by Fiona Quinn
“Trained,” Spyder said.
“Anything else?”
“Five-foot-eight. You have given me pause. I will admit, I had not thought through the ramifications of trial and incarceration. You are right—it is quite impossible. You will excuse me.”
Spyder left me at the table to sip my coffee.
Thirty-Six
Iniquus was in an upheaval. Even though they were given no background and no explanation, every single person who could type with all ten fingers was doing data entry, converting handwritten logs into files that the computers could parse. IT set their best and brightest software developers to task reworking code to define parameters for searches. Per Major Trudy’s remotely viewed information, I was most interested in the logs that I found in the desk. Those files I kept with my Strike Force team. So far, I would put Major Trudy’s effectiveness in the 75-80% range. I needed to get him in here.
I called Spyder, “I want to go pick up Major Trudy so he can steer us toward the most pressing information.”
“You want to bring him to Iniquus?” he asked.
“Having him where the data is would be the most effective use of time, don’t you think? Between the art and my botched exit, this case is a ticking bomb set to go off any minute. They know we’re coming after them.”
“Trudy can’t function in Iniquus with the doorknobs in place. You’ll have to work elsewhere.” Spyder reminded me.
“Shoot, I forgot. Do you want to go with me to talk to him? You’re the one closest to the case, and can probably direct him best.”
“As we speak, I’m leaving General Elliot’s home. I moved him back here immediately after you left. It seems that the progress Elliot was making suddenly reversed.”
“Hopefully he’ll improve now that he’s home. I want to study the logs around the time he was out of the country to understand why the vacation left him vulnerable. If I were going to name the five most vibration-dense people I know, it would be you, the Iniquus owners, and Striker. How someone was able to influence General Elliot—if they influenced General Elliot. . . Hmm, yes, I’ll make that a priority when I get back. So can you go with me to task Major Trudy?” I asked.
“No Lexicon, I have to speak with the POTUS. They have asked me to come right away. And I am pulling up to the gatehouse now.”
“Wait. What? Do you know the president? Did you just call up and say, ‘Hey, can we chat?’”
“I am not at liberty, my dear. But this will certainly not be our first meeting.”
“Are you. . .? Never mind. When you’re done, shoot me a text, and I’ll meet you at your place.”
“This may take some time. Don’t expect to hear from me in the next twenty-four hours. And Lexicon?”
“Yes, sir?”
“I want you to be at your most vigilant. Now is the time when the monster smells our presence and is rearing up to fight for its survival.”
Gater drove to Major Trudy’s house while my brain churned. ‘Drove’ might be too optimistic of a word. We crawled a few inches now and again, but mostly we sat in gridlock.
“Have you heard from Striker?” I asked. “He hasn’t called me since the night I cooked you Italian. Is he that deep undercover that he’s completely off-grid?”
“That doesn’t sound right,” Gater said. “Could be he was operating at times when he thought you’d be asleep.”
“No text. No nothing,” I said.
I watched that information register with Gater. He plucked his phone from his belt and fussed with his apps for a minute. “Striker must be on airplane mode. He’s not coming up on GPS. I’ll follow up when we’re back at headquarters.”
“He’s been pinging in my mind. I’d feel better if someone could give me a thumbs-up about him.”
“Roger that.” He pressed a button. “Any word from Commander Rheas? . . . Could you follow up? . . . Yeah, give me a call back when you make contact, I need to go over something with him. I’m in the field, and it’s high priority, so the sooner, the better. Thank you.” He looked over and raised his brows. “We should hear soon.”
Gater wheeled the car onto the shoulder and drove a short distance to an off-ramp. We made much better time driving through neighborhoods at twenty-five miles an hour than sitting on the highway, breathing fumes.
When we arrived, Major Trudy was throwing a suitcase into his trunk. Gater parked to block him in.
“Major Trudy, I come with no treats today. Things have been busy at the office.” I smiled and walked toward him.
He put his hands in the air and walk-stumbled backwards.
“This is my friend, Gater. Major Trudy, are you okay? You look scared to death.”
“Did you come to arrest me?”
“Arrest you?” I asked.
“Kill me? Did you come to kill me?” he squeaked out.
“Major Trudy, we’re colleagues. I hired you to do a job for me, and I came to tell you that I was successful. I thought we could go by your bank, and I could pay you. Pay off the remainder on your mortgage.” It hurt to say that knowing that this major expense was digging Iniquus’ financial hole a lot deeper. But the data I collected was invaluable, I reminded myself. “I see you’re packed to go somewhere. Do you have time to run by the bank first?”
“You want me to get in that car with you and let you drive me off? Do you have guns on you?”
“Not on my body, no. My gun is in the car.” I turned. “Gater, are you wearing a gun?”
“A few,” he said. “But I ain’t planning on aiming them at you. We don’t have a warrant or nothing. You’re not under arrest. Lynx wanted to hire you for another job, is all.”
“Major Trudy, you are obviously scared about something. Let’s go in your house, and you can tell me what’s going on, so Gater and I can see if we can help.”
Major Trudy focused first on me, then on Gater. With a nod of his head, he turned and moved toward his front door.
Everything was as I remembered it. There were still only two folding deck chairs and the landline phone in his living room. Gater moved to the wall that afforded him the best tactical visual range. I pulled one of the chairs closer to the other and sat down, like we were old friends and I could make myself at home.
Major Trudy sat across from me. He laced his hands tightly in his lap and leaned his elbows on his knees. I mimicked the stance so that we were psychologically aligned, and he would see me as a teammate.
“I read over the notes I made for you, and I realized that if you were trying to get information away from this guy, Indigo, that you would have made your move immediately. The next home game is next month. I got worried, and wanted to make sure you were okay.”
I stared at Major Trudy. There was a little hiccup in what he said to me. I let my mind wander until it landed on my exit from under the Metro. The man who spread the paper knowingly, the affirmative wink that I registered but didn’t read for meaning. “You sent them. You sent the men to the Metro station to cover my retreat.”
He startled, then nodded. “I wanted to send you some help if you got into a jam, but I needed to know what kind of help to send.” His face turned pink. “Some friends from work did me a favor.”
“Holy moly.”
Gravity pulled all of my blood towards my feet, leaving me lightheaded and hollow. The enormity of what he did hit me full force and tears sprang to my eyes. I reached out and took his hands in mine. “The Omega goons would have caught me if those men weren’t standing there. You saved my life.”
He nodded. His face turned redder as he blinked back tears of his own. I could see on his face what General Coleridge had explained to me — it wasn’t a head injury that made my emotions lay on the surface, but an attachment to what happens in the ether. And obviously, after his decade of service on the Galaxy Project, Major Trudy had the same issue. He’d never be able to hide behind military stoicism. After a moment he said, “Our lives. Not just yours. If they got you, they’d get me next.” He cleared the p
hlegm from his throat. “I saw you exit, and the platform was empty. You ran to the stairs and tripped. The fuckers were seconds behind you. Your backpack had fusion night-vision goggles and an advanced tech camera. There would be no doubt you were the spy, and you would have been fucking brutalized. The prison you were held in in Honduras is not their only place in the world. They have a shit ton of them. And there would be no one to protect you in those places like you had in fucking Honduras.”
I sensed Gater’s muscles tightening, making his body rigid, like a compressed spring ready to launch.
“Do they know it was me?” I asked.
“The words I understood used the male pronoun. I don’t think they could believe a woman would outsmart or outrun them. Them being macho pricks works in your favor.”
“But you’re leaving.”
“I’m heading to General Coleridge’s to hide. Indigo will be desperate to figure out how this happened. From what I saw of him last night, I imagine he’s still shooting bile out the top and the bottom. It got so bad they called an ambulance in. I want to get while the getting’s good. If he finds me, I’ll wind up in the foreign prison myself.”
“They called an ambulance for Indigo? Are you sure?”
“I’m never sure.” Major Trudy sat back, pulling his hands from mine. He tap-tap-tapped his fingers on his knees, then jumped to his feet. “I need to get out of here. I have a plane to catch.” He glanced at his watch, then at me.
“We’ll fly you. We’ll go right now. With a direct flight, we can get you safe much sooner. Alright?”
He paused for a moment, then nodded, and headed for the door.
Gater whipped out his phone and called logistics to tell them we needed a jet and a crew, prioritized as code orange. Then he called Blaze, asked him to pack us cold-weather bags, and told him to leave them with the guards at the gate. Gater popped the trunk on Major Trudy’s car and transferred the bags to our Hummer, and then we all piled in. Now that we had a mission, Gater was his fine-tuned machine-of-a-soldier self.
We were on the highway when the call came in from Blaze—Maxx Schwartz was at the coroner’s. He’d taken a triple-tap. Time of death, approximately twenty-four hours ago. A professional hit. Gater repeated the information for me to hear. No Maxx? No case.
“Is Striker back at HQ?” I asked, and Gater relayed my question.
Neither Striker nor Vine had checked in for the last two contact cycles. We were sixteen hours-plus since we last knew they were okay. Neither had accessed their computer pages for obtaining the codes for the day. Secret Service and Iniquus had both launched searches for their operatives, Blaze told Gater.
Striker. I pushed hard against the avalanche of fear that rushed toward me. Striker was the best of the best. There was a reason—a good reason—for him not to make contact. My mind went to the Fuller Mine disaster. Maybe someone was jamming their comms. There had to be a reasonable explanation for no contact.
Panic makes you unable in mind and body. Spyder had drilled that mantra into me. Spyder—he needed to be involved. I sent Spyder a quick message and wondered what was happening at the White House. I hoped Spyder had wrapped everything up and could help us find Striker and Vine. I shifted around in my seat so I could see the major. Gater put his phone back in its holder and shot me a look that told me how serious this was.
“Major Trudy,” I said. “Does anyone besides you know about General Coleridge’s lodge? Does anyone else from Galaxy Project have the coordinates?”
“Not that I know of. The only reason I have them is that I helped him when he and his missus tested the area. I was the best on the team for finding people—that’s not bragging, it’s just why General Elliot looked me up, and why General Coleridge used me for their tasks. Most people performed searches at around the sixty, sixty-five percent rate. My rate was consistently in the seventies. That doesn’t sound like much, but five to twenty percent more accuracy can make the difference in life or death.”
“We have a change in plans.” I used my ‘calm and capable in a crisis’ EMT voice to mask the quiver that wanted to wobble my words. “Someone from our team is missing. I’m still going to get you immediately on a plane and out to Wyoming. But before I do, could I task you with finding him?”
“You haven’t paid me for last time.”
“What’s the name of your bank?” I asked, pulling out my checkbook. “We’ll stick this in the dropbox now.”
As Gater drove, I got on the phone with Titus Kane, the Panther Force Commander. “I have precious cargo that needs to be delivered and kept safe. Can you and, say, three other Panthers go?”
“And get out of typing log notes into data files? Bless you,” Titus’s rich baritone came over my phone.
“Northern destination—you’ll need sub-zero gear. Go-time sixty minutes. Logistics already called in the pilot. We’ll meet for transfer at the guard house.”
“Striker’s still in the wind?” he asked.
“No one’s heard for two cycles.”
“Shit. Yeah, we’ll gladly take this off your back and free up your hands. See you in sixty.”
With the check written (and a call to Iniquus accounting to cover it — because who has ninety-seven thousand, three hundred fifteen dollars sitting in a checking account?), we pulled out of the parking lot.
Major Trudy sat with a wide-eyed, stunned stare. He probably thought I was exaggerating about paying off his house. But his information got me data that could make all of the difference to our nation’s security. It was worth every penny–and it was his due for decades of services rendered. I pushed my seat belt off my shoulder and turned to put my hand on him. “Major Trudy, that task. I will pay you very well. I need to find someone. Now.”
He nodded.
“Where do you need to be? We’ll take you there.”
Major Trudy wrinkled, then released his face. Smooshed his shoulders up to his ears and let them fall, then squirmed around in his seat as if trying to get himself lined up. “Iniquus is a no-go. My house is a definite no-go. You don’t have monitoring equipment. . .”
“Did you use monitoring equipment when you followed me last night?”
“No.” He rubbed his back molars against each other making them squeak in a nails-on-a-blackboard kind of way. “Okay, let’s try the park around the corner. This’ll cost you fifty grand.”
“Major Trudy. I will pay fifty grand for actionable information.” Sure I would—I’d pay him anything he asked. I wouldn’t even go to Iniquus to cover this. I’d just sign over my house, my car, my anything, my everything. I didn’t care about any material thing in this world. I just needed Striker to be okay. Two cycles of no communication? He had never done that before. He would have found some way to contact someone if he at all could. And the last part of that thought—if he at all could—was the part that terrified me.
Gater steered to the far end of the parking lot. The trees still clung to the last of their crisp brown leaves. We crunched to a stop in a wind-swept pile. Gater got out of the car and surveilled the area, then posted guard at the rear of the car.
I wrote a tasking number on a piece of paper, then “Find and assess target.” I folded it to only show the number and handed it back to Major Trudy. I had a pen ready to take notes as I watched Major Trudy relax his body. His breath came slow and steady; it was hypnotic. I deliberately focused away from him, lest I fall into a trance or go behind the Veil when I didn’t intend to. The Veil was my next option, but since I had no idea what I would find, I needed to stay actionable and not damaged. I reminded myself of the EMS mantra, the first rule of the rescuer–and rescue felt to me like what was needed–was not to become part of the problem.
The silence went on for a very long time. I had kept an eye on my watch, since I knew how time played games during stressful situations. I wondered if I should prompt the major. I let another five minutes pass, then I started worrying that my worry would fill the car with so much cluttered, desperate energy th
at Major Trudy wouldn’t be able to hack his way through it to get to the real task.
Just as I formulated a monitoring question and opened my lips to clear my throat, Major Trudy said, “This environment is well-protected. I went back in time and space to see at what point the protection was put in place. It was recent—a few days ago. It was prepped to prevent a remote viewer from finding or accessing information. It would have to be, or I’d be able to get in.”
“Were doorknobs utilized?” I asked.
“Yes. The site was accessible several days ago.”
“Location?”
“Variable.”
“Variable? Explain.”
“The location moves from time to time.”
“You are saying the location changes. You also said the location was prepared to prevent remote viewing. So the person is familiar with remote viewing, and also knows that a remote viewer will be employed to discover the location’s moves. Would you agree?”
“Yes.”
“Is this a vehicle of some kind?”
He nodded.
“Did the target enter the location willingly?”
No answer.
“Did the target enter the location knowingly?”
“Target was lifted.”
“Status?”
“No data from present location.”
“Move forward to a time when you can obtain further information.”
“Nothing.”
That winded me. My lower jaw stuck straight out, like a great ape’s. That’s how I felt—like a silverback alpha, wanting to thump my chest and then rip everything apart until I found what was mine.
“Move backward in time to a location in which you can gather information about target’s present situation.”