How Spy I Am (36 page)

Kane’s head snapped
up, his gaze boring into me.

My overloaded adrenal
system slammed into top gear again. “Where can I take it?”

“I’ll take you to one
of the offices.”

I hauled myself up,
and Kane placed a firm hand under my elbow as I tottered forward.
Candy eyed him uncertainly. “The caller said it was
confidential.”

“Kane stays with me,”
I snapped. No way Robert was getting another chance to divide and
conquer.

When we were seated in
the small office, Candy withdrew, swinging the door shut behind
her.

Kane met my eyes over
the desk. “Do you want me to listen in?”

“No. Definitely not. I
just didn’t want you out of my sight in case this was another
attempt to keep me occupied while he takes you out.”

He nodded and rose to
lean against the far corner of the room while I picked up the
receiver.

“Hello?” My voice
shook despite myself.

“Aydan, it’s Sam. Are
you alone?”

“What? Why are you
calling me? Why don’t we just-”

“Are you alone?” His
voice rose shrill and trembling.

I shot a frown at
Kane. “No.”

“Aydan, I have to talk
to you alone! I told Candy it had to be alone!”

“Calm down. Hang on.”
I pressed the receiver against my chest while I stared into middle
distance, frowning.

What the hell was Sam
all worked up about, and why was he calling me instead of simply
sitting down in a meeting? What could he possibly need to tell me
that he couldn’t divulge in front of Kane? I briefly considered
asking Kane to wait outside, but thought better of it. I couldn’t
give Robert another opportunity.

“Okay, I’m alone, go
ahead,” I lied.

“They’re trying to
kill us!” Sam sounded frantic.

“Wha…? Who? What
us?”

“You and me! That bomb
last night was meant to kill you and me!”

“
What
? You
weren’t even there.”

“No, I’m sorry I
didn’t show up, I just, when I reported about Bert they told me not
to talk to you, but I said I was going to your motel anyway, but
then I thought better of it and told you to meet at the coffee
shop, but I chickened out, but I couldn’t get a message to you, and
thank God you weren’t in the motel, I was just sick when I heard
somebody had died…” He wheezed in a breath. “It had to be one of
them, they’re the only ones I told. We have to run, they’re going
to kill us-”

“Stop! Slow down. Tell
me who ‘they’ is.”

“The nights.”

“No, tell me who
you’re talking about.”

“I am! The nights! The
nights of Sirius!”

“What the hell…”

“Nights!
K-N-I-G-H-T-S! Knights of Sirius!”

I squeezed my aching
eyes shut. “Who the hell are they?”

“We, actually. We’re
the Knights.”

I took a deep breath
and held my voice very calm and level. “Explain.”

“There were eight of
us originally, but now Bert and Ivan and Gus are dead and Magnolia
and Sunflower and Tulip, and Terry is offline now so maybe he’s the
one trying to kill us. I thought he was my best friend but-”

“Stop. What’s his full
name?”

“Terry Sherman. He’s
the Chinese knight. And Plum Blossom is missing, too.”

“What the
fuck
?”

“Aydan, there’s no
time, I’m at a pay phone and I don’t dare talk too long-”

“Then make it count,”
I snapped. “Start from the beginning.”

“There were eight of
us at M.I.T. in 1961 and we decided we could bring about world
peace by, uh, sharing information so when we developed the
brainwave driven network we split up and set up in eight different
countries and used the mages to find what we needed and get it to
the right ears but the mages didn’t know, you weren’t supposed to
know, you were always supposed to be with a knight, you have to
stop killing the ghosts, you’re killing us-”

“Stop!” I could hear
him wheezing on the other end of the line while my exhausted mind
tried to sort out the deluge of information. “What-” I began, but
he interrupted.

“I don’t even care so
much about myself anymore, I’m an old man now, but you need to save
yourself. He knows exactly who you are and where you live and all
about your cover identity. You need to find him and stop him, or
change your name, change your appearance, run and keep on running.
And don’t tell anybody about this, especially not Kane or
Stemp.”

“But how the hell am I
supposed to-”

He sucked in another
sibilant breath and kept talking over me. “I was an idealistic
young fool, and now I’m an idealistic old fool. You have to
believe, everything I’ve done, I did with the best of intentions.
One of the Knights has betrayed the sacred quest for the sake of
his own profit. If you can stop him, you’ll save the world, and us
in the process.”

The line went dead in
my ear.

I let the receiver
sink slowly to my lap while I stared at the wall without seeing
it.

“Aydan?” Kane’s voice
startled me and I shushed him, trying to force my mushy brain to
remember Sam’s exact words. Dammit, why couldn’t I have Hellhound’s
photographic memory? None of that gibberish had made sense, but if
I could just remember it, I might be able to figure it out
later.

Knights and mages and
sacred quests? Was he talking in some kind of code? And he wants me
to save the world?

Well, hell, no
problem. It’s not like I need to know what I’m saving the world
from
. And hey, it’s only saving the world, right? How hard
could it be?

I groaned aloud and
thumped the receiver against my forehead.

When I looked up, Kane
was eyeing me with concern.

“That didn’t sound
promising,” he said.

“And you’re a master
of understatement.” I blew out a long breath and unclenched my
fingers from around the telephone receiver.

“Is there anything you
want to tell me?”

“Not at the moment.” I
scowled at my watch. “I have exactly twenty minutes to spend in the
network. Dammit!”

When I tried to rise,
my shaking legs barely held my weight. Kane was at my side in an
instant.

“Sit,” he commanded,
and lowered me back into the chair before squatting in front of me
to meet my eyes. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

I shot a glance around
the room, and he extracted the scanner from his pocket, holding it
up to show its glowing green light.

I leaned closer to
whisper. “Stemp’s going to kill Betty. He just abducted her, and
he’ll kill her, that bastard. We have to stop him.”

Kane frowned. “Why
would he do that?”

“Because she knows
everything I know, and I was goddamn stupid enough to report her as
a security risk to Stemp last night.” I knotted shaking fists in my
hair. “Why the hell did I trust him? He’s going to kill her, and
it’s all my fault…”

“Aydan, I don’t think
he’d do that,” Kane interrupted.

“Are you kidding me?
He’d murder his own grandmother!”

Kane’s troubled grey
gaze held mine. “I don’t believe Stemp would kill Betty. I know you
don’t like or trust him, but in all the time he’s been director,
he’s only given a kill order twice. I’ve seen him take dangerous
risks to avoid unnecessary bloodshed. He won’t hesitate to act if
it’s necessary, but I really don’t think he’d kill an innocent
woman.”

I tried to let his
words comfort me. “He’d better not, or I swear to God I’ll kill him
with my own hands.”

“Aydan…”

I shook off Kane’s
cautioning hand. “We have to get into the network. We’re running
out of time.”

Precious minutes
ticked away while Candy tried to find someone with the authority to
issue me a network fob. “I’m sorry,” she stammered. “Dr. Kraus
hasn’t come in yet, and Dr. Cartwright…” She trailed off with a
helpless gesture.

“Don’t worry,” Kane
reassured her. “It wasn’t that important. May we use one of the
offices for a few minutes? We just have to make a few phone calls,
and then we need to leave to catch our flight.”

I shot him a ferocious
glare behind Candy’s retreating back. I really needed to get into
the damn network. He returned an almost-invisible wink, and I felt
the knot in my stomach loosen a fraction. Maybe he had a plan.

He did.

As soon as the office
door closed behind us, he extracted our secret network key from an
inside pocket.

I pounced on it.
“Thank goodness! Thank you!”

“Be careful,” he
cautioned. “I don’t have a fob. I can’t come in with you.”

A shiver of misgiving
shook me, but I didn’t have time to waste. “Did you bring the
signalling device?”

“Right here.” He held
it up.

“Good. Signal me in…”
I consulted my watch. “Ten minutes.”

I didn’t wait for his
nod before diving invisibly into the void of virtual reality.

The void had no trace
of syrupy heaviness this time. A faint idea tickled my
subconscious, but I pushed it aside to examine it later.

A whirlwind tour of
the local network turned up some data that I was sure would
interest the researchers back at Sirius, but my quest lay
elsewhere.

Quest. What an odd
term for Sam to use.

I slipped through the
external firewalls and into the public data stream.

Whoever the Knights of
Sirius were, they didn’t seem to be advertising. By the time the
blip of the signalling device stabbed its tiny needle of pain into
my consciousness, I hadn’t found a damn thing despite my far-flung
search.

If I’d been capable of
it, I would have been muttering obscenities while I slowly
re-formed my consciousness from the scattered trail of data I’d
left behind me. I got lost a couple of times on the way back to the
unfamiliar network, and by the time the faint whiff of relevant
data reached me from a distant tunnel, it was far too late to
pursue it.

When I doubled over in
my real-world chair, groaning and clutching my head, Kane’s voice
penetrated my suffering.

“Aydan, thank God.”
His hands gently pushed mine away as he began to massage the fiery
points of pain out of my head and neck. “I was afraid you’d gotten
lost,” he muttered. “Didn’t you get my signal?”

“I got it. I was just
really far away and it’s hard to get back when it’s a strange
network and I don’t have an anchor.”

“Can you walk yet?
We’re going to be late for our flight.”

“Shit.” I jerked to my
feet, staggered sideways, and would have fallen if not for Kane’s
strong arm. I blinked slowly for a few seconds before trying again.
“Okay. Let’s go.”

“Are you sure you’re
all right?”

“Fine.” I handed him
the network key. “You’d better take this.”

He pocketed it
carefully, and we hurried out the door.

At the airport, I
silently thanked my lucky stars Kane knew what to do. He spoke
authoritatively to a few security personnel, and within minutes we
were walking out onto the tarmac with our luggage.

I resisted the impulse
to stand staring at the large aircraft, its four big engines
already bellowing aggressively behind whirling propellers. Its
entire rear section stood open to form a wide ramp, and soldiers in
Canadian uniforms lined the walls of the plane’s cargo bay.

Everybody was already
seated and strapped into webbing that hung from the wall, and Kane
strode up the ramp and made his way to a couple of unoccupied seats
as if this was an everyday occurrence.

Hell, it probably was
for him. I scurried after him, running the gauntlet of eyes and
trying not to cringe at the horrendous noise. In minutes our
luggage was secured, Kane helped me strap into a seat, and the
cargo bay doors closed ponderously.

Kane leaned close to
my ear. “C-130 Hercules,” he shouted.

I nodded as if that
meant something, then winced when the engines managed an even more
earsplitting note. I fumbled in my waist pouch for my earplugs. As
I stuffed them into my ears and relaxed, I caught Kane’s smile. I
offered him my spare pair, but he smiled again and shook his head,
extracting a pair of his own from his pocket.

The plane lurched,
rumbling and bumping while the din of the engines swelled, and at
last the rough ride smoothed into a heavy, steady vibration that
told me we were airborne. I wondered how long it would take. I was
uncomfortable already.

Squirming, I replayed
Sam’s garbled message in my mind. M.I.T. students in 1961. Sam
would have been in his twenties then. I imagined a group of
brilliant, idealistic young men adopting the grandiose mission of
world peace and the noble title of “Knight”. Now, all these years
later, one of the Knights had betrayed them.

But how had they
planned to engineer world peace? That ‘sharing information between
countries’ thing sounded dicey. Particularly if the countries in
question didn’t know they were supplying information to the
Knights. Then it sounded a lot like espionage and treason.

And which countries?
Sam had mentioned a Chinese Knight, so China for sure. Communist
China in the 70s. Hmmm. Canada, obviously, since Sam had said
‘us’.

My heart stepped up
the pace. He’d also mentioned the brainwave driven network. They’d
deployed to the countries when they developed the network. When Sam
said Dr. Cartwright was his ‘counterpart’ in the U.S., what did
that really mean? Was Dr. Cartwright one of the Knights, too?

I glanced over at
Kane’s somnolent figure beside me. Heaven only knew how he could
sleep through the racket of the engines, but his eyes were closed
and his chest rose and fell slowly, his arms crossed loosely over
top.

I hated to do it, but
I had to know. I laid a hand on his muscular forearm, resisting the
urge to fondle that yummy bicep instead. His eyes snapped open, his
hand hovering near his holster. I made calming gestures and he
relaxed, pulling out the earplug nearest to me.