Adelmo laughed darkly. “No, we certainly won’t need it now.”
They probably wouldn’t be able to reach her until she went to prison, and maybe not even then. He received notice of a call from the family’s compound in Bolivia, but it wasn’t from his nephew. When he opened the line to his niece, all he got was a stream of unintelligible sobs.
“I’m sorry, Sophia, I need you to slow down. What’s happened?”
“He’s dead, Uncle Adelmo! My papa is gone! They say he had a heart attack!”
The news caused his own hand to close reflexively over his chest, but only for a moment. He shared the call with his three men.
“When did this happen?”
“I don’t know.” She sobbed a bit more, and then coughed back the tears. “An hour? Maybe two? The helicopter wasn’t ready. We had to drive all the way to La Paz!”
He mouthed “Manuel” to his men, and then made a slashing sign across his throat. They began talking softly among themselves.
“How is security? You need to make sure the family is safe.”
“We are, Uncle, we are. Mama and the other girls are still at the compound. I was the only one allowed to leave. They were so cold about it! Someone had stolen his rings!”
Adelmo nodded grimly. His niece didn’t understand what a coup looked like, but he certainly did.
“Sophia, listen to me. I need you to get to a safe house in the city. I’m sending a driver,” he said as he opened up a new message window. “His name is Juan. He’s a good man; here is his picture. Do not get in a car with anyone else but him. Do you understand me?”
“But Uncle, who will stay with Papa?”
“Dearest, the person your papa needs will not be found in a hospital. Please, find a public place away from there. Start screaming if anyone but Juan tries to take you. Do you understand?”
“Uncle, you mean I’m not safe here? What about my sisters? What’s to become of us all?” At fourteen, Sophia was the oldest, and the smartest, of Manuel’s daughters. She was a credit to the family for understanding the threat so quickly.
As Adelmo got up, he sent messages to each of his men. TAXI. AIRPORT. TICKETS. They all set to work.
“I’m booking a flight right now to get back home. I should be there in”—he glanced at the one accessing the airport who held up four fingers—“four hours. I will meet you after I land, and we’ll work this out together. Okay?”
“Uncle, please hurry! Juanita’s only six. They won’t hurt her, will they?”
“They’ll be fine. Please, Sophia, I must go.” After a few more goodbyes, he was able to end the call.
One of the men closed his connection with a nod. “I’ve chartered a private jet. It should be ready by the time we get through security.”
“Very good,” Adelmo replied.
The morning’s events finally made sense. Mercenaries were no different from defense lawyers. They worked for cash and demanded proof of payment. Whatever had happened to Manuel must’ve happened during the attack, and on his death, all PayAdvance accounts had frozen automatically. The sniper received notice and must’ve decided half a fee was good for half his service and left.
Manuel was never a particularly healthy man, and his refusal to do much about it made everyone nervous. Top that with this ridiculous stunt to have Adelmo taken out, and the line of succession was an absolute shambles. Leadership had to be reestablished, and quickly. The Quispe family was a powerhouse in Bolivia, but it was definitely not the only one.
It was just as his history professors at Cambridge had taught: the real test of an empire is how it manages the transfer of power. Adelmo was the next surviving male in line, but it would take more than just sharp elbows to keep him there.
Chapter 62: Mike
They’d taken his phone, so staying synchronized yanked energy out of him like a cut fire hose. He would’ve just passed out and slept through it all, but then the cops started talking about sending him to the hospital. He needed to stay as close to Kim as possible.
“I’m fine,” he insisted.
The EMTs had run scanners over Tonya and Kim, and then shunted them off to squad cars, but when they got to Mike, the things naturally blew offline. One of them caught fire.
“Damn it, I’m fine.”
“Can you walk?” one of the medics asked.
Everything spun in and out of focus as timing signals crossed and sparked realm dissonance that thumped through his real self. In a car on the other side of the ambulance, a scream, quickly followed by the pop of more stun darts, made the decision easy. Crossing his eyes and shaking his head, Mike stood and hobbled into the squad car Tonya sat in.
Tonya leaned out of the other door and yelled, “She can’t be touched, damn you! Just don’t touch her!”
“Sergeant,” one of the officers said, “I think she might have a point.”
“Well, what are we supposed to do with her?”
“I have an idea.”
*
As Mike staggered through the detention center’s entrance, the officer behind the glass asked, “Rich, why is that one on the end of a pole?”
“Don’t get me started. We got it out of one of the animal control vans. We had to drop her three times before—”
“If you’d listened to us, it wouldn’t have taken even once,” Tonya said.
“Tell it to your lawyers. At least the big one can walk now.”
The door opened with a loud buzz, and they were all marched farther into the facility.
The spooling in Mike’s head had cleared substantially, but it still felt like it was wrapped in heavy canvas. His one attempt to split through the realms made his stomach reverse so fast he barely avoided throwing up. But once they plopped him in his cell, Mike was able to relax a bit. Walking took up a helluva lot of bandwidth, which was now free. In fact, he felt sorted enough to reach out to send a message.
Chapter 63: Spencer
The words still smashed into him.
“Shit! Spencer!”
It took all night and most of the morning to make sure all of Kim’s Phoenix Dogs were safe. He’d just wanted to brag a little. If only he’d kept his mouth shut like everyone in his life had told him to, none of it would’ve happened. But no, he had to talk to someone.
When Mike refused to pick up his phone, Spencer made a decision he knew he would regret for the rest of his life. He hit the emergency interrupt on Mike’s phone. Mike would have to answer that.
“Shit! Spencer!” was all he heard before the connection cut. It made his stomach flip. Law enforcement was the only bunch that could cut an emergency connection.
Absolutely nothing got through, and then the return ping included a for-real address.
“No, no, no, no!”
He reached out toward the address, but then he lost the hotel’s camera feeds. Losing access at that moment to that address made him shout and punch at the display. The cops had found them.
It was his fault. He’d done this.
He’d shown them the way.
He searched frantically and found a camera array still functioning on a pole across the street. Three all-too-familiar figures staggered into view at the top of the steps. Tonya was carrying Mike. Kim danced around frantically behind them.
Then the cars came. The cops grabbed Mike and Tonya. His heart felt like it’d been hit by lightning when Kim got shot. She dropped like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
He killed her, his hero, and it’d happened right in front of him. He ran down the hall and puked in the bathroom until nothing came up. It was his fault. If he could’ve just left the damned interrupt alone, none of it would’ve happened.
It was his fault.
When Spencer checked the news feeds, he got a little relief. Kim wasn’t dead. She’d just been knocked out. He stopped thinking about eating a bullet, but he still couldn’t even breathe properly.
All he managed was to lie flat on his back, listlessly flipping through realm e
-magazines. His chest ached, and his stomach muscles were on fire from all the heaving. There was no way he could make this right. He’d seen enough crime dramas to have a good idea what prison life was like. Kim wouldn’t survive jail.
And he’d put her there.
“Shit! Ow!” He sat up, rubbing his ears. The feedback’s squeal whipped through again. It wasn’t his ears. It came through his realm connection. A black border drew itself across the top of his vision, and then collapsed with another static-filled shriek. It came back and progressed to an actual black screen, filling his view ahead. It tweaked, and the board slowly pinwheeled around its center. It sped up, and a faint voice swore over the line.
It tweaked again, and it was a proper message board, translucent dark gray with a beveled frame. When the words began typing across the screen, he bolted upright. Spencer pumped both fists in the air until things shook off the shelves around his bed. He looked up one more time just to make sure it was real and that the words were still there.
HEY SPENCE, IT’S MIKE
Chapter 64: Aaron
He spent the rest of the morning trying to do all the jobs the team did, all at once, and all by himself. Since everyone at the Firing Range had the same security clearances he did, Aaron drafted them to help with the forms. They weren’t very efficient, but it was better than nothing.
“The DC lockup worked around it with a leash pole they got from an animal control van,” Donny said.
“Jesus.” JoBeth shook her head. “Is that even legal?”
“It’s kept them from laying her out again,” Aaron said as he sent yet another form on its way. “Have you seen the video?”
The other three grimaced. “We should give whoever invented stun darts a medal,” Emilio said. “I’m not sure Tasers would’ve even slowed her down.”
Aaron checked the time again. They were behind schedule for the first interrogation of the new guests.
“JoBeth, when did you file the paperwork for their transfer out of lockup?”
Her eyes unfocused. “That can’t be right. Emilio, you remember me putting that paperwork through?”
He nodded. “Yeah, I watched you do it. They’re running late?”
“They would be if there was any evidence I’d requested them.”
“Agent Levine, a word, please?” Aaron’s heart nearly stopped as Deputy Director Melissa Adams entered the lab. The rest of them didn’t say a word, for once.
He tried to figure out what he could’ve possibly done that warranted a visit from one of God’s own helpers, but kept coming up blank. Aaron was pretty sure agents six months out of the academy weren’t allowed to breathe the same air as a deputy director. The feeling of following the principal to the office was overwhelming.
As he shut the door to the empty office they had borrowed. She turned toward him, mature, tall, elegant, and clearly uncomfortable. “I’ve been instructed to tell you you’re off the Rage case. All of you, the contractors, and your team. It’s an order from the director’s office.”
She paused and examined the switches on the wall. “I have no idea what to make of it.”
Aaron’s heart finally started beating properly. Whatever it was, it wasn’t his fault—a vast improvement. Still.
“Due respect, ma’am, but why would they send someone like you to talk to someone like me?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. This is the strangest thing I’ve ever seen. It definitely stinks, but I can’t figure out why. I’ve asked around, and other agencies are seeing all sorts of weird things going on, but nobody knows what it means.”
“So we’re off the case?”
She stared directly into his eyes, which made Aaron very glad he’d recently gone to the bathroom. “Like I said,” she raised an eyebrow, “I’ve been instructed to tell you you’re off the Rage case. Someone is pulling some big strings, all at once. It’s really pissing me off that I don’t know who it is or why.”
Before she left, she turned back and looked at him, long enough for it to be awkward. She nodded and closed the door.
Everyone in the room shouted when Aaron broke the news.
“That’s what we’ve been instructed to do.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Donny asked.
“It means,” he said as he checked the time, “let’s get some lunch, and then I’ll see if any of my team have made it out of the hospital yet.”
He checked his personal message queue while he was in line at the Thai place a block east of the office. He stepped out of line to sit down when he saw who the third message was from. He crosschecked the time. Trayne must’ve sent it just before the explosion. The subject was Eat Me. When he tried to access it, all he got was a password blank. He thought briefly and entered MAD HATTER.
It bloomed into a titanic, sprawling array of files, far more than the Firing Range techs and the rest of the team could sort through with any kind of speed. One file had been flagged highest priority, so Aaron tried that first.
“Prime Ministers and Presidents, thank you for attending this presentation.”
She was right. This was big. Hell, it wasn’t big; it was gigantic.
When Aaron came back to the lab, JoBeth motioned frantically at him. “Would you please talk to this guy? He won’t tell me anything because I’m just a contractor.” She shared the connection to Officer Rich O’Brien of the Central Detention Facility in southeast DC.
“Now,” JoBeth said, “will you tell him?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He turned to Aaron. “We got your paperwork, but your guys had already come by and picked them up. I helped load them into the FBI van myself.”
He exchanged an alarmed look with JoBeth. That was the first thing they’d checked. Nobody from the FBI had picked them up.
Aaron asked, “What time did this happen?”
Rich tapped away on his keyboard, and then stopped. “What the hell? I signed those three out personally. I know I did.”
“What’s wrong?” JoBeth asked.
“Folks, I’m gonna have to call you back. Right now our system doesn’t show any sign of them, and that’s just not right.” He kept typing. “They were processed in around ten, maybe a quarter after, and I know I helped process them out no more than fifteen minutes ago.” He pushed away from the desk. “It’s hard for me to believe, but it seems like we may have lost their records.”
JoBeth replied, “Actually, Officer O’Brien, and I mean no offense by this, but I believe you. We’re having some really strange problems with this case ourselves.”
She shared a different screen with Aaron and tapped out another search of her own, with isolated FBI records hidden behind who knew how many billions of dollars of firewalls, and got the same result.
TRAYNE, KIMBERLY—NO RECORDS FOUND.
Chapter 65: Mike
He’d graduated from texts to actual voice contact with Spencer, and then the cops took them out of their cells. The moment the van’s door slammed shut and the hoods came down, his connection spun out of control. This was not how the FBI worked, which meant these were not agents. It took some blind stabs to get things working again.
“Mike? Mike? Is that you?”
“Yeah. Jesus, Spence, is this what real fear feels like?”
The adrenaline ran through his veins like liquid panic. This phase of the integration had proved his very last prediction—his body was now as necessary to Mike’s survival as the quantum fabric. His realmspace mind had intertwined with his realspace brain. There was no way to separate the two sides now. If they killed him out here that would be the end of it.
Spencer asked, “What happened?”
He explained the situation, and then it was his turn to ask, “Spence? Spencer? You there?”
“Yes. All you’re doing is being driven around?”
“For now, anyway. Are they gonna shoot us?”
“I won’t bullshit you, Mike. I just don’t know. These people are… do you even know who these people are?”
/>
“Completely? No. They sure seemed like FBI agents, but they’re not acting like them anymore. They have to be working for Watchtell somehow.”
Mike closed his eyes in the dark as his heart slowed, and his breathing returned to normal. Abject terror didn’t actually last all that long.
“Anyway, you ready?”
“Mike, I’ve got the easy part. Go ahead.”
He was learning how to manifest in the realms all over again. It was critical that he not injure Spencer or screw up his access. Mike’s vision fuzzed briefly, and the familiar velvet texture surrounded him. Then it wobbled sideways and skittered away from him.
“Spencer! Get out!” The fireball flew away from his feet as they hit the floor of the realm.
He groaned out loud in realspace.
“Mike, are you all right?” Tonya asked in the van.
“I’m fine, Tonya. Just having some problems getting—”
“Quiet, you two!”
It was the first thing Kim had said since their arrest.
Tonya and Mike both said her name at the same time.
“Are you all right?” Tonya asked.
“No, I’m not. But I’m,” she breathed deeply a few times. She’d been doing that ever since the hoods came down. “I’ve got routines I use to help me deal with it. They’re just slow, and I’m way out of practice.” More deep breaths. “As long as they keep me on the end of a pole I think I’ll survive. But you two have to shut up.”
“Kim,” Tonya asked in a calm, level voice, “are they going to kill us?”
Mike’s nerves jangled at the mere mention, but Tonya said it like she’d faced this sort of thing every day.
Through her breathing exercises Kim replied, “I don’t know. I don’t think so. He didn’t work that way before, that’s all I know.”
Spencer reconnected. “Mike? You there, Mike?”
“Are you okay, Spence?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. We’ve worked up an ejection routine now. At the first sign you’re manifesting, I get popped out like a cork. It’s actually kinda fun.”
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