She knew this had to be about her father.
There’s no possible way this wasn’t about her father.
She just had no idea why now, or what they wanted from her dad specifically.
Was someone trying to use her to get political prisoners released from some black site in Eastern Europe or whatever? Did they want him to bomb some country? To not bomb some country? To release terrorists? To lift sanctions?
Whatever it was, she guessed they would be disappointed.
Somehow, she doubted Dad would go along with any of that, last surviving daughter or not.
“Who I am… is complicated, Marion,” the man said, studying her eyes. “I will not harm you. I will not allow anyone else to harm you, either. I mean your father and country no ill will. More than anything, I am trying to keep this situation from escalating.”
Pausing, he raised the cloth a second time.
“May I?”
She blinked, frowning. “Who you are… that’s the complicated part?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me your name, at least.”
“Tyr.”
Her lips pursed. “Tyr? Like… Teeer? What kind of name is that?”
The dark-eyed man gave her a flat look. “One my father bequeathed me.”
Marion’s frown deepened.
She looked between his eyes.
He wasn’t screwing with her. With anyone else, she’d assume they were screwing with her, but she honestly didn’t think this guy was.
“Do you want something from my father?” she said.
Tyr shook his head. “No. I do not. I fear others do, however.”
“What others? What do they want?”
Tyr raised the cloth a third time, and that time, after a bare hesitation, she nodded. As he began dabbing her cut and swollen forehead, cleaning the wound, Marion winced, still watching his dark eyes. Before she could ask again, he began to speak.
“There is a group in particular that concerns me,” he said, his voice calm, a deep, rolling rumble in his chest. “I was made aware of them by my sister-in-law, who used to work for them. She came upon materials indicating they might use you as an excuse to start a military conflict between your country and another country––”
“What country?” Marion broke in.
He looked at her, answering without hesitation.
“China, from what I saw on the tapes,” he said. “I suspect the who is somewhat incidental, however. Their ultimate goal appears to be de-stabilization of both countries. Which would destabilize the world, frankly, and, if it resulted in military conflict, potentially kill many people. Which also puts it more or less in my…”
He hesitated.
Closing his mouth, he stared off, as if contemplating different words.
“…jurisdiction, I guess you could say,” he finished, looking back at her.
Marion zeroed in on the same word.
“Jurisdiction?” She folded her arms under the thick jacket, hugging her chest. “What jurisdiction would that be, exactly? Who do you work for?”
“No one.”
Hesitating, Tyr frowned, again seeming to be thinking.
“Well,” he amended. “I suppose I work for my father. I answer to him, certainly. But my position also transcends the usual employment-employer relationship, in the sense you mean it. Or even sovereign-subject. Or sovereign-soldier. My role is of a more universal nature.”
Marion stared.
“What?” she said finally.
When he only kept cleaning the cut, she frowned, wrapping her arms around her body tighter, clenching her hands into fists.
“Am I supposed to understand what you just said?”
Tyr gave a slow shrug, one that somehow matched that deep voice.
“Suffice it to say, a group is looking to destabilize the current global situation,” he told her, focusing back on her head, dabbing at her skin with the alcohol-soaked cloth. “Lia––my sister-in-law––she calls them ‘The Syndicate.’ From the surveillance tapes she gave me, they call themselves this, as well. Would you like to see those tapes?”
He asked the last casually, as if inquiring about the weather.
“Yes,” Marion said at once. “I would like to see them. Right now.”
The man with the black eyes, Tyr, nodded.
“We have time now, before we arrive at our destination. It is probably good for you to watch this while we are en route, so I will set that up for you as soon as I have bandaged your wound.” Pausing, he added, “The gist of it is, they would like to cause an armed conflict. This will accomplish several goals for them. They want your father neutralized. They want him distracted. They also favor an unstable environment in the other country in question… and they want war. Preferably a long war, if they can manage it.”
Marion fought to digest this.
She didn’t want to believe the guy was crazy.
He sure sounded crazy.
Paranoid, at least.
“Can I watch it now?” Marion said. “These recordings? While you’re cleaning the cut? It’s really hard to take you seriously, just hearing this from a total stranger.”
The man was still cleaning her head, and she winced as he got down another layer of dried blood. He glanced at her, without stopping what he was doing.
“I understand,” he said.
Lowering the cloth, he sighed.
“All right. Wait here. I have to find you something to watch it on. And a headset so you can hear it in here.” He motioned around at the noisy cargo hold.
He rose fluidly to his feet.
Marion watched as the man walked away, back to the ladder leading to the catwalk, and presumably a part of the plane that was actually built to house human beings.
She wanted to ask him why she was down here, in the cargo hold, and not up there, where it was presumably warmer, with better seats.
She wanted to ask him who was flying the plane.
In the end, she decided neither of those things were probably the details she needed to know at this point, out of everything he’d told her.
Maybe some part of her was holding out hope he worked for her father.
Some part of her wanted to hear it was Air Force pilots flying her to safety, that he was being cagey about his identity because he worked for the C.I.A., not because he was some random nut steeped in conspiracy theories who decided to “save” her.
Pushing that out of her mind as best she could, Marion wrapped herself in the thick coat he’d given herself instead, and shivered against the cold wind.
8
Conspiracy
H e wasn’t gone long.
Even so, Marion couldn’t help but exhale a sigh of relief when she saw the hatch open, a bare five or so minutes later––five minutes that felt closer to an hour, since she’d been staring at that same hatch from the moment it closed to the moment it opened up again.
He wore a leather backpack when he descended the ladder this time.
Hopping down from the last few rungs, he made his way, panther-like, back to the bench where she sat, huddled in the enormous wool coat.
He sat down next to her, even closer than before.
She saw him looking her over, noticing her shivering.
When he next spoke, it was as if he’d heard all of the questions running through her head, along with the fears that went with them.
“I’m sorry I brought you in here,” he said, sounding sincerely apologetic. “To the cargo hold, versus the passenger area closer to the cockpit. I’ll find you more blankets.”
“Why did you bring me down here?” Marion said, wrapping the coat around her throat. “Who’s flying this thing?”
Tyr shifted his weight on the bench, pulling off his backpack and setting it at his feet.
“I hired space on a plane that was headed back to the United States,” he explained, unzipping the top of the pack and pulling out a small laptop.
He placed the laptop on Mario
n’s coat-covered lap, then reached back into the bag, and pulled out a set of earphones.
He was back to fishing around the bottom of the leather bag.
“…This airplane was leaving the soonest,” Tyr added, glancing up at her. “Most of the passengers in the upper, seated compartment work for the shipping company… or for the wealthy individuals whose items are being shipped back to the States. Since most are American, I was concerned they might recognize you, if they had enough time to look at your face, to remember why you looked familiar.”
Pausing, he added,
“You’re quite striking, Marion.”
Marion felt herself relax.
At least until the last thing he said.
“So we’re going to America?” she said, combing a hand through her hair.
Tyr nodded, watching her eyes. “Yes. I thought we would go directly to your father, if that is all right with you.”
Marion felt herself relax even more.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s definitely all right with me.”
She moved the laptop briefly to the bench on her other side.
Then, rearranging the thick coat, which she’d been more or less using as a blanket, she slid her arms into the sleeves of the oversized garment, shifting it around so that she could poke her hands out to button up the front. Once she had the coat more or less arranged, she picked up the laptop and placed it back on her lap, opening it up.
There was no password, just a nearly-blank desktop with an image of a blue wave.
She’d just gotten it open when Tyr handed her a small flash drive, and the headphones.
“There is a kind of ‘summary file,’” he explained, as she plugged in the flash drive.
He showed her the relevant file on top, which was labeled “TYR WATCH THIS FIRST.”
“…But you can watch as many of the raw footage files as you want,” he added. “I believe I have seen all of them now, so let me know if you have any questions. I was able to follow up on some of this with Lia, my brother’s wife, to gain additional context.”
Grimacing a little, he added,
“I should warn you. There are some… salacious scenes. Most are not particularly erotic, but rather disturbing to watch. The man my sister-in-law was surveilling has some odd… fetishes. They involve costumes, including him dressing up as a very young human cub.”
Marion frowned.
Cub? her mind whispered.
She opened her mouth to ask, then thought better of it.
Closing her mouth, she only nodded.
“Gotcha,” she said, clicking on the first file.
“I will go find blankets,” he told her, rising to his feet. “While you watch. I will not be gone long. I saw many upstairs in one of the storage bins.”
She nodded, but never took her eyes off the screen, or off the white stone balcony that grew visible when the first video file opened.
She forgot Tyr entirely for a few seconds, as the blond woman sat down in front of the camera and began to speak.
“Hey, Tyr,” the gorgeous, model-looking blond said, relaxing back into a wrought-iron deck chair with bright cushions. “There’s a lot here, so I thought I’d try to make it easier for you. In my last job for Gregor, I was doing surveillance––”
Marion settled back on the metal bench, earphones on, arms folded inside the wool coat as she listened to the woman speak. She frowned, half-confused, through a good portion of the woman’s initial introduction. She didn’t understand a lot of her references, or what she said about Los Angeles, or any of the people she mentioned.
Then the video shifted.
The scarred man appeared.
Recognizing that hard, predatory-looking face, Marion sucked in a breath.
She knew him.
She knew that man.
For the first time since all of this started, Marion believed, really believed, that maybe she really was in the middle of some kind of conspiracy.
S he listened to Lia’s initial recording three times, front to back.
She was going through the raw footage now, trying to make sense of the conversations she saw, the meetings between different individuals.
Unfortunately, a lot of it was in Mandarin, and Marion didn’t understand Mandarin.
She caught a few other languages too, what might have been Nepalese, or even Hindi, but she fast-forwarded through most of it, unless she saw them doing things on computers or out on the streets of Kathmandu that caught her interest.
Tyr came back with blankets, before she’d finished listening to Lia’s recording for the last time. He wrapped a blanket around her while she hunched over the laptop, then another one when she was still shivering inside the coat.
Then Tyr sat down beside her and went back to cleaning the cut on her forehead. The pressure of his fingers made her wince a few times. She hissed a few times, too, once the gel alcohol got below that layer of dried blood and hit the raw flesh.
Luckily, watching the videos was a good distraction.
The whole thing still struck her as surreal, and possibly staged, but it felt less and less like that, the longer she watched. Something about the angle and quality of the recordings themselves, not to mention the blond woman in the recording, and the scarred man himself, struck her as indisputably real.
She didn’t ask Tyr anything while she listened the first handful of times.
Once he was wiping off the last of the dried blood on her cut, she bit her lip.
She was silent at first, just bearing it.
Then she paused the recording, looking at him.
“You know who that is, right?” She pointed at the scarred man in the video. “That’s the Secretary of State. Of the United States of America.”
Tyr blinked, then nodded slowly. “I did not know… not at first. But when I called Lia, she told me that.” Pausing, he added politely, “Do you know him? Personally?”
Marion exhaled.
“Not really. I know my dad and him butted heads… even though my dad was the one who nominated him for Secretary of State. I think he was advised to put him there. My dad never told me what they fought about, though.”
Pausing, still thinking, Marion pursed her lips.
“I never liked him,” she admitted. “He always struck me as a big phony. I’ve never seen him act like this before, though.” She motioned at the laptop screen, where his image was frozen. “He’s usually all smiles and ‘aw-shucks’ and ‘I’m just a country lawyer’ about everything. He was a total kiss-ass around my dad.”
Tyr frowned. “Kiss-ass?”
Marion ignored that.
“So this organization,” she said, looking at him. “‘The Syndicate.’ It sounds totally fake. Like something lifted right off a conspiracy website. Are you sure it’s real?”
Tyr nodded.
Looking at the cut on her forehead, he went back to cleaning it.
Hissing a bit when the alcohol got into the raw cut, she tried again.
“So who leads them?” She motioned back at the screen. “Is it this guy? Roy Taggert? Or is there a big boss somewhere? Some mafioso guy who’s really in charge?”
Still thinking, she added,
“Lia’s boss was located in Los Angeles, right? But she made it sound like that Gregor guy wasn’t actually in charge.”
“I don’t believe he was,” Tyr agreed, still dabbing at her forehead.
“Then who is?” Lia pressed. “Who’s in charge? Or is it a country?”
“I do not know who leads them,” Tyr said, shaking his head as he lowered the cloth.
Marion felt a flush of relief when he tossed the cloth down on the bench, and reached for a bandage out of the leather doctor’s satchel. Opening up the plastic packaging around the bandage, he began removing the paper over the adhesive, shaking his head.
“I don’t know anything about a country, either.” Tyr gave her a grim look. “I did ask Lia about this. She seemed to think of the Syndicate as sort of �
��country-less.’ She described them as more of an organized crime syndicate than something attached to a particular nation. A group of people attempting to rig the system to benefit them financially.”
“And how did she end up working for them again?” Marion said, frowning. “Was she recruited, or––?”
“No.” Tyr shook his head. “Not like you mean. Her mother, apparently, owed them money. She was given no choice.”
When Marion opened her mouth to ask, Tyr shook his head.
“I cannot say more about this.” His dark eyes met hers somberly. “It is not my story to tell, Marion. You would need to speak to Lia about this.”
Marion nodded slowly.
That was fair.
Still thinking, she met his gaze again.
“So you flew halfway around the world to stop this… Syndicate… from kidnapping me.” She studied his dark, fathomless eyes. “Me. The President’s daughter. Who you knew had Secret Service protection and whatever else.”
She continued to watch his nearly-black eyes.
They didn’t flinch, but only watched her right back.
“Why not just send the recordings to the F.B.I.?” she said, refolding her arms under the blanket. “Why not send them directly to Secret Service? Why not use one of those hotlines or something, warning the government about possible threats? Why come to me in person?”
Tyr returned her probing look, his dark eyes serious.
“Would they have believed me?” he said, his voice mirroring his eyes. “Would they have taken the threat seriously, Marion? In time to stop those men from taking you?”
Marion thought about that.
“Depends,” Marion admitted. “Given that the guy threatening me on the recording is the Secretary of State, I have no idea what they’d do. They’d likely be cautious. They’d bring it to my dad, but only after they’d run a few dozen tests to make sure the recording wasn’t faked, that it was something real. They’d definitely want to talk to Lia. And probably your brother.”
She glanced at him, frowning.
“That’s assuming Taggert doesn’t have people who could intercept this kind of thing.”
Gods on Earth: Complete Series (Books 1-3): Paranormal Romances with Norse Gods, Tricksters, and Fated Mates Page 37