A Deadly Web

by Kay Hooper

  Murphy felt decidedly grim. Any way you can incapacitate her for a few more days? Long enough for us to get the both of them out of here and somewhere not under Duran’s eye?

  No, she’d catch on, and I figure the less she knows we know, the better. I’m pretty sure she’s out of commission for the rest of tonight and probably most of tomorrow.

  So that’s all the time we have to come up with a plan?

  Well, I think maybe it gets worse.

  Christ, how could it get worse? Even as the thought flew from her mind, Murphy reminded herself that things could always get worse. Always.

  Maybe not worse. Maybe just more complicated.

  More complicated is always worse.

  Well, that really depends on who knows what. And considering that Duran sent Astrid out looking for the second psychic despite the fact that she was pretty much walking wounded, I’d say he’s a hell of a lot more than suspicious. I think he needed confirmation of a worrying suspicion.

  That we had a second circle of protection and it’s you?

  No. You know about our new ally?

  Murphy could feel herself stiffen, but years of practice enabled her to keep her thoughts calm. You think Duran knows about him?

  Just after I put Astrid out of commission, I caught something. Murphy, it was the mental scream of a psychic. A psychic being . . . turned inside out. Something beyond torture. Changed in some fundamental way she’ll never recover from.

  Murphy could feel herself frowning, even though she struggled to keep her mind calm. Taken? Who? Someone we were protecting?

  Sarah was grim now herself, and her mental voice reflected that. No, a psychic we weren’t even aware of. But someone else was aware of her, because in that mental scream, she was trying her best to contact him.

  You think he’s nearby? In Charleston?

  Somewhere close. And I think that’s who Duran more than half expected Astrid to find.

  But if you caught it after Astrid was out of commission—Wait. There was another?

  At least two others, earlier. Psychics who went missing, psychics he was keeping track of, for whatever reason. The one who cried out is clairvoyant, and she knows there were two others very recently. Two she expected our new ally—oh, hell. Two she expected Bishop to know. He must have made contact with all three of them at some point. And I’m betting one or both of the first two taken also tried to call out to him when they realized they were in trouble. I think they tried to reach Bishop because they knew he could help them. That he was the only one who could.

  I think that is what has Duran worried. There are people fighting against you, that’s bad enough. And then there are people you really, really don’t want in that fight. People who could seriously hurt your operation. People like Bishop.

  —

  “No,” Brodie said with a tone of finality.

  Tasha wasn’t a woman to accept that sort of thing, even from him and even about this. “Look, I’m not going to hide in this condo for the duration,” she told him.

  “Nobody has said that’s the plan,” he reminded her. “Just for now. While we try to figure out a plan.”

  “We can’t figure out a plan if we don’t completely understand what’s going on around us. Would it be better to stay here? Go somewhere else? What does Duran expect us to do?”

  “And how do you propose we figure out that last one?”

  “Test the boundaries,” Tasha said.

  “By dangling you out on a hook like bait? I don’t think so.”

  “I didn’t suggest I go alone. In fact, he’d be suspicious if I did. But we’ve been inside all day and well into the evening; nobody would be surprised if we took a stroll along a very well-lit sidewalk a couple of blocks to a pleasant restaurant.”

  “We ordered takeout.”

  “They have bands every night, sometimes really good ones. And they have desserts people come from miles around to try out. We walk down there for dessert and music. Makes perfect sense.”

  “I don’t like it, Tasha.”

  “I didn’t expect you would. It’s easier to guard something you can keep inside and . . . unexposed.”

  He opened his mouth to respond, but whatever he’d been about to say never got said when a buzzing sound from his jacket drew his quick attention. His jacket had been hanging over the back of the bar stool where he’d sat earlier.

  Brodie rose from the coffee table and went to his jacket, then came about halfway back to Tasha and remained on his feet as he opened the cell phone.

  Not, Tasha noted, an expensive phone, but a very simple, almost stripped-down version. Was it what she’d heard characters on TV call a “burner” phone? One meant to be used once and then tossed?

  “Yeah?” Brodie answered. He listened for several moments, frowning, his gaze on Tasha.

  “That’s a dangerous way to test a theory,” he said finally. “Yeah, I know, but— Okay, if you’re that convinced. But it has to be her choice.” His frown deepened as he stared at Tasha. “Yeah, reasonably sure. There’s a restaurant a couple blocks down she wants to walk to. No, I couldn’t bring a gun into this building, the security’s too good. Okay. Yeah, I know where that is.” He looked at his watch. “Fifteen minutes. Tell her not to be late.”

  He closed the phone, and then immediately popped the battery out, then turned and went down the hall to the condo’s powder room. Tasha heard the toilet flush. When Brodie came back, he dropped the now-useless phone into her kitchen trash can.

  “You flushed the battery? Why?”

  “We usually just toss them and keep walking,” he answered readily. “But this is where you live, and I don’t want to take the chance that Duran’s side hasn’t figured out a way to track a specific battery. Power sources emit signatures, so who knows?”

  Tasha was curious about several things. “Can’t cell phone calls be picked up by someone with the right kind of equipment? I saw that on a TV show.”

  “Not our cell phones. We’ve modified them extensively. No Internet access, no GPS, no emergency button, and they transmit and receive on rare, virtually unused frequencies. Otherwise, they’re just plain old cell phones intended to be used for one call and only one call.”

  “They call that a burner, right? Without all the modifications, I mean.”

  Brodie nodded, then said briskly, “Okay, you get your wish, if you still want to go out. I don’t know if you want to change or just put on shoes, but we’re about to leave here and head for that restaurant with the music and desserts.”

  “I want to change,” Tasha said, getting up from the couch. Then she paused, looking at him. “What is it we’re really doing?”

  Brodie’s face was even more impassive than usual, and in his mind that ocean she could see so quickly and easily was very calm and very deep. “If I told you, it could affect . . . the outcome. Just get changed, Tasha, okay?”

  She still had questions but went into her bedroom to get changed into something less casual. It wasn’t a dressy kind of restaurant, so she settled on keeping the jeans but switching to a pretty, lightweight sweater—winter in Charleston really wasn’t cold, even the nights—and exchanging the dorm socks for warm socks and running shoes.

  Because you never knew. Given what was going on in her life right now, and the fact that Brodie and whoever had called him obviously had something other than a casual stroll in mind, it wasn’t all that farfetched to consider the possibility of having to run for her life.

  She brushed her hair quickly, then came back out in the living room to find Brodie shrugging into his jacket. “Directional microphones,” she said. “I saw that on TV too. Couldn’t someone be outside listening?”

  “All your windows have blinds,” he said, almost as if he’d expected her to ask the question. “They help prevent the glass from vibrating. No vibration, no way to listen
in from outside. Aside from that, it’s also security glass.”

  She blinked. “It is?”

  “Yeah. Not bulletproof, but thicker than normal. Helps with soundproofing with traffic so close outside. That’s probably why the condo designers chose it.”

  “So even harder for anyone outside to hear us.”

  Brodie nodded. “You really picked an excellent building. If Duran and his goons were garden-variety thugs, they’d never get in here. Unfortunately for us all, they’re considerably better than that, and so far we haven’t found a security system they haven’t been able to bypass.”

  “A guard with an Uzi outside my door?” she suggested, not really serious.

  “Remember what I said about the nonpsychic they were somehow able to hypnotize? We believe they’ve been experimenting with mind control, using the psychics working for them. And they’ve clearly had some success at it. So we’re fairly careful who we arm and when.”

  Tasha suddenly wished she’d chosen a thicker sweater. “Great. That’s just great.”

  “Your extra senses and your instincts are your best protections,” Brodie told her seriously. “Always listen to them. If your instincts are telling you to run, do it.” He glanced down at her shoes approvingly, then offered his arm. “Shall we?”

  She took his arm a bit gingerly, muttering half under her breath, “I have a feeling I’m not going to enjoy the music nearly as much as I thought I would.”

  “Sorry about that. Don’t take your purse unless you want to, but you’ll need your keycard for the building.”

  “Travel light?” she said, snagging the keycard from the table in the hallway where she always dropped it and her purse and sliding the card into her back pocket.

  “Usually not a bad idea.” He paused at her door and looked down at her seriously. “There may come a moment when you’ll have to decide to leave everything behind except what you can easily carry. And it’s not a bad idea to have that figured out in advance. Just in case.”

  “Right,” Tasha said somewhat hollowly. “Just in case.”

  —

  “Aren’t we taking a big chance, being here just now?” Miranda Bishop said to her husband. They were sitting in a cozy booth in a dim back corner of the restaurant, and since a new band was busy setting up, it was fairly quiet in the spacious room.

  Well, except for bangs and thumps and the occasional discordant note of some instrument.

  “A slight chance,” Bishop admitted. His veiled gaze was on a couple who had just come in and were being shown to an equally semisecluded booth in the corner opposite them. The man was tall and dark and powerfully built; he moved in a way Miranda had come to recognize in men of action, with every muscle fine-tuned and under his complete control, ready to react to any sort of threat instantly.

  The woman was tall and lovely, with a figure most any other woman would envy and dark hair that showed a red glint here and there under the low lighting of the restaurant. She didn’t move with quite the ease of her companion, but neither did she appear to be jumpy or nervous.

  “Is it my imagination,” Miranda murmured after sipping her drink, “or is she handling all this pretty well?”

  “I’d say pretty well. But even having watched those goons break into her condo, so far the only real threat she’s faced has been in her mind. Or, rather, in his. I don’t think it’s quite real to her yet. And won’t be, until she faces real physical danger.”

  “Is that why we’re here?”

  Bishop looked at his wife and smiled. “No. In just a minute, you and I are going to slip out that side door over there and leave. Before Brodie has the chance to spot me. He would not be happy to see me.”

  “Then why are we here at all?”

  “We can’t use our extra senses or even amplify the normal five, but we can still use those senses. I wanted to see those two together. Try to . . . get the measure of them.”

  “You’ve already met Brodie.”

  “Yeah. But my bet is that something’s changed since he became Tasha Solomon’s Guardian.”

  “And you want to know whether that’ll prove to be a strength or a weakness.”

  “I can’t know for sure without using senses I can’t use, at least for the moment.”

  “But there’s that profiler training and experience,” she said.

  “Coming in handy,” Bishop admitted, still watching the couple intently and yet obliquely, making sure his gaze wasn’t fixed on them for too long.

  Long enough for one or both of them to feel it.

  “So what do you see?” Miranda was also a profiler, but Bishop had been at this game quite a bit longer than she had. Besides, she always found it fascinating to watch him work.

  “A man born to be a guardian, a caretaker—and the armed watchman at the door. And a strong woman who has felt fear, but isn’t entirely convinced she can’t take care of herself no matter what comes at her.”

  “I’d agree with that assessment. And so?”

  “I’m wondering what kind of team they’ll make. Unfortunately, without seeing them work together and without use of our abilities for the time being, there’s really no way to be sure. I’d hoped I’d see something that might tell me how Brodie, at least, is going to react when he finds out we’re still in Charleston and a lot more involved in this than he planned for us to be at this early stage.”

  “Something we’re not alerting him to just yet.”

  “I think we need to bring along some hard information to that meeting.”

  “Peace offering?”

  “Well, something to convince him he can not only trust us, but that we can help a lot more by getting into the war now. I really don’t think this is the time to hold back any of the assets.”

  “The endgame is a lot closer than they realize?”

  “Yeah. A lot closer.”

  “As if we didn’t have enough trouble with serial killers,” Miranda said, but she slid from the booth, her hand in her husband’s, and followed him out a side door, waving cheerily to the waiter they had already paid and tipped for their meal.

  Just a couple of steps out the door, Bishop paused and looked at his wife. “Maybe it’s knowing damned well I’ve lost psychics who could have tried to reach out to me when they were being abducted. Maybe it’s being a profiler and knowing only too well that there are monsters in this, deadly ones, and they won’t stop until somebody stops them. Either way, we have to put the pieces together and figure out what’s going on. And fast.”

  Realizing, Miranda said, “You believe there’s still a chance to save at least some of the abducted psychics, don’t you?”

  “I have to believe that.”

  She nodded back toward the table no longer in their line of sight. “Even though their experience, maybe decades of it, tells them lost psychics stay lost?”

  “Even though.”

  “So we check out the place Henry McCord was restoring. And we check out the house waiting patiently for Grace Seymore to return. And if we’re very lucky or very good, we’ll find something useful.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Well,” Miranda said, “I’ve learned never to bet against you, especially when it comes to getting into the minds of the bad guys. But we have been up for nearly forty-eight hours. I think we need a good night’s sleep if we expect to be any good at all, to anyone.”

  Bishop looked at her with a smile very few people ever saw. “One more stop to make. She’s going to be mad as hell about it—but she won’t betray us, to Brodie or anyone else.”

  “Because?”

  A low laugh escaped him. “Because she’s keeping secrets on top of secrets on top of secrets. And I’d back her against Duran any day. Probably the most valuable operative this side has. I only hope their leader realizes it.”

  “Now this one I’ve got to mee
t,” Miranda said.

  THIRTEEN

  Tasha said, “I gather that quick stop you made two steps into an alley just before we got here was to get a weapon?” She kept her voice low.

  “I’ll get rid of it before we go back to your condo,” he said. “But I was advised to be armed just in case.”

  “Obviously by someone you trust.”

  He nodded, but didn’t offer an explanation. Not that she had really expected him to.

  “Okay,” Tasha said. “We’re here. Nice drinks and desserts. Nice band playing soothing stuff instead of rock. A lot of my neighbors appear to have decided to while away an hour or two here.”

  It was true; quite a few people had greeted Tasha when they had come in, though Brodie had made sure they hadn’t lingered long enough for introductions.

  “Is that usual?” Brodie asked, casually sipping his drink.

  “It’s not unusual. As far as I know. I mean, I’m not usually here on a Sunday evening.” She felt an odd little shock then as she realized she had met Brodie only that morning.

  It felt like a lifetime ago.

  She braced herself mentally. “I know we didn’t come here for the drinks or desserts or the music. So . . . what’s the dangerous way to test somebody’s theory?”

  “You don’t have to do this, Tasha.”

  “Tell me what it is.” She kept her voice light. “Then I’ll tell you if I want to do it.”

  He looked at her for a long, steady moment, then nodded. “Okay. I noticed this morning that when you use your abilities, you close your eyes.”

  “I always have,” she said. “At least, I learned to pretty young. It’s hard enough to sort through all the voices without having . . . visual clutter too.”