While Katharine watched footage of the darkened office in fast forward, she could see that there wasn’t any activity around Mary Wayne’s desk all night.
“Maybe she stayed in a different part of the building.” Then she groaned. “Would that require watching every video camera, all night, for signs of movement?”
He shook his head and offered a slight smile. “It’s not so bad as all that. But it would be a pain. So let’s not do that unless we have to. Still, you might want to pull up a chair.”
Katharine nodded and then settled in and listened as he explained what he was doing. First, he checked for when Mary Wayne’s computer activity had stopped the night before. Then he used that time as a starting point for monitoring her desk. Sure enough, she stood up, grabbed her bag, and headed down the hall. A few camera switches allowed them to follow her all the way to the lobby–and right past Katharine.
“Go back!” Katharine almost apologized for the outburst. It was so unlike her. But Jeff Grason didn’t seem offended, and he was already reloading the footage she wanted. As she watched herself on the video, her own eyes seemed to look right through Mary Wayne. The woman had walked blatantly in front of Katharine, as though she didn’t have a care in the world.
Son of a bitch. How had she missed that?
Katharine shook her head as Jeff Grason rewound the footage again. The third time through she was able to voice her disgust. “I completely missed the one person I was looking for. And then I stood there for another two hours waiting for her to go by.”
Jeff Grason seemed like the other security employees she had met at the firm–he wasn’t fazed by anything. He just offered a kind smile and a suggestion. “Let’s see when she came in this morning.”
Twenty minutes later Katharine was seriously pissed.
She fumed her way up to her office wondering if Jeff Grason was watching her in the security cameras and if she was leaving a trail of smoke behind her. Twice she had stood at the front desk, pretending to work. Twice Mary Wayne had walked right by and Katharine had been totally oblivious.
How? How had Mary done that? How had Katharine missed the one person she was looking for?
She wanted to stomp right up to payroll–Mary Wayne had been sitting at her desk when Katharine left the security division. But Katharine was smarter than that. She’d blow everything if she went up there in a huff. And given her thief’s ability to be absent at just the right times, she would probably just make everyone else nervous.
Instead, she went to her own office, upset about the whole thing. Lisa stood abruptly and asked if she could help, but Katharine refused. That earned her a sour look. Though she wanted to soothe the hurt feelings, there wasn’t much she could do about it. She couldn’t tell anyone about the investigation, certainly not her assistant. And she and Allistair had been locking the doors so much to talk about it …
She looked at Lisa. “It isn’t what you think it is.”
Lisa sat back down, but her eyebrows declared Katharine a liar. Katharine closed the door and sagged back against it. She was a liar. It was a lot of exactly what Lisa thought it was. As she spotted Allistair looking up from his desk, her hand reached back and clicked the lock on the door.
His look was sympathetic. “Baby, what happened?”
But Katharine shook her head. She didn’t want to talk. She just wanted to feel.
Perhaps she had gone crazy. Zachary had come back to her after the long weekend. He’d come to her condo every night. Each night they had made love and he had left. That meant he wasn’t there to see her getting dressed in the morning. He didn’t know that she had put on an old camisole with straps that wouldn’t stay up. With her gaze on Allistair, who was still in his seat, she shed her jacket and pulled her strapless bra out from under the silky material, just the way she had planned this morning.
She had worn a garter belt today rather than panty hose. She’d pulled her underwear over the top of the garters, telling herself it was easier to use the ladies room that way. Which was true. It just wasn’t the truth.
Allistair’s breathing was heavy by the time she reached his chair.
She was a fiend.
She was likely going straight to hell.
• • •
Allistair lay on his back in the sand. He was completely naked and breathing heavily, with Katharine curled at his side. Just as naked and just as sated.
He had convinced her to come out with him tonight, to walk on the beach, to talk with him. As usual for them, one thing had led to another, and another–right there in a little secluded piece of beach they had found.
He had kept her on top, his eyes enjoying the sight of her in the moonlight, his skin savoring the twin bites of brisk air and cold sand abrading him from either side. There wasn’t enough of her to have. She was nearly enslaved to him, a servant to the drive that bound them.
Which was a good thing.
The fight for Katharine’s soul had devolved into attempts to monopolize Katharine’s time. Clearly at this point neither he nor Zachary had the advantage of being her lover–her only lover. She was sleeping with both and had no real loyalty to either. Zachary did have an advantage over him, though. Allistair knew. It was as he had suspected from the beginning–Zachary didn’t get himself involved. He stayed beyond, above, unattached, while Allistair fumed about having to share Katharine with his rival.
He was angry at her for betraying him even though he knew she hadn’t–she had promised him nothing. He was angrier at himself for wanting that promise. Not that it mattered; he couldn’t have her anyway. All of this was temporary. Even Katharine herself.
He pressed his anger down to a controllable simmer. He had her right now, so for this moment he had the advantage. Unfortunately, he couldn’t hold form long enough to keep her. He knew she would stay with him if he didn’t leave–just as she would stay with Zachary if he never left either. She was a captive of the pull they exerted on her, and she was drifting back and forth like the tide. And, like the ocean, she was following without thought or aim.
That was another reason Allistair was mad, though this part was directed at her. Katharine was drifting. Even with everything that was going on all around her, with all the things she had seen and was experiencing, she was questioning so little. When she did question things, she seemed to stop as soon as she received any answer–right, wrong, or incomplete.
He wanted to rattle her, shake her awake to the world around her. She didn’t see it, like a child who believed that if she closed her eyes no one could see her. At the least, it was foolish. At the most … well, for Katharine, it could prove deadly. But if she just looked …
If she opened her mind to see what awaited her, she could have a life she’d never dreamed of. He could offer her so much. Then again, so could Zachary. If the consequences weren’t so dire, Allistair would have been tempted to force the decision. To just tell her it didn’t matter what she decided, only that she did.
As the days passed by, he was losing ground. By merely staying still, he was falling behind Zachary.
He was also losing form. Making love took a large store of energy, just as it did for humans. The expenditure of effort was part of the binding process, but humans just required sleep and food to restore themselves. For him, he needed to cross over. His skin twitched, itched. He was running out of time.
Tenderly, he urged Katharine up from their hiding place. He offered a feeble excuse and helped her dress. She smiled at him like it was all okay, but he wanted to scream at her that nothing about it was okay. His immortal soul was on the line. And so was hers.
She gave no indication that she was upset that he didn’t walk her up to her door, that he just dropped her at the door to her building and told her she’d see him tomorrow morning. The fact was that he couldn’t walk her up. He was about to be overcome by the change. He couldn’t risk running into Zachary. In Allistair’s weakened state, Zachary would have all the advantage.
There was
nothing more he could do in this form anyway except hold on to Katharine for another few seconds. She still wouldn’t look up, still wouldn’t see what was right in front of her face.
All the clues and cues were laid before her. In the end, it made her no different than any other human. It was the way of the earth, something God had put into place eons ago. If they looked, truly looked, people would find all the answers they needed. But they didn’t look. So no one saw what Allistair really was, though he passed countless souls on the way back to his small house. Any of them could have–should have –seen the truth. But there were old beliefs in place and, if you never looked beyond them, the partial explanations stood. The blindness remained. You saw what you expected to see.
And if Katharine wouldn’t start looking around for herself, he would have to force her to.
Unfortunately, Zachary probably had a similar idea.
• • •
Katharine sank back into her couch. The weekend was upon her, and again she had told Zachary she didn’t feel well. Again she was holed up in the one place where she felt the least safe–her own home.
She stuck her soupspoon into the Tupperware and tucked the dish up against her chest to keep the casserole noodles from dropping onto her sweatshirt. As usual, she wasn’t sure what the greater sin was: eating on the sofa, eating directly from the container, or using a soupspoon instead of the proper fork. She could feel her mother frowning down on her, could practically hear the voice urging her to get up and set a place at the table, to plate the food to look like she’d cooked the meal, even if the extent of her effort had been waiting the three minutes while it microwaved.
Fuck you, Katharine replied to the imagined mother-voice in her head.
That alone almost gave her pause. She loved her mother. That the woman had been overbearing had been almost a welcome relief in the face of her father’s missing emotions. Her mother only wanted the best for her. Katharine had known this–better, she had believed it–from when she was old enough to understand. She had never said anything so vulgar to her mother. All through her teenage years, she had never even thought anything like that.
Her teeth worried at her lip as she wondered if maybe she really did have a brain tumor. Her thoughts and emotions were running rampant these days. She was like a dog in heat around two different men, and no matter how she resolved to refuse either of them, she never even made the most basic of motions.
She wished her mother were here now to talk to, although nothing in the woman had ever surprised Katharine. Her mother had always held to her party line regardless of the situation. So Katharine could, at this point in her life, basically recite what her mother would have said in any given scenario.
But the litany held no comfort. The thoughts and worries scattering through her brain were so far out of the realm of things her mother had dealt with that Katharine wasn’t even sure the woman would ever understand. Certainly not when she herself was so far from any kind of comprehension.
In an effort to clear the thoughts she didn’t like, Katharine ate another bite of her dinner and picked up the remote control. The TV surged to life. A shellacked brunette hairdo framed a face that spewed news while bright tickers ran in every direction, revealing the absolute latest news on sports, stock prices, and the war.
The anchor was talking about the case of a veterinarian who had been abusing the animals he was supposed to humanely euthanize. Katharine couldn’t care less and lifted the remote and changed the channel.
The screen flickered but the brunette popped back up, ending the sentence that should have been cut off. Katharine pushed the button again.
Again, the television flickered but remained on the same channel. The light on the remote had blinked red, indicating that it had sent the signal. Another button brought up the channel and program title across the top of the screen, so that part was working fine. She turned the television off and then back on before trying to change the channel again, and wasn’t surprised when nothing more than the same slight flicker occurred. It seemed the TV thought it was changing the channel. Only it changed to the channel it was already on.
Well, she was smarter than the TV, right? Katharine tried typing in the digits for a different channel, and the numbers appeared on the screen as she pressed the buttons. She smiled, but when she hit “enter,” they were immediately replaced by the digits of the same news station she was already on.
Maybe the number she’d typed didn’t correspond to a channel she got.
Katharine tried again, this time inputting a number she knew was part of her programming.
Again, the channel stuck right where it was. Only the tiny ripple through the picture and sound acknowledged that she’d even tried to change it.
Half an hour later, Katharine had checked every wire, called the cable company, and waited on hold for ten minutes only to be told that service in her area was just fine and any problems she was having were likely due to her remote. She tried using the buttons on her set, even though she didn’t think they’d been used before. It took her five minutes to find them, but when she pressed the tiny “channel up” button, the channel remained unchanged.
She couldn’t play any of her prerecorded shows. Couldn’t swap the inputs. All she could do was turn the set off and on.
She sighed. She’d be lucky if anyone would come out to fix it on a Saturday. Certainly no one would come out tonight. And what if she was incredibly unlucky and the repairman had the same effect on her as Allistair and Zachary? What if she started having random affairs with every guy she met?
Katharine wanted to laugh at the thought, but it really wasn’t funny.
She thought about just turning the set off, but her dinner was cold and she was hungrier now than when she had sat down. She re-nuked her food and settled on the couch again, grateful that at least it was stuck on a channel she often watched.
Stories of far-off floods and earthquakes dominated the screen while she ate the casserole one small bite at a time. It wasn’t the best programming for eating, but it was clearly all she was going to get. The field reporter turned the show back over to the brunette, who briefly thanked him, then promptly changed the subject again.
“A series of gun accidents has killed over twenty U.S. residents in the past three months.”
Great, Katharine sighed to herself, another great dinner topic. She watched because she had nothing better to do.
“Misfirings are causing the weapons to explode at the handler rather than toward the target. This is occurring only in the latest model of the weapon, meaning that the vast majority of those harmed have been law enforcement officers, who upgrade and receive new arms at a far higher rate than the average gun owner.”
Katharine chewed methodically and went for another bite without looking down at it. Her spoon scraped at the bottom of the plastic until it found a piece of pasta in the corner and captured it while she watched now with rapt attention.
“In related news, many of these same weapons are turning up in Sudan and Zaire, where fighting has escalated drastically in just the past week. The recent influx of cheap, faulty weaponry has not only increased the death toll, it has given peacekeepers a harder time maintaining any semblance of order in the area. Efforts to extract asylum seekers as well as workers for various peace organizations have ground to a halt. The African contingent of the Red Cross alone has suffered fifteen related deaths this week. Lieutenant Craig Seger, a military weapons expert, has joined us here in the studio. Welcome, Lieutenant Seger.”
The camera cut to a man with quarter-inch hair that stood straight up from his head. Muscles bulged from his olive green T-shirt, and his mouth didn’t budge from its grim, straight line, even as he talked. His hands moved as deftly as his words, taking apart the gun while he spoke.
“We don’t know why, but some sort of cash surge occurred somewhere along the way. We know the weapons we are seeing were intended for sale in third world countries, as most of them have never bor
ne serial numbers or any identifying marks.”
The brunette’s smile was out of place, but the scene had Katharine leaning forward.
“Would you say that’s unusual?”
“Absolutely. Most of what we see in Africa are laundered weapons–guns that came from some legitimate source initially but were stolen or rerouted from their intended path. African guns often come from misappropriated weapons seizures or caches of guns that the U.S. Army has deemed unfit and sent to be destroyed. Or possibly from weapons holdings of now-defunct governments. But that’s not the case here. These guns are new. And they’re cheaply constructed.”
He started showing the various parts of the weapon. “The barrel looks like a standard gun, but the metal composition is poor, meaning it’s more likely to crack or degrade. The grip often isn’t secured to the mechanics of the gun properly, so the gun can literally fly apart as it fires. And the firing pins we are seeing are made of a new metal composite and are constructed in such a way as to save material. Unfortunately, that means they don’t last and often fail right at the critical point–as the user is trying to fire the weapon.”
His voice kept going on, but Katharine’s eyes were riveted to one spot on the screen. He held up the pin, pinched between his beefy fingers.
She had been looking at those pins for weeks.
All of the Light & Geryon portfolios had poured money into MaraxCo. They had even moved it from other funds. Shuffled all kinds of things to get as much as possible into MaraxCo. Was this how their expected profits were being generated?
She hadn’t once looked beyond the bottom line. She had been quite satisfied that the pins were selling well. Hadn’t asked where and how WeldLink was selling them.
But how could she have been so stupid?
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