by K. B. Wagers
Her return broke whatever staring contest was going on between Luis and Jenks, the former sliding out of his spot so she could get back into the booth.
“Luis, the bartender asked if you knew the men in the far corner from us. Jenks has a line of sight on them.”
“Which bartender?”
“With the glitter eyeliner.”
“Ah, Clair. He likes looking out for us.” Luis smiled and reached up. “You’ve got glitter on your face.”
“He was pretending to flirt so he could tell me about those guys.”
Jenks chuckled. “Oh, honey, Clair doesn’t pretend to flirt with anyone. He must like you.”
“Oh. Shit.”
“You’re fine.” Jenks waved off Max’s panic before it could set in. “He doesn’t expect anything in return, it’s just his nature. But you flirted back, apparently, which is new for you.” She looped an arm over Max’s shoulders and squeezed. “You don’t have to change unless you want to, Max. We like you just the way you are.”
“Yeah, I don’t know those guys,” Luis said. “And I’d bet a few feds their public identities aren’t real.”
“Should we get out of here?” Max asked.
“No, not yet. Drink your water and tell me a story about your childhood,” Jenks replied.
Chapter 36
Max frowned, but she complied and launched into a story about the time she and her older sister Pax had ditched their classes to play hide-and-seek in the garden on board the Navy carrier their parents were stationed on.
Jenks lifted her beer and took a sip, eyes wandering toward the trio across the bar. They were all well built, wide shoulders and big arms hidden behind plain black jackets. Luis was right, the handshakes from their DD chips were pristine and the names as forgettable as any mediocre white man’s.
She zeroed in on their mouths, waiting a beat for the conversation to fall into line in her brain.
“Gerard said to watch only, not to engage.”
“It’s definitely the one we pulled off of Shaw’s DD before he died. She’s been locked in the NeoG HQ since she’s been here on Earth, or with someone. If we get her alone, we can probably take her.”
“That seems like a bad idea—have you watched the video from the preliminaries?”
“Pfft. Cage matches aren’t the same as real fights. She’d last two seconds.”
“I’ll let you go first.”
Jenks snorted. “Keep talking, LT,” she said when Max trailed off.
“You’re not listening.”
“I am and it looks less suspicious for me to be staring at these guys across the bar if you’re talking.”
“And why are you staring?” Max kept her eyes pinned on Jenks even though she desperately wanted to look in the same direction her teammate was.
“Did I mention I can read lips?”
“No, but your brother did—oh.”
“Yeah.” Jenks grinned and took another drink. “Now keep telling me about your awful childhood. It must have been rough to sleep in a bed every night.”
“Jenks thinks she’s cool because she’s got street cred.” Luis snorted. “We don’t have the heart to tell her she’s just a big nerd.”
“So are you.” Jenks stuck her tongue out at him. “Anyway, they’re talking about how they think they can take me in a street fight.” She grinned. “But they’re apparently under orders not to engage us. Which makes me really want to do this.”
Ignoring Luis’s protest, she got up from their table and fake-staggered her way across the bar toward the trio.
With a wink at Clair, who sighed and crossed himself, Jenks grabbed a regular at the bar and kissed her. She was going to have to apologize to Tessa later for it, but it seemed the fastest way to start a fight.
“Hey!” Her date, predictably, objected and threw a punch at Jenks. It took all day to connect with her jaw, but she let it. She tripped to the side, overcorrecting and throwing herself at the table, catching the man nearest her with an elbow to his temple that laid him out immediately. Her other hand swept out, ostensibly to catch herself but somehow managing to upend all the glasses on the table instead.
The two remaining men jumped to their feet with cries of outrage.
“Hi, shit, sorry!” she slurred amid their exclamations. She could hear Luis and Max scrambling to intervene, but they were too far behind her.
“You—” One of the remaining men got to his feet, a wet stain from the spilled beer spreading over his shirt and pants.
Jenks ducked his punch, put her shoulder into his middle, and lifted him off his feet as she drove him into the wall. His breath rushed out in a wheeze and he slid to the floor when she dropped him.
Her final opponent was more wary. Jenks caught the chair he kicked in her direction without taking her eyes off him. Only when she spotted the gun in his shoulder holster did she pick the chair up and fling it back at him. He went down in a shower of broken wood.
The man she’d slammed into the wall was trying to get to his feet, hand groping for what she could only assume was an identical gun. She kicked him in the face, her boot making a satisfying crunching noise.
“Jenks,” Luis said, grabbing her by the shoulders. She shook him off and bent to pull the gun from the man’s holster.
“Guns.” She tossed it Max’s direction, pleased when the LT didn’t bobble it. “Luis, call HQ. I’m sure Clair or someone has called the local constables, but I don’t want these guys going to local. They’ll just end up dead again, and I want a chance to have a conversation.”
She stripped the others of their weapons and grabbed chair guy by the collar, lifting him onto his feet and pinning him to the wall with one hand. He blinked groggily at her.
“What the hell?”
“You know the important difference between a cage match and here?” she asked with a smile.
“What?”
“I generally like the people I fight with in the cage.” She punched him in the stomach, dropping him and jumping back before he threw up all over her boots.
“If I had known that letting you all go for a drink would result in me having to cut my night with my wife short, I would have confined you to the base.” Rosa rubbed at her face to block out Jenks’s unrepentant grin.
“To be fair,” Max said, “they were following us, and they were armed.”
“And now we have them in custody,” Jenks said, a bit too eager.
“You are not questioning them.” Rosa pointed a finger at her. “At the moment all we have is your testimony that they were talking about you. Then we have a dozen witnesses who saw you start a fight.”
“You did, technically.” Max nodded and Jenks deflated some.
“Commander, they were following us. They were talking about abducting me—or trying to.” Jenks snorted. “They’ve all clearly got fake IDs.”
“At the moment that’s all we can hold them on,” Luis said as he came into the room. “That and the fact that Clair’s got folks telling the investigators they started the fight with Jenks.” He made a face. “That won’t stand up if they push for surveillance footage, but I suspect they won’t.”
“Are we going to be able to leverage anything into information?”
Luis ran his tongue over his teeth as he considered Rosa’s question. “No, we don’t have enough. Stephan’s going to let them go.”
“Excuse me?”
He held his hands up at Jenks’s protest. “Don’t. This is my job, Dai, let me handle it.”
Rosa watched in amazement as Jenks actually backed down, though she crossed her arms over her chest and glared in Luis’s direction for a long moment. “Can I ask why at least?”
“So you can follow them.” It was Max who answered, and Luis nodded.
“They’re not going to talk, and as much as I hate to admit it, we need to back off.” He shook his head and Rosa’s heart sank. “It’s a different caliber from the crew running the system jumper. More professional. The longer we ke
ep them here, the less chance we have of finding the person in charge. If the pattern follows, they’ll just make an attempt to take these guys out—which could cost us lives and would certainly kill our only lead.”
“If you let them go, then what?” Jenks asked.
“They go back to the nest and we follow. They’ve all got trackers on them that will likely be found, but I put an extra one on the first guy Jenks took out. They might miss it because it’s off until I activate it.”
Rosa shared a glance with Max, the younger woman nodding once before she looked back at Luis. “Tell Stephan to do it. How long do you think until we have something?”
Luis shrugged. “Depends on how long they decide to wait to report in. I can put a tail on them, they’d be expecting it anyway, so I’d say a day or two at the very least. Probably longer.” He smiled. “Go on back to bed, Commander. We’ll call you if there’s anything else.”
“You two get some sleep,” she said. “We’ll most likely head back to Jupiter tomorrow if Stephan thinks pulling back is the best way to go.”
“We will.” Max gave Jenks a little shove toward the door before she could protest again. “Good night, Rosa.”
“It’s morning already,” Rosa grumbled, but she smiled at their retreating backs and headed out the other door toward her room. It was still dark in there, Angela asleep. Rosa stripped and slid back into bed, wrapping her arms around her wife and pressing a kiss to her back.
“Sorted?” Angela asked sleepily.
“For the moment.” Rosa inhaled. “When are the kids scheduled for a LifeEx booster?”
“Not until next year for Isobelle, and Gloria has three more. Why?”
“What about you?”
“Couple of months.” Angela was awake now and she rolled over, cupping Rosa’s face in her hands. “What’s going on?”
“I can’t tell you.” She felt the way her wife’s fingers tensed on her face. “I know. Just do me a favor and check with me again before you go?”
“Okay.” There was a wealth of trust in that word.
“Thank you. We’ve got a few hours and then I’ll have to head back to Jupiter.”
“Well, if we’ve only got a few hours . . .”
Rosa slid her hands over Angela’s skin and found her mouth in the dark, sinking into the kiss with a sigh that contained a multitude of I love you’s.
“Back to work like nothing happened.” Jenks slumped in her chair in their quarters on Jupiter Station with a grumble. “This makes no sense.”
Max looked away from the journal entry she was reading and smiled. “Stephan and Luis know what they’re doing. If this really is a plan a hundred years in the making, we’re not going to solve it overnight. I know your solution is charging in and pummeling things into submission, but that’s not going to work here.”
“Why not?”
Max swallowed down the sigh that threatened and shut the file on her DD so she could focus on Jenks. “Tell me something. How did you get food when you were living on the streets?”
“Stole it.” Jenks shrugged. “Or bought it with money I scrounged. Some guys hunted rats and bigger things. I couldn’t do it.” She reached down and patted Doge’s head unconsciously.
“When you stole it, you didn’t just walk in and take whatever and walk back out, yeah?”
Jenks frowned at her. “That’s the fastest way to end up with the PKs on your ass, Carmichael. You wouldn’t last a day out on the streets. No, you pick a shop, watch, and wait for the busy times. Then you slip in when they’re distracted. Even better if you can find someone to cause a scene.”
Max gave Jenks a flat look, waiting patiently for the woman to realize what she’d just said. It took a minute, but Jenks wasn’t impulsive by nature so much as by choice.
“Oh,” she said. “I get it. We’re watching and waiting.”
“Precisely. We’re letting Intel do their jobs while we do ours.”
“You want to go spar?”
“No. I’m reading. Go find Locke and beat on him for a while.”
Jenks heaved a dramatic sigh but got up and headed out of the quarters. Max chuckled. She knew Jenks understood what they were trying to do here and that at least some of her impatience was for show. But she was restless. They all were. Going back to Jupiter had been the best move, but it meant they’d left the investigation largely in the hands of Intel, and Max knew it was making them all feel out of the loop.
Max reopened the scan of her great-grandfather’s journal that Ria had sent her. So much of Alexander’s journals dealt with the post-Collapse world and his thoughts on the reconstruction efforts, which were well under way by the time he’d started writing with any regularity. She’d never read them all the way through, only the pieces that had been assigned in school.
She found the famous entry where he’d first come up with the idea of the life extender—which was etched onto the wall in the entrance of the LifeEx headquarters. The one that contained the oft-quoted line “We shall go into the stars and live forever.”
Max flipped to the next page, one of the many that hadn’t made it into the public scans that were available of her great-grandfather’s thoughts.
Talked to G. He had thoughts about my plans. For once they were good thoughts. He believes that with a few tweaks we could have a workable model by the summer. I am doubtful, but since I’ve confided in him anyway I should follow this through and see where it goes.
“Who’s G?” Max frowned and ran a search for the capital letter, coming up with more than a thousand hits. She refined the search, removing the first word of sentences unless it was the single letter, and set her chip to compile the results by date.
Over eight hundred hits spread among close to five hundred entries.
With a muttered curse, Max got up and wandered over to the coffee, pouring out the cold dregs and fixing a new pot. As it brewed she started reading.
Two and a half hours later, Max had drunk more coffee than was good for her and had a head swirling with a one-sided tale of a mysterious friend who’d helped her great-grandfather develop LifeEx and then tried to steal it from him.
It was a story she’d never heard so much as a whisper about, not even from her family.
Max checked the time and then shot Ria a message.
Carmichael, M: We need to talk, call me as soon as you can.
Her tablet rang a few minutes later and Max got up to pace the empty quarters with it in her hand. “Ria.”
“Max, what’s up?”
“Who’s G? And why is this the first I’m hearing about a friend of Great-Granddaddy’s being involved in the development of the serum?”
“Thomas Gerard died in an accident before the serum was released. And this is the first time you’re hearing about it because it’s not worth talking about.”
But that wasn’t true—at least, not anymore. The men in the bar had been talking about reporting to a Gerard, and Max wasn’t about to chalk it up to a strange coincidence. “But he was responsible for the formula, and then they had a falling-out? The journal entries around that period look like pieces are missing.”
“Great-Granddaddy ripped parts out of his journal and destroyed them. No one knows what he was thinking during that time. The best I’ve been able to piece together is that Thomas wanted to go a different direction, one Alex didn’t agree with.” Ria lifted her hands. “I’m sorry, Max, I don’t know what else to tell you.”
“So it’s a dead end?” Max rubbed at the bridge of her nose, wishing she trusted her sister more. “Did Thomas have any family? Someone who’d want to get back at us for what Alex did?”
“Alex didn’t do anything, Max, except create a serum that allowed us all to travel into the stars and live longer, healthier lives. Thomas died. Alex owned the formula. Whatever input Thomas may have had into it, it belonged to Great-Granddaddy. I’m sorry, I wish I could help you more with it, but this line of thinking isn’t going to take you anywhere. Bosco is curren
tly running through all past employees with your Intel folks.”
“Yeah, that’s going to take a while,” Max muttered. “All right, well thanks for clearing up that mystery at least.”
“Hey, no problem. It’s always good to check things off the list, right?” Ria smiled. “I’ve got to go, but I’ll email you later.”
Max nodded and disconnected with a sigh. “Damn it.”
Ria wasn’t telling her the truth, she knew that from the far-too-easy explanation her sister had ready about Thomas Gerard, but there wasn’t anything Max could push her with to get a confession.
There’s no way I can get my hands on the actual journal, especially if Ria’s hiding something.
The question was: What was Ria trying to hide from her?
Letters
Nika—
You know that feeling you get when you’re staring at something for so long that everything blurs together and becomes a big mess? I feel that way about this whole case. The journal idea ended up being a bust. I was able to confirm there was a man who helped Alex Carmichael develop the LifeEx serum in some capacity, but he died before anything became of it.
Or so my sister claims. I’m not sure I trust her, but I have no access to the physical copy of the journal, and even if I did I don’t know if I’d find anything different from what I’ve seen here. It’s so frustrating. All I do know is that the men in the bar who were watching us said they reported to a Gerard and the name can’t be a coincidence.
We’re going back out on regular patrol in the morning and part of me is glad for a return to routine. I know the Games are a big deal and we have a lot riding on our performance. The training has kicked up a notch and I don’t mind it at all. But I also just want to be able to focus on the job.
How are you?
—M
Max—
I do know that feeling and I wish I had a good answer for you. The journal was worth checking out, even if nothing came of it. Though I agree the name match is odd. I know Stephan had some leads he’s following up on, might be worth it to shoot him an email or give him a com and see if there’s anything else you can take a look at.