Spy to Die For (Assassins Guild) (19 page)

Skye seemed nervous and preoccupied. She paced around the entertainment room, and wouldn’t alight anywhere for long. She’d sat next to Jack a couple of times, then popped back up as if ejected from her seat.

He tried to focus on the information pooling in front of him, but he had trouble doing so. Part of him needed to monitor Skye just because she was acting so strange.

And, if he were honest with himself, he also wanted to monitor her because he had been monitoring her all along. She had become his focus. He loved her changing moods, her soft skin, the way that she laughed. He just wanted to spend more and more time with her—and he knew he had ruined that by contacting Rikki.

Not that Skye was jealous. She hadn’t been.

He’d ruined it because they had agreed that the outside contact would force them back into the populated parts of the universe. Their time together was over, and they hadn’t discussed the future.

He
hadn’t discussed the future because there might not be one. Or maybe that was just the excuse he was giving himself, because he worried that Skye would tell him that once this entire adventure was over, he was on his own.

She had been so clear from the beginning that she didn’t want any attachments. The more he learned about her, the more he realized that she had lived her entire life according to that philosophy, and these past few weeks with him had simply been an aberration.

An enjoyable aberration, but an aberration all the same.

“Okay,” he said, trying to focus on the information, “when people get disciplined, sometimes they get demoted, right?”

“Yeah,” Skye said. “You find anything?”

“Quite a bit.” He already had a list of about twenty names. “Does the Guild do anything to prevent traitors in its midst?”

Skye froze. “That’s a big word. Traitors.”

“It’s what someone would be, right, if they went against a country or a government. Isn’t that what we’re looking for with the Guild?” Or maybe he was just jumping to the wrong conclusions.

Skye still hadn’t moved. She ran a finger along the edges of the screen in front of her. “I guess so, yes. But what would be the goal of these traitors?”

Jack shrugged. “Would they want to overthrow the government of the Guild?”

“We don’t call it a government,” she said. Then she leaned forward, and started tapping on the screen. “Take a look at this.”

She sent more information to him. It was about the death of the former director of the Guild, the man she had mentioned before, a man named Rafiq Zvi. According to the information that Skye just sent Jack, this Zvi had been killed by someone inside the Guild, someone who had gone crazy.

It seemed too easy to Jack.

“Let me check this out,” he said.

He dug for a bit to see what he could find. The Guild records had very little, although they claimed that Zvi had died on Guild property. But the more Jack dug, the more he found references to the nearby city of Prospera.

So he looked in Prospera’s records. Apparently, the city had claimed jurisdiction at first because, contrary to the Guild records, Zvi had died in a restaurant in Prospera. The city had investigated a little. Then the Guild informed the city that the Guild would do the investigation.

The city handed jurisdiction over to the Guild with a speed that surprised Jack. Usually police departments were very protective of their own investigations. They also wanted to make sure that a suspicious death got solved properly.

Most of the research he had done for the Rovers early on had been in jurisdictional matters, in figuring out who or what someone could get away with in a particular location. He was an expert in finding out how to avoid jurisdictional problems and when to invite them.

It looked like someone had done the same for this death in Prospera.

He dug a bit deeper, and found a name that had been on his list of possibly disciplined assassins.

“Do you know a Camalla Taub?” he asked Skye.

“Why?” she asked.

“She’s the one who got the investigation of Zvi’s death moved out of Prospera,” Jack said.

“He died in Prospera?” Skye ran a hand over her face. “Wow. I always thought he’d been surprised in the Guild.”

“Not from the initial reports,” Jack said. It took him some digging to retrieve those reports, but he managed it. “Apparently, he’d been in a restaurant with some old friends. He’d gotten up—to do what seems to be in dispute—and got beaten to death in the back part of the restaurant.”

“That’s weird,” Skye said. “The directors of the Guild come out of the top assassin pool. Do you know how hard it is to kill people like that?”

“Only in theory,” Jack said. He really didn’t want to know.

“This contradicts every story I’ve heard about his death,” Skye said.

“Weren’t you at the Guild at the time?” Jack asked.

“Yeah, and it shook up everyone. But we were awakened the next day, told he was dead, and told that the Council of Governors would elect a new director. It took weeks, and then it got disputed, and finally Kerani Ammons took over. It took her a while to consolidate power since almost half the council had voted against her.”

Jack remained silent. He dug a bit more. He felt oddly disturbed. And he wasn’t quite sure how to communicate that disturbance to Skye.

Finally, he said, “I know you’ve learned to think of the Guild in a particular way, but imagine this if it were a country instead of the Guild. The leader dies, and the information about the death is not clear. Someone gets blamed, but that someone might not even have been near the leader when the death occurred.”

“Is that true?” Skye asked. “I thought some crazy killed him. Isn’t that what happened?”

Her reaction was what Jack had been afraid of as he started this line of thought. He had learned long ago that people brought up in a system had trouble thinking outside of that system, even if they didn’t like the system. Since he’d never had any allegiance to any system, he had the luxury of being a free thinker.

“Just go with me on this for a moment,” Jack said. “Imagine if the someone who got blamed could possibly be a patsy.”

“Damn,” Skye muttered.

“And there’s a cover-up. No one knows, or the people who do know don’t care. To get a new leader, there are a series of hoops that everyone has to jump through, including an election through a limited body.”

Skye swallowed hard. Her gaze remained on Jack’s. He hadn’t moved. He was afraid he would upset the balance between them.

“If you control most of that body, then you get the leader you want,” he said. “But if you only control half, it might be dicey. It might take a bit of finesse. It would definitely take more time.”

“I’m not sure I like this.” Skye clearly understood what he was getting at.

“Ultimately, it doesn’t work. The new leader gets chosen but by the wrong half of the council, and it takes a while for that leader to consolidate power. That leader, who hasn’t been part of the inside group until now, knows nothing about the cover-up on the other death, and so governs according to whatever laws are in place.”

“Laws that include a discipline system that destroys careers,” Skye said. She clearly understood what he meant. She seemed both upset and intrigued by it.

Jack was intrigued, but he didn’t want to communicate his enthusiasm to Skye. He wanted her to come to the ideas slowly, because he didn’t want to have to fight her.

“And that leader will keep people not suited to the job of assassin on the job,” Jack said.

Skye backed up, hands out. “I don’t like this.”

“I know,” he said. “But you see where I’m going with it.”

“Yeah,” she said softly. “Now I understand why you used the word ‘traitors.’ You think someone is going to assassinate Kerani Ammons.”

“And this time,” Jack said, “they’re leaving nothing to chance.”

It took Skye a moment to absorb what Jack was telling her. She had always assumed that she hadn’t fit with the Guild. And because she had assumed that she hadn’t fit, she had assumed that the Guild was perfect.

Sure there were people in the Guild who misused it or behaved badly, but they weren’t part of the organization. And yes, she didn’t entirely believe in the Guild’s mission, particularly on a personal level, but she understood how such drastic measures could be necessary in an imperfect universe.

She had never thought that the Guild might be scarred from within.

“So that’s what Liora meant when she said that they might not need Heller,” Skye said. “He was third because they have two other methods of killing Kerani Ammons, and if those fail, he gets to step in.”

“It’s speculation,” Jack said. “But it’s the kind of speculation I would act on if I were researching this for a client. The information about the previous director tilts the rest of this in the direction of another assassination.”

Skye sat very still.
Another
assassination
. She hadn’t really wrapped her brain around the first one. Rafiq Zvi had died in a murder—by Guild definitions—killed by a crazy member of the Guild.

But if Jack was right, then Zvi had been assassinated: deliberately targeted with the idea of deposing him, and changing an entire system.

Not the kind of assassination that the Guild usually did. The kind of assassination, in fact, that the Rovers were heading toward, the kind that Jack wouldn’t do.

The unethical kind. If, of course, you could call any assassination ethical.

Maybe
illegal
might be a better term. The kind of assassination not sanctioned by all those agreements between all those governments. The kind that occurred when one government tried to influence another.

“So,” Skye said slowly, “you think that the members of the Guild who had been disciplined are doing this?”

“Disciplined and disgruntled.” He rested his hands near one of the screens. “Has anyone ever tried to recruit you?”

She hadn’t expected that question. “How would I even know?”

“You probably wouldn’t or you would have answered me immediately.” He was talking as if this were normal. Maybe in his world, it was.

She felt shaken. She had to concentrate to focus on what he was saying.

“You would have had conversations with someone—or a bunch of someones—about how much you disliked the Guild or how the current ruling body isn’t working well or what you were willing to do to get out of your contract.”

“Oh, hell,” Skye said. “I’ve had conversations like that all the time.”

Only she hadn’t had
conversations
. She had the openings of
conversations
. She had shut down the topic, usually because she figured her opinions were no one’s business but her own. Besides, most of the people who talked with her weren’t people she liked much.

No one she liked had ever had a conversation like that with her. Was that just her gut? Or had she forgotten the conversations with people she liked?

Or was she seeing everything in a paranoid way now? Was Jack right? Were all of those conversational gambits just a way to feel her out, just to see if she was interested in joining a conspiracy? To see if she was willing to be a traitor to the Guild?

She had hated the Guild so much that she never saw herself as part of it, so she never rebelled against it in an organized way. She was so against any attachments that she never even thought of the other people who were having similar issues.

If she had thought of them, would she have banded together with them?

“Skye,” Jack said gently. “Has anyone tried to recruit you?”

She couldn’t answer that, not definitively. And she was an information person. She believed in definitive. Definitive made sure the right target got assassinated, not the target’s twin brother or the person that the target tried to slip his guilt onto. Definitive meant that innocents went free and the guilty got punished, and no one got falsely accused.

She was all about definitive.

So no matter what, she couldn’t answer Jack’s question. She hadn’t thought she was being recruited into a band of traitors, so to be definitive, she would have to answer no. But she was also oblivious. She hadn’t even realized that such recruitment was possible, that people would want to conspire against the Guild.

If someone didn’t like the Guild, then they could just wait until the end of their employment or repayment contract and leave. She hadn’t thought there would be any other way.

But Jack’s theory made sense to her, in that gut way that she trusted.

“Skye?” he asked again.

She got up and went to his side of the table. She tapped on one of the screens, making the list that he had compiled holographic. She hit one other part of the screen so that the hologram included images of the people who had been disciplined.

Her mouth fell open. She closed it, then bit her lower lip.

He had twenty names on that list. Sixteen had spoken to her at odd times. Sixteen. And a few of them had done so in such a way that she remembered thinking afterward,
That
was
weird
.

Jack watched her. She could actually feel his patience, as if it were a live thing. He was waiting for her to figure something out.

She had one more thing to do. She opened another holographic window and tapped on it, looking up vacation days from five years ago.

Fifteen of the names had the same date. And then again, each year. She didn’t have information for this year because that would be in the Guild’s current records, and to get those records, she would have to hack into the system.

She closed the screens, sat back down, and put her face in her hands. She was shaking.

The Guild hadn’t been a safe place for her, but it had been understandable—at least, she had thought it had been understandable. Everyone in their place, everyone with their assignments, people who had moved out of their place had either succeeded or screwed up. She had never thought of anyone cheating or gaming the system, because she hadn’t believed it was possible.

She figured all of the bad people would get caught. And those with questionable skills or a questionable commitment to the Guild, like she had, would get shunted aside in favor of better candidates.

Jack placed a tentative hand on her back. Then he rubbed gently, not in a sexual way, but in a soothing one. He probably thought he knew how upset she was.

Oddly, she was upset about the broken rules and about the misunderstandings. Not that these people had formed a conspiracy against the Guild.

The Guild didn’t treat everyone well. It was only a matter of time before someone rebelled.

Someone other than her.

But she had never expected the rebellion to take this form.

People from within, killing to obtain their desires. Surely, the Guild should have foreseen this? How had it missed the conspiracy?

She raised her head and tapped the screen one last time. Jack’s hand remained on her back, soothing and warm. She didn’t try to shake him off, which was unusual for her. His touch wasn’t a distraction at all, and she found his nearness comforting.

“That’s it,” she said to herself. “They control the information.”

“What?” Jack asked.

She looked at him. “You’re right. There’s a group and there has been for years. They set this up a long time ago, and they meet off-site at least once a year. But the key is that a lot of these people got demoted into what’s called The Office. They handle routine things, like the security for Guild members and vacation days and financial transactions. They do some investigating, mostly background of potential candidates for the school, and they have their fingers in a lot of the Guild’s management.”

“Do you think this conspiracy extends beyond these people that I found?”

“It would have to, wouldn’t it, to have part of the Council try to vote their own candidate in as the Guild’s director.” She rubbed a hand over her face.

She and Jack had spent so much time here, while Liora and her people were planning an active assassination. For all that Skye knew, it could be all over already.

Or about to happen.

It sounded like they had real plans, major plans, with at least two backups.

“We have to get this information to the Guild,” Skye said.

“If you don’t know which people are working together,” Jack said, “how are you going to know who to trust?”

Great question, especially since she’d missed so many cues already. She would ask Jack, who seemed to have a very good sense of other people, who to trust, but he didn’t have decades of experience with them.

“I guess we take this information to the director,” Skye said, “and let her figure out what to do.”

Jack was silent for a moment, as if he were considering what to say next. Finally, he nodded his head just a little.

“And what if we’re too late?” he asked softly.

Her heart twisted. She cared more than she thought she did.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess we’ll figure that out when we get there.”