
“It’s not responding to healing magic?” Ella steps up beside Riker, gaze directed at Brittany’s prone form. The analyst’s skin is almost as pale as the sheets. “How can that be?”
“Well, in order for magic to work on a disease, it has to be geared toward that disease in some way.” Navarro rubs his chin, frustration clearly seeping through his pores. “Obviously, I don’t have anything designed to fight this particular disease, even in a peripheral fashion. Which I find incredibly disturbing. I should at least be able to stabilize her blood pressure, her heart rate, something. But I can’t. If I didn’t know any better, I’d almost think…”
“Think what?” asks Desmond, who’s been looming silently in the corner since he stepped out of quarantine. “That this is a biological weapon, designed in a lab?”
“Whoa now!” Amy rises from her crouch, back sliding up the wall. “We have two people down. Two. That lady at Kelly’s, and our analyst. Why are we all so keen to act like people are dropping like flies?”
“So as to prevent that situation from occurring,” Navarro answers. “In these modern times, when biological warfare is a distinct possibility, we have to treat every unidentified illness that strikes more than one individual as the start of a potential epidemic. We can’t risk underestimating a new virus or bacteria, even if incidents like this”—he motions to Brittany—“turn out to be false alarms ninety-nine percent of the time.”
“Okay,”
Amy drawls, “but you said you didn’t find anything in her blood. So what if this isn’t a disease at all?”
“Yeah,” says Joe Adelman, “what if it’s a designer drug gone horribly wrong?”
“Or hell,” adds Jake, “what if it’s a poison?”
Ella rubs her arms, restless, and says to Navarro, “You think this could be some kind of mass poisoning attempt? Someone releases a deadly agent in a public place, Regent and this other woman come into contact with it, and a few hours later, they fall seriously ill?”
Navarro starts pacing around in a tight circle. “It’s possible. The fever makes me jump to pathogen, just because that’s the most dangerous out of all the options, but depending on the composition of a certain poison or a ‘designer drug’—which, essentially, are one and the same—the effects could mimic a viral or bacterial infection.”
“Either way, this isn’t our playing field,” Riker says. “We have too much work to do on the supernatural end of things to devote a great deal of time to a mystery illness that has, thus far, only struck a small number of people.” He holds up his hand when Ella turns to berate him for sounding so callous. “We should call the CDC, get them down here to look at Regent and the other woman. And while we’re at it, we should have Regent moved to the same hospital as the first victim, so the disease experts can monitor them both.”
Navarro looks uncomfortable at that suggestion. “I’m honestly not sure Regent is stable enough to be moved.” He casts a morose look at the struggling analyst. “We may have to put her on life support soon.”
“God,” mutters Newman. She breaks away from the rest of her team and backs toward the infirmary door. “I can’t stand around here doing nothing. Can we please get to work?”
Naomi sighs. “That may be the best course of action. As long as none of us are sick…”
“You’re right.” Riker nods solemnly. “We can’t afford to waste time, given our current workload.”
Navarro raises an eyebrow. He’s probably heard a ton of rumors about what our two teams have been cooking up in the task room over the past few months, but he knows better than to ask directly about topics he’s not supposed to be privy to. “If that’s the case, then I’ll handle communication with the CDC myself. I have some contacts there I can ring up, help get the ball rolling. Unless you want to run this through the commissioner.”
Doom Sayer (City of Crows Book 4) Page 4