Destiny: The Girl in the Box #9

by Crane, Robert J.

  I felt my facial muscles tighten. “I, uh … I don’t want to be unfeeling as I say this, but I believe that’s a somewhat common occurrence in Minneapolis.”

  “Killed in broad daylight,” Ariadne brandished a piece of paper. “Witnesses report that a large man with red hair held the victim up in the air as he crumpled his lower head like he was squeezing a pop can.”

  I stared at her. “Okay, so, maybe not so common.” I shot a look of apology at Scott, whose expression was already shrouded, like he was hiding what he felt—but poorly. “We should—”

  “Go check it out, yeah,” Scott said, and the sullenness came out. “Always the mission.”

  I wanted to slap him across the face and remind him that failure of the mission meant his death, at which point we’d never have a chance to explore his fragile emotions, but I decided that wouldn’t produce the right results. So I shut up. “We can talk on the way, if you’d like—”

  “Go on without me,” he said, shaking his head. “Maybe we’ll talk when you get back.”

  I shot a pleading look at Ariadne, but she just shrugged, and I turned my focus back to Scott, who was now stone-faced. “Go on. You’ve got important things to do.”

  “Yes,” I said, “and pulling you back in the boat is right at the top of my list.”

  “I’m not out of your boat quite yet,” he said, “but you might consider taking a break from rowing when you get back if you want me to keep from falling out.”

  I felt a pained expression paralyze my face. Did he really not see what was at stake? Was it not obvious that this was what NEEDED to be done? “We’ll talk when I get back,” I said, and let my fingers brush his face. I cringed as I passed, realizing that I’d just used up three or four seconds of my allotted time to touch him for the day, and I might need them later to help soothe him.

  I passed Ariadne as she held the door open for me and almost ran into Reed, who was standing just behind her. “Why are you lurking?” I asked him as the three of us awkwardly tried to clear out of my doorway. The noise of the cubicle farm behind him carried over a pleasant hum of activity, even at this late hour of the day.

  “I was over there talking to one of the analysts and I heard Ariadne’s news,” Reed said with a tight smile. “Figured I’d go with you to Minneapolis.”

  “Lovely,” I said, “you can drive.” I started past him.

  “What is it with you and driving?” he asked as he fell in behind me on the way to the elevators.

  “I don’t feel comfortable doing it,” I said as I pressed the call button. The sharp ding of the elevator arrival tone followed a half-second later. “I mean, I’ve only been driving for a year and a half or so. I’ve taken the courses, and I can do it, I’d just rather someone else do it.”

  “Well, okay, Miss Daisy,” he said as the elevator doors slid closed with a low thumping noise. The elevator box smelled stuffy, nothing like the brisk fall air I’d gotten a taste of outside. “I can drive.”

  I looked over at him. “You’re not going to give me crap about playing rough with Century, are you? Because if so, I can drive myself—”

  He held up a hand to stay me. “I’m not super enthused about what you’re doing, but it’s dire times. I think Scott’s problem is that he’s shaken because he hasn’t killed many people and—I mean, he’s not really over the first kill thing yet, and now you’ve got him taking a shotgun to unarmed people.” He shrugged. “It’s messy. I remember my first kill rattling me. Didn’t yours give you the guilt for a while?”

  “Kinda sorta not really,” I said. “But my first kill was Wolfe, so …”

  The elevators dinged open in the lobby and I started to get out, but found someone blocking the path. “Janus,” I said with a nod, and tried to pass him. He shifted to block my path, and it took me only a second to realize he was doing it intentionally. “Let me guess—we need to talk.”

  “It is almost as though you are reading my mind,” Janus said with a faint smile that didn’t crinkle the crow’s feet at his eyes. “You are going out?”

  “Checking out a body in Minneapolis,” I said as we crossed the lobby and passed through the security checkpoint. “Reports indicate it could be a meta attack.”

  “Lovely,” he said, his tone suggesting it was anything but. “I will accompany you.”

  “This isn’t about your former Omega recruits that just bailed on us, is it?” I asked, sending him a look laden with reproach.

  “What? No,” he said with a shake of the head as we cleared the front doors and the fall breeze whipped around us, rattling the heavy door. “They have made their choices, and while I regret that Karthik failed to realize that he would better serve the greater good by remaining here with us, I think having them gone will free you to focus on the important business of waging an offensive war, as you have stated is your intention. Keeping them here, worrying about defending them, it was all a distraction.”

  I paused in the front driveway loop. There was a Towncar sitting there, waiting suspiciously. I peered into the window and saw a set of keys in the ignition. “Is this ours?”

  “It’s the Agency’s, yeah,” Reed said. “Looks like a couple agents left it here.”

  “Take down the tag number and remind me to have security drag them over the coals later,” I said, frowning as I opened the passenger door. “This is a case of grand theft auto waiting to happen.”

  “It’s a closed campus,” Reed said with amusement as he popped around and got in the driver’s seat. “The only people who could steal it would have to be our employees, and they’d do it right under the nose of security with about a billion cameras to record them doing it. He turned the key in the ignition and I had a brief flash of paranoia, worrying that someone might have left a car bomb for me … just outside my workplace … on the off chance I might decide to commandeer that particular car…

  Paranoia. Apparently, it’s not just for my mother anymore.

  “Can we talk?” Janus said from the back seat.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Go on.” The smell of the leather interior was heavy, and I cracked the window to let the fall air creep into the car.

  “You cannot let yourself be swayed by anyone who tells you that your tactics are unnecessary,” Janus said. “This is a fight to the death, and Century has clearly proven whose death they would prefer it to be. Losing your nerve at this point would be a grave mistake.”

  “As in, it would lead to the graves of all of you,” I said. “I agree, which is why I made my position plain in the meeting.”

  “I heard it,” Janus said, “but I could sense your emotional surety begin to falter when Mr. Byerly posited a scenario in which innocent civilians might be harmed.”

  “My surety might falter when innocent civilians enter the picture,” I said coolly as Reed steered the car out the front gate of the campus with a wave at the guardhouse, “but since they’ve yet to use human shields, I think we’re safe from debate on this point for a while longer. Also,” I said, mildly annoyed, “all you people digging in my head? Does that ever stop being annoying? Because I’m thinking you had to have had complaints from the HR department at Omega for this—”

  “We are speaking of inconsequential and distracting matters again,” Janus said with a wave of his hand. “And of course I had no complaints from the Human Resources department at Omega. I am an empath, I steer the course of people’s emotions; do you think for a moment I would allow someone the luxury of having sufficiently ill feelings toward me that they would feel pressed enough to file a complaint?”

  I exchanged a look with Reed, one of reluctant amusement. “You old dog, you,” Reed said with a smile that was probably just this side of irritated. “Omega was the perfect environment for that type of corruption, wasn’t it?”

  “Old news,” Janus said with a sigh. “They are dead, we are not. This war, though, it could well kill us all, and I would not care to be undone simply because you have failed to consider the options ava
ilable to your enemy at the outset and plan your responses accordingly. Sovereign is a mind-reader; others in his group are as well—”

  “Claire,” I said tightly, remembering the stocky woman whose leg I had broken in Vegas.

  “There will undoubtedly come a moment when they choose to throw your fears in your face,” Janus said, all seriousness, “because that is what they do. They will find your weaknesses and strike at them. They will determine the stress and fracture points of your organization and press as hard as they can on them. They will break your support if they can, and you need to be prepared for that.”

  “I like that you think they won’t just come in with overwhelming force and kill us,” Reed said, not taking his eyes off the road. “You’re more optimistic than I am.”

  “Why use a nuclear warhead to kill a cockroach?” Janus said with another sigh. “When a simple shoe will do the job?”

  “Actually, from what I’ve heard, the boot is more likely to kill the cockroach than the nuke,” Reed said.

  “Because you think a cockroach can survive being heated to ten thousand degrees Fahrenheit?” Janus snapped. “Don’t be ridiculous. Consider the logistics of hitting you with overwhelming force. Weissman is no fool—he has a plan, and will use whatever it takes to get the job done and no more. He has his teams scattered, doing what they must to wipe out our people. Only if he fails at his first attempt to destroy you will he summon those carefully laid tendrils back to himself for use in finishing the task, because to do any more would delay the implementation of his efforts.”

  I had to grudgingly concede that point. “And if there’s anything Weaselman has shown us thus far, it’s that he’s trying to keep to some sort of timetable, or else he would have come at us with something stronger than a mercenary unit last time.”

  “Yes, he is conserving his resources to keep his plan on schedule,” Janus said urgently. He was leaning forward, speaking almost directly into my ear. He was kind of loud, actually.

  “Which works in our favor,” Reed said.

  “Indeed,” Janus said, “but it is a double-edged sword. One or two more hard hits to Century and he will likely call in … the rest of his merry band, I think you would say?”

  “Not sure that’s how I’d put it,” I said, “but I get your point. That could actually work in our favor, though. Getting all of Century together in one place …”

  “You would never survive it,” Janus said, shaking his head so obviously I could hear it move. “Do not even dwell on the insanity of trying to face such a cataclysm. Best we continue to take them bit by bit, as quickly as possible. I believe the most fitting word is … blitzkrieg.”

  “Because that doesn’t have any historical associations we’d care to shed,” Reed said with dark lines of a frown etched all over his face.

  “Outside of the obvious—and distasteful—associations, the underlying principle is sound. We strike at them quickly, lightning-fast, hitting them in safe house after safe house, city after city, without mercy or pause.” Janus thumped a fist into his hand.

  “And how do we find them to hit them in such a manner?” Reed said, voice dripping with sarcasm. “Because I’m sure they’re posting signs on every corner that say ‘Century safe house.’” He snorted.

  “Ah, but they have as much as done that,” Janus said with deep satisfaction, “albeit inadvertently. You see, you have to consider that they never planned for someone to come after them, and so they never worried about carefully covering their tracks.”

  I glanced at Reed and he looked at me. Green trees were whooshing by outside his window, and the faint rush of the wind outside my cracked window was like white background noise for me to think to. “What are you talking about?” Reed asked. “You know how to find them?”

  “I believe I do,” Janus said, “and if you’ll forgive me, I’ve set your man—J.J., I believe his name is—to testing my theory.”

  “You’re forgiven,” I said, “especially as J.J. is most definitely not, ‘my man.’” I shuddered then craned my head around to see Janus, who was sitting back in the seat now, with a look of deep satisfaction. “What did you do? How did you tell him to find them?”

  “I’m curious about that myself,” Reed said, almost dismissive. “Since we’ve been looking for hints to Century’s location for the last year and haven’t found squat.”

  “It’s very simple once you know what to look for,” Janus said. “And the reason you can’t imagine it being so easy is because you—my young friend, you idealist, you—are a product of Alpha, that bastion of crusading do-gooders, out to destroy evil Omega.” His voice carried great humor and an exaggerated emphasis on what he was saying that bordered on satire. “Whereas I am a product of Omega, where our focus was on … money.” His eyes glittered behind his glasses. “So, you see, my boy, you would look for Century while thinking all the while, ‘what would this evil group be doing?’ I, on the other hand, know just as little of their motives as you…” his eyes twinkled, “but I know that if you want to catch them, you need to follow the money. And by revealing their safe house in Vegas, they have left a trail of money for you to follow … all the way back to wherever it originated from.”

  Chapter 32

  I counted five cop cars on the scene as we pulled up. I was pretty well sick of the sight of cop cars by now, their flashing lights becoming a familiar code to me for nothing good. The street was nice and quiet, like a thousand others in the city. Naturally there were a few people standing outside watching, but that was nothing new.

  I wished I’d brought a heavier coat when I started toward the knot of police cruisers surrounding the scene. All I had on was my suit jacket. I flipped open my FBI ID so the cop on the perimeter could see it and he nodded as I crossed under the police tape. The morgue wagon was parked nearby and there were no paramedics in sight, so I knew this one had been a lost cause from the get go.

  The wind carried a hint of sulfur, blowing in off the factories just across the river. It wasn’t strong, was actually barely noticeable, but to a meta, everything is far more obvious than it should be. I longed for a sip of coffee, but the sun was going down and I needed to sleep at some point.

  I stopped just shy of the body that was covered in front of me and waited for one of the morgue guys to look up. When they didn’t, I reached down and jerked the covering off the corpse. It was certainly a mess.

  “With a face like that, I bet he didn’t get many dates,” Reed cracked. I gave him a sidelong glance and he quickly looked contrite. “Sorry.”

  “No, it’s okay,” I said, staring into the blank eyes of the corpse. They were already rolled up into the head. I stared at the cheekbones, tried to imagine the face when it was all put together normally. The jaw had been just crushed, like the guy became the Muppet Beaker below his cheeks. Wrecked tissue and exposed bones were mashed up in the skin and blood. I couldn’t recall seeing anything quite like this before, save for that time I’d beaten the head of Omega to death with a chair. Though that was slightly messier, I think. “He actually did get quite a few dates, just none that survived to go on a second.”

  “Huh, what?” Reed asked. I could see I’d lost him.

  I felt a prickle of interest from Janus as he leaned forward to look at the corpse. “Fries,” he said in surprise.

  “Yep,” I said. I’d recognize those eyes, that hair, those cheeks, anywhere. The clothing was spot-on, too, that preppy son of a bitch. “Looks like James came to the bad end I always predicted he would.”

  “Seriously?” Reed leaned over and squinted at the body. “That’s James Fries?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  I sent him a sidelong look that was full glare this time. “I’m sure. However long I live, I’m not likely to forget this loathsome shitbird.” Or his lips, though those were now missing.

  “Wow, Fries,” Reed said. “What are the odds?”

  “Very poor,” Janus said, sti
ffly. “If you are suggesting this might be coincidence, I can tell you it is most certainly not.”

  “I’m starting to sense a pattern,” I said, staring at the mangled corpse of James Fries, the only incubus I knew. “First Charlie, and now—”

  “Yes,” Janus said, nodding his head. “Century is killing all the incubi and succubi.” He gave us a slow look, and I could see the weight of the news weighing on him. “Sovereign wants to make sure there is no one else with the power to oppose him.”

  Chapter 33

  “This isn’t the best news I’ve heard all week,” my mother said sourly as I stared across my desk at her. “Is there anyone else even left?”

  “You and me,” I said, sliding a thin file across the desk. “All the other incubi and succubi we had on record are either dead or missing. I’m guessing dead. Weissman doesn’t strike me as the type to leave a lot of loose ends.”

  “So am I next?” There was a joking quality to my mother’s words, but I could feel the tension beneath them.

  “Presumably,” I said, with a little tension of my own.

  She stared at me, and a softness came into her cold blue eyes. “I think there was a time you might have been gleeful in pronouncing that, so I guess I should take it as progress that you don’t seem pleased.”

  “I’m not,” I said, lowering my head. “I’m so not. Whatever there is between you and me,” I said, waving a hand between us, “I’m mostly over it. I don’t have time in my life to be bitter and angry at you anymore.” I faked a smile. “Too many other people are vying for my bitterness and anger at present.”

  “You little liar.” She rolled her eyes then turned serious. “I did it all for you, you know.”

  I stared back at her, keeping any hint of emotion off my face. “I believe you believe that.”

  She narrowed her eyes, and I wondered if she was going to split hairs with me over what I’d just said. She let it pass. “You know this Weissman better than I do; do you think he’ll send these henchmen here to do the job?”