“All right,” he said. “All right. Point made. There’s no need for this. I’ll cooperate.”
We turned back.
“Incidentally, Agent Boulanger, you do realize that I didn’t personally assassinate your former teammates, yes?” Linder nodded at Jessie. “Agent Temple’s mother pulled the trigger.”
Aselia’s hands tightened on her shotgun. She looked to Jessie. “That true?”
“She’s no mother of mine,” Jessie told her.
“You may have to tell her that in person,” Linder said. “That matter I wanted to talk to you about at your debriefing? Althea Temple-Sinclair escaped from Vigilant Lock custody. It’s a shame, really. Agent Boulanger’s one real chance for justice, and your refusal to terminate Althea when you had a chance may have stolen that from her forever.”
April cleared her throat. She gave her wheels a hard shove, her chair rolling close.
“What our former patron is doing,” she said, “is an attempt at pitting us against one another. Staving off his own fate while we fight among ourselves and question our loyalties. And it will not succeed.”
Linder half smiled. “Now why would you be worried about that, Dr. Cassidy? Are you concerned these fine agents might find out you shared a bed with Benjamin Crohn? Or that you blackmailed him into leaving the Bureau, the entire reason for his current enmity toward you?”
“No,” she replied, “because I already told them everything. Are there any other dirty little secrets you’d like to share, or can we proceed with the interrogation?”
Aselia was still staring at Jessie. Looking at her like a stranger.
“Swear to God,” Jessie told her, “I thought my mother was dead until a few days ago. She abandoned me when I was a kid. What she did has nothing to do with me.”
“It’s true,” I said.
Aselia nodded, slow. Swallowing, like drinking down some old pain just to get the taste out of her mouth. She circled Linder’s chair.
“Still sore, after all these years,” she said, her voice faint. “Guess it’s not something you really get over, watching all your friends die.”
“And if you had followed orders,” Linder said, “they would still be alive today.”
The butt of the shotgun cracked against the side of his head. Linder’s scalp split open, the cut spitting blood as he tumbled with the chair and landed hard on his side. Aselia stomped her shoe down on his hip and stood over him with both barrels aimed in his face, her face twisted in sudden rage.
“Give me one reason not to pull the trigger,” she roared, “one fucking reason!”
“Because he wants you to,” April said.
Aselia froze. We all did. Wrapped in the dusty stillness of the abandoned Kmart, one trigger squeeze between life and death.
“He wants you to kill him,” April said. “Because he believes that’s the best and only option left to him. If you pull that trigger, he wins. Don’t give him the satisfaction.”
The shotgun drooped, Aselia’s hand going limp, her anger deflated and squandered. Jessie grabbed Linder’s shoulders and hauled him back up. A steady trickle of blood ran down his cheek. It dribbled onto the shoulder of his bland gray suit.
“Astute as always, Dr. Cassidy,” he said.
“All this time,” Jessie said, “we were out there hunting the enemy, when the enemy was you all along.”
“Not true,” Linder said.
“You work for the courts of hell. The eastern coalition. Vigilant Lock is nothing but a con game.”
“Everything you’ve said is correct,” he replied. “And none of it makes me the enemy. I am a patriot.”
“You sold out the human race. You’ve murdered your own field agents. How can you say that?”
“Can you do math, Agent Temple? I can do math.”
Jessie loomed over him, hands on her hips. “Explain.”
“I started as an Agency man. Clandestine ops, graduated to case manager by my late twenties. I was stationed in this little backwater hellhole in South America. One of our assets needed an urgent face-to-face meeting; normally I avoided that, but the information he’d acquired was just that explosive. We made contact in a back alley about a block from the United States Embassy.”
His gaze went distant. Lost in the gloom, grasping at the threads of a memory as blood pattered down onto his shoulder.
“Children made their living selling chewing gum to the cruise-boat tourists,” he said. “They’d walk up to you with their hands out. ‘Chicle? Chicle?’ Now, this boy—couldn’t have been more than seven or eight—made a wrong turn. He stumbled upon us. He couldn’t have known what was in the folder, but he knew enough. He knew he’d just seen a local handing over important-looking documents to a gringo. He knew our faces. And he knew he was hungry. The soldiers, you see, paid for information on rebel activity.”
“Linder,” I said softly, “what did you do?”
“I did the math, Agent Black. Exposure meant my asset would be arrested and killed. Everyone he named under torture would be arrested and killed. And so it goes. Our entire local network would be dismantled overnight. Twelve lives, at least. Twelve is a larger number than one. That’s what I was thinking as I put my hand over that boy’s mouth and snapped his tiny neck.”
He met my gaze, subdued now, almost serene.
“When I was brought into this organization, they told me the truth. What was at stake. And just like they knew I would, because that’s why they chose me . . . I did the math. The courts of hell have infiltrated every stratum of our nation; they have operatives in our government, our military, our courts and schools. The only thing that’s kept them from openly conquering the earth is the state of cold war: they all dream of a takeover, but no prince wants to share his throne. Keeping the shadow war in motion, the constant flux of espionage and soft betrayal, is the sole factor ensuring humanity’s survival.”
“Liar,” Aselia said. “The entire point of this program was to tip the scales.”
Linder regarded her like a college professor with a particularly slow student.
“Consider the forces in play,” he said. “The Courts of Jade Tears and Night-Blooming Flowers hold vast amounts of territory. Between the two of them, their domain extends from California through almost the entire Midwest. The eastern coalition is tiny by comparison. Waging war through deniable human assets gives them a survival advantage. Yes, Vigilant Lock—and Cold Spectrum before it, and Directive Nine before that—was a false-flag operation orchestrated by infernal operatives. Yes, I deceived you. But look at the effect. Seeding turbulence, perpetuating the cold war, all of it leads to the ultimate objective: keeping the courts fighting each other and sparing humanity in the process. Do. The. Math.”
Linder looked my way. His tone steady and cool as he held my gaze.
“And can you say you’ve done anything you wouldn’t have if Vigilant Lock really was the organization you thought it was? Look at just the last few months. Your team stopped the Bogeyman kidnappings. You kept the King of Silence from being unleashed on Earth. You prevented a terrorist attack on Las Vegas. Regardless of who backs it, this organization does good for the world.”
“Tell that to the Redemption Choir,” Aselia said through gritted teeth. “Tell that to my team.”
“What happened was . . . regrettable. I underestimated Douglas Bredford’s tenacity.”
“You put a bomb in his trailer,” Jessie said.
“No,” Linder said, “actually, we didn’t. It’s my assessment that Bredford committed tactical suicide.”
“Pardon?” I said.
“He was dying. Cirrhosis of the liver and God knows what else. When you and Agent Temple made contact with him in Michigan, he must have seen the chance to strike back at me from beyond the grave. A string of clues and bread crumbs carefully placed and designed to lead you to the truth.”
“He could have just told us up front,” Jessie said.
Linder cracked a humorless smile. “Would you
have believed him?”
She didn’t have an answer for that. Neither did I.
“You needed to uncover it for yourself,” he said. “From RedEye, to Glass Predator, to . . . me. And, just as he likely intended, doing plenty of damage along the way. So here you are. All the lies banished, the truth unveiled. And, unfortunately, like Icarus, you’ve flown too close to the sun and doomed yourselves in the process. As it stands, I give you two days, four at most, before you’re taken down. You’ll be arrested by law enforcement, brought in and then assassinated in custody before you can talk, or tracked and eliminated by Panic Cell. You’ll be remembered as murderers and traitors for a week or two, and then you won’t be remembered at all. The news cycle has a very short attention span.”
Aselia pressed the barrels of her shotgun against the back of Linder’s head.
“On the bright side,” she said, “you’ll land in hell before we do.”
TWENTY
Nobody moved.
We froze in the stillness. Dust floated on blades of sunlight. A strong wind rattled the vacant store. The exposed scaffolding above, like the bones of some vast dead beast, groaned and clanked.
“I don’t hear any objections,” Aselia said. The shotgun’s muzzle pressed in, forcing Linder to bow his head. “Any last words?”
“Yes,” Linder replied calmly. “What if I offered you an alternative?”
She frowned, uncertain. Her eyes flicked to Jessie.
“Hear him out,” Jessie said. “You got thirty seconds.”
Aselia eased back.
Linder raised his chin. “What if there was a way to restore your names and reputations, strike back against Benjamin Crohn and his allies, and subvert Vigilant Lock from within? I propose a coup.”
I put my hands on my hips. “With your help, I assume.”
“Of course, Agent Black. It would hardly be the first regime change I’ve orchestrated.”
“No way,” Aselia said. She paced behind his chair, her free hand balled into a fist. “No way this asshole gets to live. No way we can trust him. Tell me this, Linder: If you had a way to take over from inside, why haven’t you done it by now?”
“I didn’t have the resources. Going to war against the courts of hell is not a matter to take lightly, Agent Boulanger. You succeed or you die. You—”
He paused, stumbling over his words. A flicker of something passed over his normally impassive face. Something like regret.
“I have a family,” he said, softer now. “A wife, a little girl. Her name is—”
Aselia jammed her shotgun in his face. “Don’t. Don’t you even try that ‘humanizing yourself to your captors’ bullshit. That’s hostage-survival 101, and we’ve all had the same training. Didn’t have the resources, my ass. You had my team.”
“I did. And when Benjamin Crohn ordered me to have your team liquidated, I didn’t have the time to arrange a plan. He was also watching me far more closely than he does today. I hadn’t yet earned his trust. As it was, I saved as many of you as I could.”
Her jaw dropped. “Saved? You made the call to have us all wiped out.”
Linder took a deep breath. He let it out in a faint sigh.
“Yes. And Douglas Bredford found RedEye, made contact with the administrator, Burton Webb, and arranged to have as many of you shielded from detection as possible.” He tilted his head, looking her way. “Did you ever ask yourself how Bredford found out about RedEye in the first place?”
“You?” Aselia asked. “You . . . told him?”
“Not directly. He never knew it was me; I simply made sure he ‘stumbled across’ enough back-channel intelligence to make his way to safety.” His head gave a tiny shake. “I hoped more of you would get clear. It was out of my hands. As is this. Director Crohn is out of control. I believe his sanity is slipping.”
“About that,” I said. “April says he was as human as we are, back when she knew him. But we just watched him get into a fistfight with Nyx and hold his own, not to mention getting shot three or four times.”
“Even among Vigilant’s directorate,” Linder said, “not everyone knows who they truly serve. Crohn is the main intermediary between our organization and the courts of hell. As such, he’s been suitably rewarded.”
“Rewarded how?” Jessie asked.
“He’s paid in bound demons. Captives from the western courts. He . . . ingests them. Eleven or twelve by now. He’s human, yes, but at this point he has the physical power and speed of an incarnate. Possibly more—it’s not a thing I’d like to test.”
April leaned on the armrest of her wheelchair with her chin cradled against her curled knuckles.
“So if we could immobilize him long enough for Harmony to perform an exorcism,” she said, thinking out loud.
Linder shook his head. “I wouldn’t count on it. They’re not possessing him. He’s possessing them. It’s a bit of a Damocles sword, too. His masters hold the contracts that bind them to service. Do you know what happens when you burn an infernal contract, Agents?”
“The demon goes free,” I said.
Linder gave me a nod.
“And considering they’ve been bound against their will, their reaction would be . . . unpleasant. Essentially, Crohn is a slave of the eastern courts: they can kill him at any moment, from half a world away, with the flick of a lighter. Ample incentive to stay loyal.”
“We need those contracts,” Jessie said. “We could force him to clear our names. Go on TV and say this whole manhunt was a big mistake.”
“A laudable start.” Linder eased back in his chair, flexing his bound wrists. “Of course, he’ll still need to be eliminated once he’s served his purpose. You have a more pressing problem to deal with: the eastern coalition can’t afford the risk of exposure. Once Vigilant Lock declares its independence, they’ll react like any other self-respecting kingdom does in the face of a rebel colony.”
“Send an army,” Jessie said.
“They’ll come after you—us, actually—without mercy,” Linder said. “They can’t risk their enemies finding out that Vigilant was their brainchild. The blowback would be devastating.”
My thoughts drifted back to Portland. Caitlin, the West Coast hound, showing up just as we needed a distraction. And before that, Fontaine’s insistence that there was something she wanted Jessie and me to do—something she couldn’t get done on her own.
“I think . . . maybe they already know,” I said. “Is there any kind of paper trail? Communications between Director Crohn and the eastern courts?”
Linder turned his head. His gaze dropped to the floor as he thought it over.
“I imagine there’s something,” he said. “The binding contracts alone would be proof of collusion. Why do you ask?”
“Caitlin helped us out by stalling Nadine.” I looked to Jessie. “Why? Because she needs us alive, to do something she can’t.”
Jessie snapped her fingers. “Proof. She might know Vigilant Lock is a scam, but knowing and proving aren’t the same thing. And if we expose the eastern coalition . . . what was that you were just saying about blowback, Linder? Hell, get the courts openly fighting each other, and they might be too busy to even think about coming after us.”
“The enemy of our enemy,” April mused. “Well, the enemy of our enemy is still our enemy, but that doesn’t mean they can’t serve a purpose.”
“Our first priority has to be those contracts,” Jessie said. “We can’t do a damn thing with our faces on TV and half the cops in the country hunting for us. We get the contracts, then we blackmail Crohn into clearing our names.”
Linder nodded. “Then your next stop is New York. The Court of Windswept Razors rules that region, and they’re Director Crohn’s point of contact. I wish I had more for you to go on; you’ll have to improvise in the field. Meanwhile, I’ll be running intelligence on the rest of Vigilant Lock’s directorate. They’re a mixture of the ignorant and the venal; the ignorant can be taught. Some of the venal ones, thos
e willingly serving the courts in exchange for money and power, can be swayed to our cause. The others, we’ll have to eliminate.”
The room went silent. Aselia stood over him, the shotgun cradled in her hands.
“You’re assuming a lot,” she said. “You already gave us all the intel we need. What you haven’t given us is a reason to keep you alive.”
“You disappoint me, Agent Boulanger. I thought it was obvious. Once this fight is over and the dust settles, Vigilant Lock still needs to be able to function. I have access to the alphabet agencies. You don’t. I have the ability to generate funding. You don’t. I can misdirect the authorities and keep our existence concealed. You can’t. Your fieldwork is superb, but no covert operation survives without signals intelligence and supply. You don’t want me alive—you need me alive.”
Jessie held up a finger. “Excuse us a minute. Team? Conference out back.”
We gathered on the oil-stained loading dock, leaving Linder alone in the boarded-up store, and brought Kevin up to speed.
“I really hate to say this,” he told Jessie, “but Linder’s got a point. I can scrounge for rumors and leads on the net, but all our big cases, the real trouble spots, come down from him. He’s got access to intel I can’t even dream of. If we go it alone, we’ll be letting a lot of bad guys slip under the radar.”
Jessie paced the dock. She clasped her hands behind her back and stretched her arms out, sighing.
“And then there’s the funding,” she said. “None of us does this for the paycheck, but we still need to eat. And buy plane tickets. And guns.”
Aselia leaned back against the scuffed brick wall, apart from the group. She’d been lingering in silence. Now she raised one hand. “Do I get a say?”
Jessie glanced over at her. “As far as I’m concerned, you became a part of this team the second we flew out of Des Allemands. If you want to be. So, yeah, you get a say.”
Aselia shoved herself away from the wall. She walked over, joining us.
“I can’t even tell you how much I hate that man.” She jerked her head toward the loading-bay door. “That thing about trying to save my team, leaking the RedEye info to Douglas? Maybe true, maybe not. Linder breathes lies like other people breathe air. Doesn’t matter if it is true; he still sent our team after innocent people, and then we died for asking questions. Doesn’t matter if he was only following orders. That excuse didn’t fly for the Nazis, and it damn sure doesn’t fly for people working for the courts of hell.”
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