The Flight of the Silvers (43 page)

The moment Melissa spied his shrewd blue eyes, she knew and feared his true nature.

“Good evening, sir. I’m Melissa Masaad. Supervising Special Agent, DP-9.”

The man removed his hat and procured his government ID. He spoke in a soothing lilt, as if reading a bedtime story.

“Cedric Cain. Associate, NIC.”

Melissa scanned his badge. “That’s quite a vague rank, sir. Can’t say I’ve heard of it.”

“I never need to make my own coffee, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I suppose I’m dancing around the larger question.”

Cain smiled slyly. “You are. But you look good doing it.”

The National Integrity Commission was formed in 1913, during the great American panic that followed the Cataclysm. Though their original mission statement involved the “neutralization of foreign threats and influences,” their first two decades were little more than a systematic purge of immigrants, illegal and otherwise.

In 1932, the NIC was re-formed into a global network of strategic intelligence operatives. They worked mostly in secret, virtually always outside the nation’s borders. Though crackpot rumors of their activities remained, Integrity held a mostly positive reputation among U.S. citizens. To the lay public, they were the stalwart souls who kept the world’s problems from becoming America’s problem. How they did that was their own business.

Melissa knew the shades would come sniffing around her case sooner or later. The question was whether or not they deemed her fugitives to be a foreign threat.

“Melissa,” Cain cooed. “Pretty name. Does anyone ever call you Missy?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, I’m going to start calling you Missy if you don’t stop calling me sir.”

“Apologies, Mr. Cain. My strict British conditioning.”

“It’s Dr. Cain, actually. You can start there and work your way to Cedric. You smoke?”

“Are you asking me if I break the law, Dr. Cain?”

“I’m inviting you to break the law with me, agent.”

Two minutes later, they sat in the parking lot, in the front seat of Cain’s black Cameron Bullet. Melissa found it a surprisingly compact car for such a stretched man. The driver’s seat had been altered to retract another ten inches, all the way to the back cushions.

“So how’s Andy handling his sunset?” Cain asked.

Her mind danced with pleasure as she took a drag of Cain’s Cuban cigarillo. “You know Andy Cahill?”

“Oh, we go way back. You were probably in diapers when he and I had our first turf war.”

“Really? Who won?”

Cain let out a coughing chuckle. The question was rhetorical sarcasm. Integrity was the rock to the Bureau’s scissors, trumping them on all jurisdictional matters. Only an act of paper from the White House could stop them from taking Melissa’s case away from her.

“Andy’s fine,” she responded. “He says he hates retirement, which I assume to mean he loves it.”

“Last of the cowboys, that one. You know, I tried to poach him a couple of times. The man was too damn smart to be a Dep.”

“We are a simple folk,” she jested.

“Please. I already know you’re smarter than Andy. If I thought you wouldn’t laugh me out of the car, I’d make you a job offer right now.”

Melissa couldn’t help but smile at Cain’s perceptiveness. After seven hard years in British Intelligence, she’d sooner club baby seals than step back into the world of national defense.

She followed Cain’s gaze across the lot, at the silver Royal Seeker that had been seized with Amanda and Theo. Her men had already pored over every inch for prints and fibers.

“How much do you know about this case?” Melissa asked.

“I’ll put it to you this way: I only recently started smoking again.”

“You’ll have to give me more than that.”

“I read all your summaries and transcripts,” he said. “Stole a gander at the Filipino’s hospital report. I sat in this car an hour ago, watching you interview Amanda Given on my handtop. There’s not a drop of evil in that woman, is there?”

“That feed was closed-circuit.”

“Nothing’s closed-circuit. You did a stellar job, by the way. The generators were a brilliant idea.”

Melissa blew smoke through a scowl. “So while we’ve been following these people, you’ve been following us.”

“More or less. But before you beat the war drums, know that I’m not here to plunder. I’ve only been asked to assess and report. You’re lucky they sent me and not someone else.”

“Why is that?”

“Because I don’t think we’re ready to handle this problem,” Cain confessed. “Integrity’s in a state of flux right now. Bunch of young hard-liners are taking us over, pulling us back to our dark early days. If they got their mitts on these outlaws of yours, it wouldn’t be pretty. At the very least, that Maranan fellow would be a goner. The lab boys would fish the ring out of his brain like the prize in a cereal box.”

Melissa’s stomach twisted in tension. “You can’t do that.”

“There’s no ‘me’ in that equation, hon. I don’t run the Sci-Tech division. Not anymore.”

“Obviously you still have some influence if the agency sent you here.”

“If I sing the right tune, I can quell their interest for a while. But I can’t do it alone. You need to keep me posted on everything you learn, especially about this Azral and Esis Pelletier.”

“You seem fine at gathering this information on your own.”

“It’s harder than it looks. If I get my news straight from you, I’ll have better luck spinning my new bosses. Are you willing to work with me?”

“That depends. Why are you really doing this? What do you get out of it?”

Cain sighed a long spout of smoke, then tapped his ashes out the window.

“‘Associate’ is just a title they slap on the folks they don’t know what to do with. There are those who hope I go the way of Andy Cahill. I have other plans. Fortunately for you, they involve keeping these fugitives away from Sci-Tech. At least until I get it back. Now I know you’re cynical about us God-and-country folk, but I swear to you I want these people alive. I think we can learn a lot more from their mouths than their corpses. I know you feel the same way. So let’s help each other.”

Melissa couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being positioned like a chess piece, though she saw little choice at the moment. “I’ll keep you posted on everything I learn.”

“Good. Your big task now is to find those other four runners, fast.”

“Believe me, that’s my top priority.”

“It better be. Because if they make any more headlines, it’ll be out of my hands. Integrity will cloud up and rain all over them.”

They stared at the Royal Seeker again. Neither the license plate nor the Vehicle Registry Pin existed on record. Either the tags were unparalleled forgeries or the van had somehow been pilfered from the future. A month ago, Melissa would have laughed at the latter theory.

“Guess everything’s about to go topsy-turvy again,” Cain reckoned. “Everything we know, right out the damn window.”

“I only recently resumed smoking myself,” Melissa admitted.

“Have you said it out loud yet?”

“Said what?”

“That they’re from another world.”

Melissa felt a familiar lurch in her gut, the one she suffered whenever mad reality confronted her.

“Not yet.”

Cain took a last drag of his cigarrillo, then chucked it away. “Well, maybe it’s time to start.”

—

As soon as she returned to her desk, her handphone buzzed with a new text message. Owen Nettles was a blond and bespectacled little man who never made eye contact and rarely spoke above a mumble. But for all his awkwardness, he was one of the Bureau’s best ghost drill operators. Melissa had left him at the Nemeth lake house to learn more about the missing fugitives.

His update wasn’t encouraging.

Melissa frowned as she keyed her reply.

Melissa winced with discomfort. Owen’s deep love for ghosting had mutated into an unhealthy fascination with David Dormer. She’d have to talk to him about guarding his tongue around the others. The Bureau didn’t look kindly on boyers. She typed:

she typed.

She sat at her desk in a state of fidgety distraction, chewing a dreadlock as she twirled Cedric Cain’s contact card in her fingers.

“Something, something, private school. Something, something, private school.”

Her agents traded dark and baffled glances. Howard waved to her from the edge of her desk.

“Melissa?”

She snapped back to awareness. “Hello, Howard.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m all right. Thank you. How are you?”

“Well, truth be told—”

“Has Amanda written anything yet?”

“No. Not that I saw.”

Melissa muttered an expletive and hurried down the hall.

Amanda curled into an uncomfortable fetal position on the sofa, the best she could manage with her chain restraints. Her eyes were dark with fatigue and anguish.

Melissa retrieved the notepad from the floor. A few lines of scribble graced the top page.

I don’t think you have the others. If you knew they were okay, you would have told me like you did with Theo. I’m sorry to use your kindness against you, but information’s the only leverage I have. I plan to use it sparingly.

For what it’s worth, I do believe everything you said about honoring my rights. I pray to God the rest of your people are as decent as you.

With a weary sigh, Melissa sat down on the folding chair and rubbed her throbbing temples.

“When I was thirteen and living in Khartoum, a drunk driver struck me down in a crosswalk. I lost my left arm and my right eye, and my spine was shattered in three different places. It was extreme good fortune that the hospital had installed its first reviver the week before. I woke up inside the machine, fully intact and with no memory at all of the incident. I didn’t believe the story until the doctor showed me photos of my mangled body.”

Amanda sat up on the couch again. Melissa absently twirled the tempic screwdriver in her fingers.

“That was when I first realized the great and wonderful change that was happening all over the world. To this day, I remain endlessly fascinated by temporis. I built my first tempic barrier when I was sixteen, and then my first ghostbox a year later. I understand these devices better than I understand most people. I love them all. Except for the weapons.”

She fixed a heavy stare on Amanda’s long fingers.

“When I think about what you and your people can do, I feel like an amateur all over again. I barely know how to process it. And now on top of all the lunacy . . .”

Melissa shook her head at Amanda in bleary awe.

“You didn’t have temporis at all, did you?”

“What do you mean?”

“On the world you come from.”

Amanda met Melissa’s gaze with brief and pensive silence. “No.”

“I can’t even imagine what you people have been through. The shock and upheaval. It staggers the mind.”

The generators hummed without interruption for ten long seconds before Melissa stood up.

“I don’t have the others,” she confessed. “The lake house was abandoned by the time we got there. My guess is that they’re proceeding to Brooklyn in the hopes that Peter can help them locate and rescue you. I assume that’s where we’ll apprehend them.”

“I hope not,” said Amanda.

“I understand. But the fact remains that your companions are out there right now, hunted by forces far worse than us. And now they have to function without their seeing eye and their tempic arm. At this point, we’re their best option. You’ll just have to trust me on that.”

She opened the door, then turned around to Amanda.

“I’ll do everything in my power to protect you. That’s an unconditional . . .”

Melissa took another look at the rectangular discoloration on the wall. Her jaw went slack with revelation. She knew why it bothered her now.

“. . . chalkboard.”

Amanda looked at her askew. “What?”

“There was a chalkboard there. This used to be a classroom.”

“Uh, okay. Why are you—”

Melissa closed the door and ran back to the bullpen, urgently scanning each agent.

“What happened to the local men? Did they all go home?”

“One of them’s still here,” said Howard. “He’s in the bathroom. Why?”

Melissa rushed to the men’s room. The heavyset blond at the urinal jumped at her abrupt entrance.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“How long has DP-9 occupied this building?” Melissa asked.

He shook his head at her in exasperation. “You stormed in here just to—”

“How long has DP-9 occupied this building?”

“I don’t know! Ten years or so. Why?”

“What was it before you moved in?”

“It was a school! Some fancy little academy. Why the hell are you—”

Melissa bolted down the hall and burst into Theo’s room. He tossed her a genial smile.

“What’s up?”

She squinted at his free hand, clutched around the edge of his desk table. His grip tightened defensively as she approached. She pried his fingers, revealing a small brown sticker.

PROPERTY OF ARCHER LANSING PRIVATE SCHOOL

Melissa laughed with dark disbelief. “You knew you were coming here. You foresaw this.”

“I think you’re overestimating my—”

She fled the room and made a beeline back to the bullpen, stopping at Ross Daley’s desk.

“Did you leave Theo alone at any point during his hospital stay? Did you leave him within reach of any handphones?”

Ross scowled at her in insult. “No. Of course not. What do you take me for?”

“You don’t want me to answer that.”

She spun around to Howard. “Call Owen and Carter and anyone else who’s not here. Tell them to get back now. The rest of you, grab your guns.”

Howard flashed his palms. “Whoa, whoa, boss. Slow down. What’s going on?”