Chapter 198

The first entrance into the underworld was located at the bottom floor of an unremarkable parking garage. By the time we arrived, every car that was going to leave the garage had already left and the only remaining vehicles were an assortment of old sedans and coupes that probably hadn’t been moved in days or weeks. After Max parked the van, I politely asked the Twins to check each of those cars for traps or occupants. If Barrett and Hunter already had men waiting to pounce on us, our task would be over before it could even properly begin, but I didn’t want to take any more stupid risks than absolutely necessary.

Fifteen tense minutes later, a rhythmic knock sounded from the van’s back door.

“It’s him,” Max said. She pointed at a monitor she’d mounted to the wall, which was connected to an exterior camera. “Akumi’s not with him, though.”

I opened the door. “Well?”

“The cars are all empty,” Kira said. “We went through each one on the floor below us, checking the back seats and trunks for traps. Also, I disabled the alarm systems so that we do not accidentally draw the wrong kind of attention.”

I hadn’t explicitly told him to do that, but it was a good idea. A garden variety carjacker could trigger one of the car alarms at some point during the night, summon the local law enforcement officers, and complicate things even further.

“Where’s your sister?” CJ asked.

“She is waiting for you.”

CJ swallowed nervously. I thought that I might need to dredge up another inspiring speech to bolster his courage, but he surprised me by straightening his shoulders and stepping out of the van without needing any prompting. He checked his weapon, patted down the additional magazines he’d stashed in various places on his body, and shuddered visibly.

“Alright,” he said. “Alright. How long until you two are in position?”

“Ten minutes, maybe,” Max said. “Traffic reports show that it’s a slow night, so we shouldn’t -”

I cut her off with a raised hand. “Assume ten minutes. Keep your earbud in and active. If you run into trouble that you can’t handle, don’t hesitate to call for help.”

“Help?” He swallowed again. “No. Whatever happens, we’ll find a way to handle it. You just focus on getting your friends back, okay?”

He didn’t mean it. Obviously, he was putting on the bravest face he could manage to keep me from being distracted with worry. Little did he know that I was already so sick with fear, adrenaline, anxiety, and a cocktail of about a million different emotions that I simply didn’t have room to feel any worse. Instead of telling him that, however, and potentially shattering the bravado he was managing to put up, I nodded once and closed the door.

Max retrieved a wireless keyboard from the passenger seat and input a few short commands. The earbud I wore crackled and came to life. Kira worked his jaw for a few moments, acclimating the unfamiliar pressure in his ear, so I imagined that he’d come online as well.

“Making sure we’re all connected,” Max said. It was strange hearing her in person and through the comms at once. I was used to being the one running the system, after all, and I generally just switched things over to a stereo set-up as soon as it was feasible to do so.

“I’m connected,” CJ said.

“Yes,” Akumi said testily. “Are you coming?”

“Yes, I…yes, I’m on the way.”

Akumi made a sound that managed to convey both irritation and impatience at the same time. Mila would have been impressed.

“We’re live, too,” I said, gesturing at myself and Kira. He tapped his ear, confirming what I’d said, and readjusting how the earbud was positioned.

Max and I had discussed the protocols and how to use the equipment as a team. Her specialization in surveillance notwithstanding, she’d worked alone for the overwhelming majority of her career or with her father, in whatever form their relationship assumed. None of us could afford for her to go through such high-stakes, on the job training, but…well, it was what it was.

While she informed everyone else on the procedures we’d be using to keep the lines clear, as long as possible, I reached over to mute my line and tuned her out as best I could. Planning for this assault had proven impossible. Instead, I focused on stripping out all auxillary goals and checkpoints in favor of crystallizing the few objectives that absolutely had to be accomplished. Short-term goals that, if we were successful, might lead to other short-term goals. Without information and without the ability to step back, this battle would quickly devolve into a game of inches.

We had a few advantages, at least. Or, if advantage wasn’t quite the right word, there were some things that we could cling to for a little bit of an edge.

Over the years of my criminal career, I’d learned that it was generally harder to play defense than offense. It seemed paradoxical, but it was true. A given proprietor, curator, private collector, or mob boss could install as much security as he wanted, hire as many goons to patrol the hallways as he could find, and bury an item under miles of secured vaults and secret entrances. But, once all of that was set up, it was an absolute nightmare to adapt to changing circumstances.

Hunter couldn’t get more men on short notice. Barrett couldn’t install additional cameras or set up road blocks in real time. Meanwhile, we would be able to change strategies on the fly to work around their defenses and innovate new techniques, if necessary, once we understood how he’d chosen to protect himself.

Mila would have described it as momentum. My backup team could establish momentum, could build on it by forcing Hunter’s men out of position, and could maintain that pace by taking out or otherwise incapacitating the people we encountered. Barrett and Hunter were forced to remain stationary and sequestered, until such time as they could hand my friends off to the Magi and disappear into the wind. As long as they were keeping their heads down and out of sight, they wouldn’t be able to evade us.

We were also comprised of a group with unknown capabilities. Barrett knew Max was a hacker, but he didn’t know her specialty and he couldn’t know how good she was at it. There might be a mistake or underestimation that we could take advantage of. The Twins were an unmeasured quantity, even to me, and I’d been the one to bring them officially into the chase. Akumi’s capacity for violence hadn’t been tested and I suspected that what I’d glimpsed when we’d saved Devlin the first time was just the surface of it. Kira was even more mysterious than she was.

I glanced up at him. He was listening to Max’ explanation, nodding where appropriate, and fiddling with the rings he wore. He caught me looking at him and gave me a humorless…smile wasn’t the right word to describe the expression. Whatever it was, if he’d intended to put me at ease, he’d failed terribly.

The third and final advantage we could claim was surprise. Barrett wouldn’t be expecting us to attack him at his headquarters, hired guns and kidnappers be damned. He was so close to victory that it only stood to reason that he’d start to relax, maybe even let down his guard a little bit. Even the most professional thieves could grow sloppier when they thought the heat had died down and it was looking as though they might be getting away with their crimes. When we hit him, and if we hit him hard enough, that shock could put him on his heels. From there, we’d just have to keep pressing and make sure that he couldn’t get his metaphorical feet under him again.

Max finished her explanation and used the wireless keyboard to mute all of the lines except for the one that fed communications traffic into her ear. One of the screens in the van came to life, transcribing everything that came over the earbud. It was a nice touch that I had personally never considered implementing.

There was more room in the van, now that Akumi and CJ had gotten out, but Kira and I didn’t move any closer to each other. He continued playing with his rings, twisting each one entirely around each finger in turn, and didn’t look up from a spot on the van’s floor. After a few minutes of that, I decided that I couldn’t take the silence, so I cleared my throat loudly.

“I should have asked you this before,” I said, “but I don’t actually know what you do.”

“We work – worked – for the Yakuza,” Kira answered. “We enforced their rules and made certain that other organizations in our area understood that there would be consequences for acting without first showing the proper respect.”

Protection money, then. I’d suspected as much, but it was good to have that confirmation.

“She’s the fighter, though?” I gestured at the back of the van, as if Akumi waited on the other side of that door. “The…violent one, for lack of a better word?”

A ghost of a smile crossed his lips. “We are both fighters,” he said. “But, yes, my sister prefers that type of work. Why?”

“Well, you two worked as a team. If she was the fighter, what did you bring to the partnership?” He raised his eyes and I hurried to clarify. “No offense, of course. I’m sure that you’re also a good fighter, but…”

“I am good at many things,” Kira said. “Fighting is one, even though my sister prefers it. I am…what is the word…a fixer. I fix things.”

“Things?”

“Problems,” he said. “I find things, sometimes. Other times, I find people. When those people are also problems…”

He trailed off, leaving the rest to my imagination. My imagination, unfortunately, was perfectly willing to fill in those blanks with vivid images and uncomfortable ideas. I willed myself to to stop thinking about it, which was only mildly successful.

“It should not matter,” Kira said. He must have read the direction of my thoughts through my facial expressions. “My sister may be a better fighter, but that does not mean I am bad at it.”

He was anxious, but not in the same way that CJ had been. Kira wanted to be in the action, I realized. He might not be sure that this was the best way to go about things, but he’d made a commitment and he wanted to see it through to completion, so that he could get back to the hunt for whichever agent of the Magi had killed his former boss.

“I’m not worried about that,” I said, surprising myself with how true that sentence was.

“Then what are you worried about?”

“A lot of things. Nothing we can do anything about now.”

“When we go underground,” Kira said, “we will be on their ground. If you would rather stay behind, I am sure that you could guide me from the van.”

I shook my head. “Not a chance.”

It was another moment of shocking honesty that came from a place deep within me. Kira had a point, of course. I wouldn’t be much use in a physical fight, especially not in close quarters and confronted by people who weighed more and had more experience. If anything, I might get in the way or just end up as a hostage myself. But I couldn’t stay in the van. I wouldn’t. Not this time.

He gave me a searching look. Then, apparently satisfied with whatever he found in my eyes, nodded in agreement. “Not a chance,” he repeated.

“Alright,” Max said from the front of the van. The vehicle began to slow down. “Almost here. Next stop: Mockingbird Station.”

The second entrance into the underworld was, of course, the first entrance I’d used in Dallas. Mockingbird Station looked different than it had days earlier, when Mila had first shown me its secrets. The building itself seemed deeper, more foreboding; the shadows appeared to stretch longer; and there was an uncomfortable feeling in the air that permeated into the van’s interior, as if it had sneaked in through the air conditioning.

It was also entirely empty. Most of the people who’d been lingering around the Station on my previous visit had been civilians. Their presence in the mall above the speakeasy had provided a sense of normalcy that I now desperately missed. When the underworld denizens had been cleared out by Hunter’s trip downwards, the regular civilians must have felt something happening beneath their feet. Shops were closed early, metal gates swung down and locked into place to protect goods. Balls of paper trash littered the ground around a few trash cans. It seemed no one had bothered to pick those up and the late night janitors seemed to be mysteriously absent.

We left the van parked, but still running, and I led CJ and Max through the mall until we reached Blind Alley Pizza Company. Its doors were also locked, but Kira used a bump key to force the tumblers into place. The two of us stepped inside the pizza place; Max stayed just at the edge of the doorway.

“I’m going back to the van,” she said. “I’ll keep an eye on things and let you know what’s going on with the other group, whenever possible.”

I trusted Max’ work, to an extent, but I couldn’t stop myself from nervously adjusting my earbud. “These will track our location, right?”

“I don’t have accurate floor plans,” she admitted, “so I can’t say for certain that I’ll be able to tell exactly where you are. But I’ll know generally and can send help your way if it’s necessary.”

I was positive that it would prove to be necessary, sooner rather than later. I was just as certain that, when that moment came, it’d be too late to wait for help to arrive

“Got it,” I said. No need to share that dark thought and risk the fragile morale I’d only just managed to create.

Kira adjusted his belt so that he’d be able to draw at least one of his knives quicker. I knelt long enough to remove my collapsible baton and a canister of pepper spray from my backpack.

“Good luck,” Max said. Then, she retreated through the mall, heading back to the van at top speed.

Kira took the lead. When we stepped into the walk-in freezer, he hauled the door shut with one hand. A few seconds passed in total darkness before the freezer’s back wall began, slowly, to slide down. The door made no sound as it lowered itself but, after we stepped out of the freezer and down into the speakeasy proper, there was a slight grinding and an audible click when the door slid back up and locked.

I’d expected as much. I didn’t know how to open the door from this side, but that was yet another problem wed have to deal with later.

Find Devlin and the others.

My earbud crackled to life. “Sarah?”

“I’m listening, Max.”

“I’m going to move the van to a different position,” Max said, via the comms. “There aren’t any other cars in the area and I don’t want them to figure out that something’s going on because they notice something out of the ordinary.”

“That’s good,” I said. “Find somewhere equidistant between the two different entrances, if possible?”

“I’m already -”

Max stopped talking. I thought, for a moment, that the line had gone dead, before the sound of her keys flying across the keyboard came back over the comms.

“Max?” I asked. “What is it?”

She didn’t immediately answer. When, after a few tense heartbeats, she finally spoke, I felt the bottom of my stomach drop to an even lower place than the underworld.

“Targets engaged,” Max said. “CJ and Akumi say that they ran into three guards, just now.”

Kira looked up sharply. “What happened?”

“Two men down,” Max reported. “Non-lethally, for what it’s worth, but they’re not going to be in fighting shape for a while.”

“What about the third?” I asked.

She audibly gulped. “He got away.”

Well, I thought. That was fast.

Chapter 197

It wasn’t that I was worried about making a bad call. Not anymore, anyway. The problem was that there weren’t any good choices available. Retreating wasn’t an option. We couldn’t do more research, reach out for assistance from any of our allies, or put any meaningful roadblocks in the way of Barrett’s plans. The odds were too high to risk going in through the wrong entrance, especially considering that even getting the right entrance wasn’t a guarantee that we’d be able to navigate through the underground labyrinth in time.

We had to cover every base and hope that Barrett and Hunter didn’t just overrun us with simple numbers.

Piled into an oversized van, as we went over the blueprints and plans the Texan had been able to unearth, I took stock of my…not friends, exactly, but allies. There was just enough room in the van for each person or, in the case of Akumi and Kira, group to isolate themselves. We all had enough to do and think about it that it wasn’t unreasonable for any one person to focus on their own duties, instead of indulging in idle conversation, but there was an undeniable sense of dread hanging in the air. No one acknowledged that dread, which only served to make it more ominous and even harder to ignore.

Max hadn’t spoken since we’d left the arcade. With time being as short as it was, she hadn’t been able to download and upload all of her information and programs to the computers in the van. I’d helped her the process, after she’d extracted a promise that I wouldn’t look at anything she deemed secret, so I had a vague idea of the toolkit she was bringing to the party. Communications software, some physical equipment that could boost her signal and provide her with consistent bandwidth for a limited time, and her usual suite of surveillance/counter-surveillance apps. She’d lobbied for another thirty minutes in the arcade, so that she could put the finishing touches on some experimental script she’d been toying with.

I’d worked with Max, as a name on a computer screen, for years. Max, as a person, was still something of an enigma to me. At best, I could hazard guesses as to what she was thinking and, more often than not, I thought I got it mostly correct. In this situation, though, I couldn’t help but wonder where her head was truly at. I’d been working closer to the ground with Devlin for a long, long time, and what we were driving towards was still frightening enough that my stomach threatened to rebel every time the van hit a bump or took a turn too sharply. Max couldn’t possibly be dealing with this any better.

The Twins were, as ever, an island unto themselves. They spoke exclusively in Japanese now, gesturing occasionally at the rest of us. Akumi, in her sharp suit, wore an expression of calm disinterest. Kira, in contrast, couldn’t stop himself from tapping his feet against the floor of the van, shrugging, or cracking his knuckles every few seconds. Both of them occasionally reached one hand up to the collars of their shirts, paused, and then lowered the hand without doing anything. I’d seen the coin they each wore around their neck. Whatever the coin meant to them, they were both trying to at as though they didn’t need to remind themselves of that connection…and they were both failing at it.

And CJ….oh, CJ was a mess. He was holding it together as best he could, but it was painfully obvious how scared he was. He kept his eyes pointed firmly at the ground, back straight, and tried not to be noticed. Of course, his effort only served to attract the occasional glance from one of the more experienced thieves, hackers, or enforcers. And those glances only made him lean further into his impression of a statue, which continued the cycle.

They were fraying. I didn’t need to be an expert in psychology to see that much. Conceptually, attacking Barrett before he could hand Devlin and the others over to the Magi was the right move. Making that decision from the relative safety of the arcade was entirely different than actually driving to one of the two entrances we would have to use to assault his base. Every moment that passed while we drove toward the job only served to heighten my own anxiety and make me even more afraid of what mistakes I might – would – make when things went sideways. And I’d been doing things like this, with even less planning, for six months. Everyone else probably felt that same feeling, except multiplied two or three times over.

I didn’t think they’d leave me to attack the base on my own. We all had something riding on our success. But I did think they might default to their own natural behaviors, instead of trusting in someone else to have their back. That might be helpful, granted, but it was far more likely to cause a disaster. The only hope we had at success was a unified front. And, looking around the interior of the van, we were anything but unified.

CJ leaned in closer to me. It surprised me, at first, and I leaned in to hear where he had to say.

“Your grandmother told me to keep you safe,” he said. “I promised to do that.”

Ah. He’d brought this same point up several times before we’d left the arcade to begin with. It made sense, if I looked at things from his perspective. But he was still thinking about the Magi as a threat that only had to be dealt with once, instead of an existential threat that lurked around every corner. And he didn’t know the lengths the Magi could or would go to, so he couldn’t understand how important it was to get this right, the first time.

“And this is the best way to do that,” I countered. “I’m not going to be any good in a fight. That’s just a given. So if we run into any opposition, my best bet is going to be hiding behind someone else who knows what they’re doing.”

“You don’t think I know what I’m doing?”

“I’m sure you do, but that’s not the point.”

“If we have to split up,” CJ said, “then I should be the one to go with you. These two have experience working together. It makes more sense that way.”

I suppressed a sigh. “The two of you have guns. If – really, when – you run into one of Hunter’s men, there’s a better than even chance that you’re going to make noise. Either one of you shoots him, or they shoot at you…either way, that’s going to draw attention.”

“It has been a long time since someone shot at me first,” Akumi said. Since she’d used English, I assumed she’d wanted me to hear her say it. I hadn’t known she’d even been listening.

I ignored her and kept my focus on CJ. “Kira’s got more experience with infighting, I’m guessing. So the two of us can get in without alerting anyone. If Hunter figures out that we’re attacking from one entrance, but doesn’t hear anything from the other, he’ll order his men to secure that area.”

“Which…” CJ paused, thinking through the logic train. “Which will pull them away from you.”

“And,” I added, “we might be able to figure out something about where they’re hiding, based on where his men come from and how long it takes to get to you.”

That last part was a hopeful exaggeration. For us to do anything of the sort, we needed there to be some sort of in-house security system that I could access and that Max could hack into. But CJ didn’t need to know that much.

“She’ll never forgive me if you get hurt,” CJ said. “I’ll never forgive myself.”

“We’ll stay in communication the whole time,” I assured him. “You can make sure of that, right Max?”

She didn’t respond until we reached a red light, a few moments later. She rifled around inside an athletic bag on the passenger seat until, eventually, she pulled out a hard plastic case. I opened it when she handed it back to me. Inside, there was a half dozen matte black earbuds.

“I won’t bore you with the technical details,” she said. Then, after a moment, I saw a slight grin on her face in the rear-view mirror. “When I was reassembling the Mouse’s hard drives, I found some algorithms and encryption protocols he’d been working on. Some of it he’d borrowed from me, some of it he’d created himself. But, I cleaned up his work and did some tinkering on these earbuds.”

“And?” I asked.

“They’ll work underground to a point.” She tapped the car’s dashboard on each of the last three words. “And, while they can be jammed, someone would have to basically take down two or three blocks’ worth of electronics to do it. Which is the kind of thing people tend to notice.”

“Downsides?”

“Shorter battery life,” she admitted. “A few hours from a full charge, which these have. I could improve that, if I had the time, but…I don’t. So.”

“Are these the only ones you have?”

She tapped her own ear. “Counting the one I’ve got in, yes.”

I passed out the earbuds to everyone present. When I handed the earbud to CJ, I held his eyes. “We have to do it like this,” I said. “Unless you’ve got a better idea, our best chance is to keep them from coordinating. Between the two groups, we can keep them guessing.”

“And that gives us a higher chance of pulling this off,” CJ said. He groaned in displeasure, but took the earbud and slipped it into place. “I don’t like this, Sarah.”

“Neither do I,” I said.

“Me either,” Max said. I frowned at her and she shrugged, as if she’d seen the gesture. Probably due to the rear-view mirror, I decided. “What? I’m just saying.”

I shelved my response. The Twins appeared as calm and imperturbable as ever, although I did notice Akumi rubbing her fingertips together at her side, as if there were a lucky coin in her hand. CJ looked sick, but there was resolve visible behind that queasy expression. And Max kept her eyes fixed firmly on the road. She’d seemed frightened, anxious, and…excited?

I couldn’t blame her. But I also couldn’t let things stand like this. When things started to go bad, I needed them to actually listen to orders and instructions, not merely hear them and then choose to work for their own best interest.

“Alright,” I said, clapping my hands together for emphasis. “We’re going to have to play this by ear and I’ll call out any alterations, as necessary. Max, your job is to keep us all aware of what’s going on, as close to real-time as possible.”

“Got it.”

“Akumi.” I hesitated, then plowed ahead. “These people kidnapped your brother and they hurt him. I know that you want to hurt them.”

She showed me her teeth in an expression that definitely was not a smile.

“But you need to hold off on that,” I continued. “Wait until they spot you, or I call for it.”

“And then?”

I answered her with a careful, deliberate shrug. “Make some noise. Noise equals distraction and a distraction means that Kira and I will have a little more freedom to move.”

Akumi drummed the fingers of one hand against the bandoleer under her jacket. “Then I will be very distracting.”

I spared a moment to shudder at the thought of what visions of violence were dancing through her head. Then, I remembered the slaughter at the boat house and I resolved not to judge her for bringing the fight back to the door of the people who’d started it.

“Kira, you and I are going to run silent for as long as possible. There are some secondary objectives that I’d like to see about handling while we’re searching and I’ll need you to keep me safe, in case they find us before we know where they’re keeping my friends.”

Kira nodded and carefully adjusted the rings on his left hand.

“CJ, we’ve talked. You need to follow Akumi’s lead, as long as possible. Keeping her out of trouble is keeping me safe. Trust me on that.”

He hesitated for a split second, then nodded jerkily.

Devlin would have said something clever and inspiring. He’d led a few teams during our marriage, ended up as de facto lead some other times, and it had been his grudge with Asher that brought Mila, Michel, and I together in the first place. He was the charmer, the schmoozer, the one most able to connect with people and to find out what to say that would speak directly to them and their motivations.

Me? Normally, I was the planner. I was the one who laid out the steps that needed to be completed, who kept an eye on things from above, and who tried very hard to avoid notice. For the next few hours, though, I couldn’t be that person. I had to become whoever I had to be, in order to do what needed to be done.

“This isn’t going to be a clean job,” I said to everyone. “More than likely, this will end up being incredibly sloppy. But we’re going to pull it off because we have no choice. Keep your eyes open, call out anything that seems off, and move fast. If Barrett hands my friends over to the Magi, it’s game over for all of us. So…let’s not let that happen.”

They stared blankly at me. Max waited until a stop sign before she turned her wide, frightened eyes back to face the rest of us.

I sighed. “This…isn’t what I do. I’m not good at this part of things.”

“That’s obvious,” Max said.

I pointedly ignored her comment. “This is it, though. One job, one night only. Akumi, Kira…this is your chance to find out a little bit more about the people who killed your boss. CJ, you can keep my grandmother from ending up in the crosshairs of some very dangerous people. Max, you and your father can go back to doing…whatever it is you do.”

And I could save the only people who’d ever seen all of me. The heiress, the hacker, the thief…all of those personalities and a dozen others. My team knew who I was, even if I wasn’t sure most days. For that…for them…I could do this.

“One job,” Akumi said. She rubbed her fingers together at her side and nodded at her brother.

“This will keep everyone safe,” CJ said, as if he was convincing himself of that fact.

“I hate being in the spotlight,” Max said. “But…I guess I can deal with it for one night.”

I didn’t know what I’d said, but something had reached them. The Twins, Max, and CJ all drew in breaths and released them slowly. There wasn’t a bond between us, like the one that had grown up between Michel, Emilia, Devlin, and me. We hadn’t spent nights together plotting how to take down conglomerates or celebrated victories over breakfast in foreign countries.

But we had the same goal. There was a unity of purpose in the room now, where there hadn’t been one before.

That would have to be enough.

Chapter 196

Hours passed in a blur of activity and motion. Members of my backup team entered and exited the arcade, dropping off equipment, and sharing information with each other as necessary. I listened, commented when required, corrected errors, and generally tried to be useful. But my thoughts weren’t in the room with everyone else. The larger portion of my mind was focused on a million different floating variables. I couldn’t get them all to fit together into a coherent plan of action. Even when it seemed like I might have landed on something, it all came tumbling down when I pushed or poked at the mental structure from a different angle.

Without more information, we couldn’t assault the weakest point in Barrett’s defensive line. But, in order to get that information, we needed to expose ourselves and make the first move. Mila had said action was better than inaction, but that rule wouldn’t apply to this conflict. As soon as Barrett realized that I wasn’t ever going to join him, he’d accelerate his timeline. And he didn’t need to beat us; he only needed to escape.

With more people, maybe we could have forced him into a trap. But…under those circumstances, it was possible that he might just decide to cut his losses and start shooting his hostages. The Magi would rather have two conspirators instead of none, after all, and it wasn’t as though he had any particular concern for my team’s well-being.

When CJ laid a hand on my shoulder, I instinctively jerked away in surprise. He blinked. “Sorry, Sarah, but…it’s almost time, isn’t it?”

I checked my phone. It was far later than I’d thought. I’d been so stressed out that I’d effectively lost complete track of time. I rolled my shoulders to relieve some of the tension I’d been holding and got to my feet. “No apology necessary. Are you ready for this?”

He nodded, but the hesitance in that action was painfully obvious.

I wanted to let him know that he could still walk away. He knew dangerous secrets, yes, but he didn’t know how to use those and I doubted he would be predisposed to sharing that knowledge, to begin with. Max would complain about letting him off the hook, but he didn’t have any clue at all about the Community or her double identity. The Texan was, as far as CJ was concerned, a well-connected man with access to information. Plus, it wasn’t like the Texan had ever bothered concealing anything except his real name.

But I stepped down on that well-meaning impulse before it found its way to my lips. We needed him. I needed him. If things got too bad in the underground, I promised that I’d find a way to send him out of danger. Until that point, though, one more person with a weapon was too valuable to send away.

I took in his new outfit. He’d stripped down to just a plain black t-shirt, paired with black jeans and a pair of thick, black boots. With his natural skin color, I suspected that he’d be difficult to spot in a darkened corridor. Handguns were visible in a shoulder holster and in a similar, smaller holster at the small of his back. Around his waist, he wore what looked like a superhero’s utility belt.

“What’s in there?” I asked, pointing at the belt.

“Phone,” he said, “and a walkie talkie, in case we lose signal underground. A multipurpose knife, pain medicine, a roll of medical tape, flashlight, and extra bullets.” He touched each pouch as he spoke, as if he needed to reaffirm the presence of those items to himself.

“Your idea?”

He shook his head. “The scary twins suggested it.”

Made sense. This wasn’t their ideal scenario, but they would have more experience infiltrating a defended position.

“Is there one for me?”

CJ pointed behind me, instead of answering. I turned in time to catch a book-bag flying through the air toward my face. The weight of the bag surprised me and I stumbled back a few steps until I bumped into CJ, who steadied me. I lowered the bag to the floor before looking back up into Akumi’s serious expression.

“Your friend said that you might need specialized things,” she said. “Besides, you will not be on the front lines. We will handle any problems.”

“And if you can’t?” I countered. “Or if I need to defend myself?”

“You have your own weapons. Besides, if we cannot handle something, you will not be able to, either.”

Harsh…but fair, I was forced to silently admit.

I was irritated that she’d thrown the bag at me, but I stopped myself from giving voice to that irritation. Instead, I went down to one knee and opened the bag to examine its contents. Inside, I found a nondescript tablet, a portable power bank, my collapsible baton, and a different taser than the one I’d grown accustomed to. There was also the customary assortment of tools thieves used on their jobs: flashlight, rope, lockpicks, and so on. The gun I’d borrowed from Mila’s room was, notably, absent.

“Is there something different about this one?” I asked, carefully removing the taser from the bag and holding it up. “I was getting used to the other.”

“Stronger,” Kira called out from deeper within the arcade.

“Dangerously strong,” Akumi elaborated. “Higher voltage, longer charge.”

“Lethally strong?”

Akumi actually laughed. It didn’t sound like genuine mirth, in the way that I thought of it, but it didn’t feel like she was being openly sarcastic, either. “It would be very, very painful, but that would not kill anyone.” She thought for a few heartbeats, then shrugged. “Normally.”

I decided not to follow her up on that and resolved to only use the souped-up taser in absolutely dire circumstances. Maybe it made me a hypocrite, but I was far more comfortable with the Twins using deadly force than I was with the possibility of taking a life myself.

Kira approached and stopped to Akumi’s right. Neither of the Twins had changed from earlier in the day, but they’d added accessories. Two knife handles poked out from within Kira’s wolf-fur jacket and he’d put new, vicious-looking rings on each finger of both hands. His hair, which I’d considered to be shaggy but not particularly long, was slicked back to the point where I doubted gale force winds could move it. He used his thumb to crack each finger on his left hand when he saw me examining him, nodded, and began navigating through something on his phone with his other hand.

Akumi had abandoned any hint of subtlety and simply wore a full bandoleer under his suit jacket, but above her shirt. I could imagine any number of weapons or tools she was carrying, stashed in various pockets or pouches of her outfit. I was only able to see a set of brass knuckles poking out of her pants pocket and a high powered gun that made me think of Dirty Harry, in addition to the usual tools in some of the pockets across her chest.

If she hadn’t been able to fully resupply herself, I shuddered to imagine what sort of hardware she’d wanted to bring.

I also noticed that both of the Twins wore their matching necklaces visibly, now. While Kira continued with his phone, Akumi lightly touched her index and middle finger to the necklace, then removed those fingers and stood up a little straighter.

“We’ve got options,” Max called out from her nest of computers. I exchanged looks with everyone assembled and we all made our way over to where she was working.

“Options?” I asked. “What are they?”

Max input a series of commands, which caused an aerial view of some part of the city to appear on her largest screen. She continued typing, adding color-coded lines and markings to the aerial view, until the entire image resembled a finger painter’s canvas.

“Each of these colors corresponds to about six hours’ worth of driving for Barrett’s car,” she said. “It looks like he was incredibly paranoid about being followed, so he took different routes to get around the city.”

“We haven’t been here long enough for that much driving,” I said.

“You haven’t, sure. But that doesn’t mean the car hasn’t. If I had to guess, I’d say that Hunter was using the company vehicle to get around beforehand. Maybe that was just because it was easier, maybe it was a deliberate plan to make things harder to put together. Either way, it doesn’t matter.” Max stripped away several of the colored lines with a flourish, leaving only four lines untouched.

“Two days,” I said. “Why not narrow it down to the last few hours?”

“He would abandon the car,” Akumi said.

“Why?” CJ asked.

I thought about the question and almost immediately found the answer. “Because he’s still paranoid. Even if he’s being wary about tails, Barrett still knows there’s always a chance. We might just stumble onto his car, through sheer dumb luck.”

Akumi nodded. “It would be smart to leave the car at one entrance to the underground, then make his way through the tunnels until he reached wherever he is hiding.”

CJ wilted slightly.

Kira cleared his throat before speaking. “Is there a map of the underground? Would your father be able to get that for us?”

“That’s another problem,” Max said. She gestured at a different screen where windows opened and closed, like a sort of slideshow. “There are too many maps of the underground. No one living knew about all of the different speakeasies or which tunnels they used to move contraband from one bar to the another. As a result, we’ve only got incomplete planning documents, blueprints that may or may not have been utilized, and unreliable word of mouth.”

“So, we can use the car to find out where he entered the underground,” I said, “but we can’t actually trust that information as any indication about where he might actually be at. And we have plans for the underground, but no way of knowing which ones are accurate, wrong, or actively misleading.” I almost went further, but I reigned my bitter sarcasm in before I could do any more damage to the group’s morale. “What are our options?”

“And there’s the good…well, good-ish…news.” She turned her attention back to the first monitor. “Dad can’t risk being seen right now, but he still has eyes everywhere. He put people on the street to monitor four of the underground entrances that were centrally located. They’ve been reporting back to him regularly and, as a result, I know more or less what they know.”

“And…” I said, motioning for her to get to the point, “…what do they know?”

“There have been sightings of men moving equipment – guns, body armor, that kind of thing – underground, starting before you guys even got here. But, those sightings were at two different locations.”

“Are they close to each other?”

Max answered by stripping away all of the remaining colored lines and replacing them with a pair of oversized stars on the aerial view of the city. In geographic terms, the two stars weren’t all that far apart. But, in the city, with crowded crosswalks, impatient drivers, and a healthy dose of plain old automotive incompetence, it might as well have been a thousand miles of distance.

“Thus,” Max said, “options.”

They were looking at me to make a decision. If I sent our forces to the wrong entrance, it was still possible that we’d find our way to wherever Barrett and Hunter were headquartered. We might manage to reach them without setting off some alarm or otherwise putting them on alert. We could even get Devlin and the others out without dying in a noble, pointless gun fight in the bowels of the city if we were incredibly lucky.

We weren’t lucky, though. Or, if we could claim to be lucky, it was only in that we made our fortunes for ourselves. Devlin only believed in bad luck, which was an assessment I agreed with. The world only ever tried to make things harder, not easier. Which was why I’d been forced to make myself into the leader of this misfit group…not because it would have been the easiest thing, but because my own inclinations and predispositions would make the already insane task even more improbable and unlikely.

But I’d learned more than one thing from Devlin, and I agreed with him on many of the things he’d casually tossed out during our time together. Trials weren’t designed to break their participants; they were designed to test them. They were designed to push their participants to the limits, to force them to push past those walls, and to foster ingenuity.

I didn’t want to make this choice. I didn’t want the responsibility to fall on my shoulders, didn’t want to grapple with the knowledge that the wrong choice could doom my friends and family. I didn’t want a lot of things, actually. Most of all, I did not want to fail this test.

I examined the monitor intently, drawing out lines in my head, and putting together different configurations. No one else in the room spoke while I worked silently. After thirty seconds, I nodded to myself and stood up straight.

“Max,” I said, “get in touch with Frizzle. My father is fine and my parents will survive. She can monitor them from here, although I’m pretty sure we’re going to end up making enough noise that Hunter isn’t going to be able to spare anyone to harass them.”

She nodded automatically, then realized what she was doing. “Wait. What?”

I turned to Kira. “How good are you with those knives?”

An offended expression crossed his face. In less trying times, I would have laughed at how incongruous the moment was. “I am very ‘good’ with them,” he said.

“Well, we’ll be in close quarters and we do not want to make noise,” I said. “You’re with me, then. CJ, you’ll be with Akumi. Do we know what the other two will be doing?”

The Twins shared a confused moment, as Max continued sputtering. CJ answered the question. “Adel is at the junkyard, but I don’t know where the Texan is.”

“Try and get Adel back here,” I said to Max. “I don’t know that your dad is going to find anything useful in the next few hours, but if he comes back to the arcade, I’ll need to come up with a way to use him.”

“Use him to…wait. Hold on, Sarah.” Max held up her hands, palms facing out, for emphasis. “You still didn’t tell us which one of these entrances you want us to go in through.”

I touched the stars on the screen, which represented the two most likely entrances to the underworld where my friends were being held captive. The right answer could allow me to save them; the wrong answer would almost certainly doom them; and not choosing, or passing the question to someone else, simply wasn’t an option. I remembered Mila’s advice: it was better to act, and fix it later, than it was to stay frozen in place by indecision.

“Both,” I said.

Chapter 195

A sound came from deeper within the arcade before I could say anything else. I froze, which was the worst possible reaction to potential danger. CJ hesitated for a moment, then stepped in front of me. Max made an alarmed sound and ducked beneath her desk.

Several seconds passed in tense, pregnant silence. Just when I started to think I might have just been hearing things, Akumi casually strolled into our area. Kira followed behind her. She still wore the pristine suit from earlier, while Kira had discarded the fashionable jacket in favor of a bulky windbreaker with tribal markings running up the sleeves.

“The underworld is quiet,” Akumi said, by way of greeting. If she noticed the tension in the room, she clearly wasn’t going to dignify it with a comment. “People have gone to ground.”

I didn’t want her to realize how anxious her entrance made me, so I pretended to fiddle with something on the nearest keyboard before answering. “What does that mean for us?”

“It is harder to purchase equipment,” Kira said. “Easier to move without attracting attention.”

“So, when we go after Barrett, we should be able to get close to him without tipping him off…but, when we actually find him, you two won’t be able to do much against his goons?”

Akumi shrugged.

Kira gave his sister a strange, unreadable look, then elaborated. “There are tunnels underground. In close quarters, my sister and I will be able to handle many people.”

“Unless they attack us, all at the same time.”

“Unless they do that, yes. But it is unlikely.”

It wasn’t quite a jinx, but Kira’s statement was still too close for my comfort. I sent up a quiet request to whatever beings were listening. “Were you able to get anything useful?”

The Twins conferred with each other in Japanese. While they talked, I took the opportunity to smooth any expression of anxiety from my face. I still didn’t know much about the Twins, but everything about Akumi told me that she was a predator by nature. Predators, like sharks or wolves or hyper-violent Japanese hitmen, seized on moments of weakness. If I showed her how keyed up I was about Minerva’s status or the upcoming mission or about a million other things, the best case scenario was that she’d take her brother and leave.

Worst case? She might turn us over to Barrett herself, if it meant it got her closer to the people she was actually hunting.

Eventually, the Twins reached a consensus and Akumi spoke for both of them. “Only rumors. Some people think they know about people moving through the tunnels, fortifying some entrances and blocking off others. Do you know where he will be yet?”

My eyes flickered over to CJ and I willed him to stay quiet without speaking a single word. Both Kira and Akumi had only agreed to this attack when we’d all expected to bring our full force to bear. With Minerva out of commission, Max and I were operating at a vastly diminished capacity. Losing the program might turn out to be the deciding factor between failure and success, which meant that knowledge of what had happened might be the only thing necessary to convince the Twins that siding with us was a mistake.

I couldn’t let them go. Without the muscle they offered, striking out at Barrett and Hunter would be a suicide mission. And it would still be a suicide mission that I couldn’t walk away from. Even if every other member of my impromptu team decided to abandon me, I’d gather every resource still available to me and walk into danger with my eyes wide open. Lying – or, more accurately, lying by omission – was one of many things I was willing to do, if it meant the chances of success went up even marginally.

“Not yet,” I said. “Soon. Right now, we need to make sure that we’ve done everything we can to prepare ourselves.”

CJ cleared his throat. “I didn’t bring much,” he said, “but you’re welcome to anything I have that might be useful.”

“And I can’t imagine that Mila didn’t manage to bring weapons of her own,” I added. “I couldn’t find them, but you three are all in the same…uh, business, I guess? Maybe you’d have better luck searching through her room.”

Kira nodded gratefully. “That would help. How long until we are prepared to go?”

I checked the clock on one of Max’ screens and did some quick math. It was already later in the day than I liked. Moving out on Barrett’s stronghold now would grant us the element of surprise, but we’d also be exposed by the light of day. Moreover, the Twins weren’t equipped for combat and we hadn’t been able to discover what, if anything, the Texan had been able to learn. Waiting until later, though, reduced our margin of error to razor thin proportions. If we went straight at Barrett after nightfall, he might not see us coming as easily. Failure, however, would also mean that we couldn’t escape and try again later.

All or nothing, I thought. Either we pulled this off – saved my friends, dealt with Barrett, and got away before the Magi could squash us like insects – or we went down in the effort.

“Tonight,” I said. “Just after nightfall. I want to hit him when he thinks he’s already won. That way, we can catch him off guard and make some progress before he starts to put proper defenses in place.”

The Twins spoke to each other in quick bursts of Japanese again. This time, Kira was the one who spoke to me first. “That is when we will be ready, then. Is there anything you can tell us that will help us know how to prepare?”

I gave the question a fair amount of thought, along with another thirty or forty seconds of stalling. “What do you think? This is your area, not mine.”

“Stealth would be best,” Kira said.

“But it would also be impossible for long,” Akumi said. She tilted her head thoughtfully. “We will not be able to hide from Barrett, Hunter, or their men for long.”

If I thought about it logically, I knew that she was right. We weren’t trying to escape a problematic situation; we were actively going into one. It was possible that we could take out one or two guards without raising an alarm. But that would end the first time someone fired a gun or managed to yell. It would all go to hell even faster if Hunter’s men had any means of communicating with each other…which they would, because that was just the way things went.

“Not stealth, then. Or not just stealth.”

“Knives,” Akumi said. “Silent and efficient, until they know we are there.”

“And after that?” Kira asked his sister.

“Guns.” She smiled, showing far too many teeth in the process. “If we can not go around these men without a fight, we should keep that fight as short as possible.”

I searched myself. I wasn’t thrilled about lethal force, but I also wasn’t entirely opposed to it. Hunter’s men would be armed, they’d be on edge, and they wouldn’t have compunctions about killing us first. Approaching that conflict with one arm tied behind our figurative backs, they’d eliminate us with insulting ease.

Also, it occurred to me that Akumi likely wouldn’t have followed any order that mandated nonlethal force.

“Split the difference,” I said. “We want to get as far as we can without letting them know we’re there. The more people we can incapacitate before the fighting starts, the easier it’ll be when we have to blast our way back out. But if anyone comes at you with intent…”

I trailed off instead of finishing the thought. Both of the Twins would understand my meaning without needing me to explicitly spell it out for them.

“We will need to see what weapons Emilia brought with her, then,” Kira said.

“And whatever your bodyguard has to offer,” Akumi added.

I turned to CJ. “Could you take them back to the hotel? If I go back, it’s going to be difficult for me to leave again. And besides..you might have some things you want to say or take care of while you’re there, too.”

I didn’t need to say Virginia’s name. I could see that idea in CJ’s eyes already. There were several hours between now and when our operation was supposed to begin. He could spend that time with the person he cared about, instead of anxiously counting down the seconds.

“Are you sure?” CJ asked. “She told me to keep you safe.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” I answered. “Max and I have a lot of work to do here anyway. We’ll handle things on this end so that you can handle things on yours.”

Still, he lingered for another few moments before nodding twice. The first nod was uncertain, hesitant. The second, definite.

“Alright,” CJ said. “If you two will, uh…follow me? I can get you into the hotel without raising any alarms.”

The Twins turned, nearly in unison, and followed after CJ as he left the arcade. I waited until they were gone, and another two minutes after, before I spoke to Max. “How bad is this? Honestly.”

She poked her head up from under her desk. “This idea?”

“The damage to Minerva,” I said. “I am well aware of how bad of an idea this attack is.”

She emerged fully and returned to her seat at the computers. Max worked in silence, accompanied by the steady clicking of her short fingernails against the keyboard, while she checked her systems. When she completed the survey, she pushed herself away from the desk and rubbed at her eyes and the bridge of her nose.

“It’s bad,” she said. “Like…bad. I’m trying to reassemble entire sectors of code that have just been destroyed. Other parts were deleted entirely and I’m almost positive that a good portion of what’s still there was corrupted or fundamentally altered.”

“So Minerva can’t be trusted anymore?”

She shook her head. “We’d have to triple-check any information Minerva turned up and, even then, there still might not be a way to be absolutely certain we weren’t being misled.”

I squeezed my eyes shut and pinched the bridge of my nose until it hurt. “Can it be fixed?”

“I don’t even know how it was supposed to work in the first place,” Max said. “How am I supposed to put a puzzle back together if I’m missing pieces and I never knew what the puzzle is supposed to look like when it’s complete?”

Instead of answering that hypothetical, I stalked away from Max and her computers. When I’d gone a safe distance, I balled my hands into tight fists by my side and fought down a frustrated scream. Of course things had found a way to get even worse. The only weapon we’d been able to retrieve so far and we’d accidentally rendered it useless and unreliable.

I counted to thirty in my head and, when the mounting emotion refused to subside, continued counting until I reached sixty. Then, eighty. At one hundred and twenty seconds, I willed my hands to relax. It was difficult, but I managed it. Then, I walked back over to where Max waited.

She’d pushed herself away from the computers and sat with her face buried in her hands. As I approached, she looked up and I caught a glint of panicked fear in her eyes. “What do we do?”

Give up, a part of me thought. Regroup, come up with a better plan. You can’t save them if you don’t save yourself first.

“We have to keep going,” I said out loud. That tiny, scared voice in my head wailed in protest and I ignored it. “You can still go through Barrett’s location data and provide a list of spaces where he might be holed up. With your dad’s help, we can narrow that down even more to places in the underground that they could fortify.”

“And then what?” Max asked. “We go in blind?”

“Minerva couldn’t get us any information about this that we couldn’t get for ourselves. If Barrett’s running a security system, we’ll just have to take it from him in real time. If he isn’t, then a super-powered program wouldn’t have helped us.”

“But the Magi…”

“We can’t worry about them now,” I said, both to Max and to my own doubts. “Whatever happens with them is going to happen. Besides, if we can get my friends back before Barrett hands them over to the Magi, we’ll have space to figure out what our next move should be.”

I didn’t point out that Barrett personally knew my name. Even if we got Devlin, Michel, and Mila away from him, there was nothing stopping him from picking up the phone and telling the Magi everything he’d learned. It wasn’t as though they’d hesitate to kidnap us on the off-chance that we might know something. They’d already gotten their hooks into my sister and my sister-in-law, so my family connections wouldn’t stop them. And the other members of my team wouldn’t even have that thin layer of protection.

If we couldn’t save my team, take down Barrett, and get the necessary leverage to expose the Magi, all at the same time…but I couldn’t think about that. I wouldn’t allow myself to think about that. I could only deal with one problem at a time.

Max seemed even less sure about proceeding than I felt, which made me momentarily concerned that she might abandon the arcade and all of her computers in a spontaneous dash for freedom. She caught my eyes and must have seen that fear reflected in my gaze.

“I can do that,” she said. It had the ring of a self-affirmation. “I can do that.”

She pushed herself back to the computers, minimized the blank screen where Minerva had been displayed, and went back to work. I left her to it and returned to a space deeper in the arcade, where I could be alone for a few moments.

There were six new emails in my inbox, collected from accounts I’d abandoned years ago and subsequently forgotten about. All of those messages had similar subject lines – “Urgent,” “Read Immediately,” “Priority Message” – and came from burner accounts with names that read like alphanumeric soup. I didn’t open any of them. One email from the Lady was enough, when I was already feeling sick from all of the doubt and fear mixing together in the pit of my stomach. She was just another concern that I didn’t have room for.

Save your friends. Take down Barrett. Stop the Magi. Appease the Lady.

I couldn’t imagine she’d be happy to learn that I’d put her at the end of that list.

Chapter 187

The Mouse might have been obsessive, needlessly secretive, dangerous to everyone who’d worked with him, and potentially psychotic. But no one could ever say that he hadn’t been thorough.

While all of the information hadn’t yet been decrypted and reassembled, the store of knowledge Frizzle had managed to reproduce in readable form was substantial. Most of the documents and spreadsheets detailed the operations of at least two dozen shell companies in different countries around the world. Employee rosters, lists of board members, financial disclosure forms…everything was neatly organized and searchable in his files. Also, after only a cursory glance, I could tell that nearly everything written on the screen was falsified. The numbers were too regular, the employee names were too generic, and the company’s websites – also displayed and dissected in appalling detail – showed traffic patterns that aligned with bots, instead of real human beings.

There were also dozens, maybe hundreds, of dead end email addresses and fake names. The Mouse must have spent years running down every possible lead, cataloging every Underworld rumor, to collect so many identities. Each name was accompanied by a short document explaining the process by which the Mouse verified individual details or disproved them. Several of the dossiers detailed schemes I was familiar with, but with new applications that I hadn’t personally considered. A few of them were actually quite brilliant.

A square jawed businessman in a boxy business suit did have extramarital affairs, but the private bank account he operated under an assumed name was routed straight through to a Taiwanese adoption agency, not to a secret child’s trust fund. A pair of women were sisters, but weren’t actually twins; once, they’d been triplets, but the third sister had been neatly excised from every official record, at exactly the same time as their father was given a promotion and an absurd raise at his investment firm…none of whom actually existed, except for the investment firm. Which was just another shell company. And so on and so on; the byzantine structure disguised money laundering on a grand scale by tying it into so many notes that anyone seeking to unravel the various streams of income would go mad before they reached any substantial conclusions.

I noticed, with a weird feeling of…pride?…that Lord Fairfax and his illicit brother William were among the names the Mouse had collected. Apparently, he’d identified the people behind a large portion of London’s drug trade on his own. He’d also compiled a short collection of information on the Interpol agent who’d turned out to be planted by the Magi. And, confusingly, there was a grainy photo of Inspector Adlai mixed in with all the rest, without anything written to elaborate as to why the Mouse had included him with all the others.

The most important thing in the Mouse’s digital trove weren’t the clues and breadcrumbs he’d managed to assemble in his own, one-man pursuit of the Magi. A single folder, titled “Who We Were,” was stored in an invisible folder, inside of another invisible folder, partitioned away from the main drives and password protected. Frizzle used her root access to bypass the password protection and opened the folder while Max and I crowded around her to get a better look at the screen.

The Mouse had chronicled, with painstaking care and diligence, the story of his life inside that folder. Pictures of him as a child, with four other children nearby, under the watchful eye of a stern father-figure of a man. Letters scanned, so as to maintain the accuracy of the childish handwriting, or transcribed with appropriate footnotes to remind himself of small details for later. One file contained a timeline of jobs he’d undertaken in his youth, complete with a nearly minute-by-minute breakdown of the roles each of the other children had taken, what they’d accomplished, how they could improve in the future. At some point, the five children became two, instead, and the next documents outlined the struggles he’d faced acclimating to his new normal.

He’d taken on the Caelum identity during those years, to give himself a name that wasn’t tied to his backstory. And he’d targeted other hackers for their resources and information, not of any personal malice. The people he hurt during his rampage had simply been collateral damage.

There was a particularly large document that went through every whisper he’d heard and researched regarding, according to the file, “a man who may or may not be accompanied by a group of children.” I had Frizzle print out a copy for me to read and went through the story, line-by-line, to allow myself the time to really process what I was reading. When I finished, I read it again, and allowed the new information to settle into my brain.

When I finished my second read-through, I sat quietly for a few long seconds. The rest of the room had received copies of the most relevant pieces of information and, notably, they were silent also. The Texan was the one who spoke first.

“I heard stories about something like this,” he said, to no one in particular. “Couldn’t ever find out for sure and, eventually, I stopped hearing folks talking about it. Just assumed it was one of those rumors.”

“Rumors like the Magi?” I asked.

He shrugged and held his papers in front of his face. “If you were in my boots, would you have believed something like this?”

I didn’t have an answer for that. Or, at least I didn’t have one that I wanted to share. I’d seen and done so many insane things since taking up with the Lady. Fairfax, in London. The Urchins, in Morocco. This job, in Dallas. The plausible and realistic had long since given way to the harsh, unbelievable truth.

“What does this tell us?” Kira asked. “How can we use this to hurt the man who took your friends?”

I swallowed and cleared my throat before answering. “What the Mouse compiled is almost certainly the most complete database of searchable information about the Magi that has ever existed, in any form. I’m not even sure their own records are as detailed. Somewhere in here, there’s some link or clue that could lead us right to them. I just know it.”

“But does that help us now? Or will your former friend simply tell our enemies who we are and wait for them to kill us all and be done with it?”

I shook my head. “The financial information doesn’t help us, no. But the personal information? With this, we know more about Barrett – or Jesse, whatever – than we knew before. With this, at least we actually know who and what we’re up against?”

“And that is?” Max asked.

I was surprised to hear the question from her, before I remembered that her experience with thieves and criminals was largely academic. Her interest lay in uncovering people’s secrets, not in learning how those secrets affected them. It wasn’t my area of expertise, either, but I had no choice but to try and emulate Devlin anyway.

“Barrett is not who he pretends to be,” Kira said. He stood upright for a moment, massaging his knuckles as he ruminated. “The person that you met is an act.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

“He was a child when he met the man who raised him. Then, he was a child working for people who he did not ever meet or know.”

I picked up on the thread. “And now, he’s still on someone’s leash.”

Kira nodded. “Yes. He is pretending to be his own man, but that is not the truth.”

“Explain?” Adele asked. “I don’t understand anything you two are talking about.”

“Barrett’s entire personality is…well, it’s not wholly constructed, but it’s exaggerated for effect. Except for a few years in the middle, his entire life has basically been controlled by unreachable, distant parental figures. He never really grew up, because he’s never really been able to make his own decisions.”

“In order to have some agency in his life,” Kira said, “he acts out in small ways that allow him to feel in control of his surroundings.”

“Like the burglaries?” CJ asked.

“Not entirely those,” I said, “because he might have done those on the Magi’s orders. But the business cards? The Hollywood-esque affectation as a cat burglar extraordinaire? Those are all him, magnified in a way that he thinks will make people think he’s acting of his own volition.”

“Risks getting attention that way, though,” the Texan said. “Can’t imagine his bosses would be happy about that.”

“He’s good at what he does.” I held up a printed picture of an antique ruby necklace Barrett had pilfered some years back. “He should be, since he’s been training to do this since he was a child. So the Magi allow him a little bit of leeway to make a spectacle of himself, since that actually makes him even more predictable for their goals.”

“Besides,” Max added, “it’s not like he actually knew anything about who they really were. He’s using an assumed name he’s a professional thief who’s been publicly tied to all sorts of high stakes break-ins. He’d go down for the crimes and that’d be the end of it.”

Akumi tapped the tip of her knife against the table briefly, then nodded. “Okay. What else?”

I rolled my shoulders and grew a little warmer with the topic. “If he hands over my friends to the Magi, it will easily be the most important thing he’s ever done for them. Definitely the most substantial. He thinks that they’ll let him off contract or off the leash if he does that…but, no, that doesn’t make sense, does it?”

“Why do you say that?” The Texan asked.

“Because he doesn’t want freedom,” I said and knew, instantly, that I was on the right track. “He thinks he does, but that’s only because he’s never had it. He’s only had the chance to make his own decisions – really make his own decisions, not just stylize what other people told him to do – and he spent that entire time being ruled by the idea of someone.”

“His…father?” CJ frowned, shook his head, and then continued. “That’s not right. But the man who raised him and the other children. That’s who he was fixated on when it was just the two of them.”

“And the…Mouse…wanted revenge,” Akumi said. Kira allowed himself a tiny smile at his sister’s hesitation with the name. “Neither man was able to move beyond his past. They allowed their memories to control them.”

“And you would’ve done what, exactly?” The Texan asked. “Pretty sure we can all agree that it’s real easy to talk about letting go of your past. It’s just a mite hard to actually do it.”

Akumi’s hand rested briefly on her chest, just above where the circular medallion would have been, and said nothing.

I took the opportunity to regain everyone’s attention. “What else does he want, if not freedom?”

“He wants to be right,” Frizzle said.

She’d been quiet for most of the meeting. I’d assumed that she’d continued working with her network of students to crack what remained of the Mouse’s secrets but, when I glanced down at the screen, I saw that most of the messages were passing between distant parties. She’d simply been listening to our discussion.

“He wants to know that he didn’t do anything wrong,” Frizzle clarified, when no one spoke into the silence after her first sentence. “It wasn’t a family, but that group of children and the man who raised them was the closest thing he ever had to a family. Then, the man sold him over to the Magi. The Magi set up his friends to be gunned down. And his only remaining friend – really, the last link he had to his childhood – betrayed him.”

“I wouldn’t say he betrayed Barrett,” I said. Max shot me a look and I held up both hands immediately. “I’m not defending the Mouse, here. But I’m just saying that the Mouse didn’t actually betray him. Barrett just thinks that he did.”

“And you said he killed his friend?” CJ asked.

I nodded. “Walked into the room and shot him before I could react.”

CJ pursed his lips. “He didn’t say anything to him before he pulled the trigger? Or wait for the Mouse to say something first?”

“Nothing. Why?”

Kira and Akumi looked up sharply at the same instant. Kira spoke first. “This man is not a professional. Not in the way that we think of it. He is loud and dramatic. Everything that he does, he does to create a personality for himself.”

“Okay…”

“But he said nothing to his friend.” Kira crossed his arms and began to pace. “What did he say after?”

“He was upset,” I admitted. “But he got over it. He just used me as kind of a sounding board, trying to convince himself that…”

I trailed off as I thought back to that conversation. Barrett had been distraught, but he’d only needed to convince himself that he’d done the right thing. He’d talked himself into believing that there hadn’t been any other choice.

“He just needed to convince himself,” I finished, “that he was right. Okay. Frizzle, you might be onto something.”

“So, the man is not used to pulling the trigger.” The Texan ran a hand through his dark hair in frustration. “What do we do with that?”

“He can be fooled,” Kira said.

“As long as he is the one lying to himself,” Akumi finished.

“He thought that he wouldn’t be bothered by killing the Mouse, but he was profoundly shaken.” I pointed at a document file, which contained a transcription of the final meeting between the Barrett I knew and the Barrett who’d raised him.

“He thought that he would be be able to kill his father figure. But, when the moment came, he allowed someone else to do his work for him.”

“Alright, so.” I clapped my hands together. “We know that he isn’t used to operating without clear directives, even though he thinks that’s what he wants. He self-deludes on a grand scale, so he can be led into tricking himself. And he desperately needs to feel that the actions he’s taken so far have been justified by what other people have done, or what he feels they’ve done, to him. Am I missing anything?”

No one said anything for a few, very long seconds.

“I’ll say it, if no one else wants to,” the Texan said finally. He turned to me. “Seems to me that Barrett’s hanging a lot of this on you.”

“Didn’t we just cover this?” I asked. “It isn’t even about me. It’s about him and his need for validation.”

“Take it from me, a man who used to raise a whole lot of hell back in the day.” The Texan leaned forward, steepling his fingers. “For a lot of folk, there ain’t much of a difference between the two. Might be something we can do with that.”

I allowed that though to float around my head, mingling and fitting into place with all of the other ideas up there, before nodding. “If we know who we’re dealing with, and we know – generally – what he actually wants, there’s only two questions left to answer.”

“First,” Kira said, “how do we find out where he is?”

“And second,” Akumi finished, “how do we hurt him, once we know where he is hiding?”

The Twins might have been doing that weird echo thing on purpose, but I got the feeling they’d just been play-acting for so long that it had actually become a familiar, unconscious routine. That didn’t make it less unsettling, though.

“Akumi, CJ, and Kira: I’m going to leave the details of that second question in your hands. If we assume that Barrett’s working with Hunter, or that Hunter is actually employed by Barrett, we can also assume that he’s going to have guards in place.”

“We will be fine without the help of your friend,” Akumi said immediately.

“I’m not doubting your skills,” I said quickly. “But your expertise and experience is in subverting defenses, right? Finding a way to get past whoever is in your way?”

Begrudgingly, Akumi nodded. “And?”

“CJ sets up defenses. Guard patrols, camera routines, the works.” I patted him on the back. “If we have an educated guess how Barrett and Hunter are defending themselves, you’ll be better able to figure out how to deal with whatever we’re up against. Also, he’ll spot any logistical inconsistencies that we might miss.”

Akumi frowned and started to say something to her brother. He cut her off after a single syllable and responded in the same language. She practically pouted, but she lapsed back into silence.

“We are honored to accept your assistance,” Kira said, bowing his head slightly.

“You,” I said, pointing at the Texan. “I want you to start calling in favors, for immediate repayment. I need to know if any supplies have been purchased in the last few days, regular hires who haven’t been spotted in the Underworld in the near past, and any major areas that have been rented by, say, international organizations.”

“I’m on it.” He indicated the papers spread out across the tabletop game.

“And what about us?” Frizzle asked.

“I have an idea to figure out where he’s hiding now,” I said. “But I need you, Max, and Junkyard Girl over here to put some things together for me.”

“I have a name,” Junkyard Girl said.

“What are you thinking?” Max asked, ignoring the protest.

“I’m thinking,” I said, sighing, “that I’m going to have to go on a date.”

Chapter 186

I called Max from the car to let her know that CJ would be arriving with me, tacitly giving her permission to run his entire background before we arrived. With everything going on, it would have been ridiculous to forgo basic precautions again.

In turn, Max informed me that she’d already gone through the complete financial and personal history of every single person I’d meaningfully interacted with since I’d landed in Dallas. That violation of my privacy would have upset me, normally, but I had to admit to myself that it was only the smart thing to do.

She’d chosen an abandoned arcade for our meeting. At some point in the past, her father had been acquired the deeds for a few properties that were just off the beaten path and, after he hadn’t been able to find a use for them in his line of work, he’d given them to Max. When she wasn’t tinkering or casually perusing the secret messages of Texas’ rich and powerful people, Max occasionally swung by these other properties to update things or to clear her head. If she had to drop everything at a moment’s notice, these lesser safe houses didn’t have anything important enough to give her even the slightest hesitation.

Which, again: smart.

CJ pulled our car around to the back of the arcade. Before I could get out of the car, a garage door slid open. It took me a few seconds of searching to find the camera.

“Your, uh, friend’s expecting us?” He chuckled nervously. “This is a little ominous, isn’t it?”

“You have no idea.”

“Yeah, I’m getting that. So, I just…?”

I gestured. He shrugged and, without another word, drove into the garage. The door slid shut behind us.

We walked down a long hallway in complete silence. Small red lights, placed high on the ceiling or in hard-to-reach corners, framed our passing. I knew that, if she’d wanted to, Max could have easily made the cameras impossible to pick out. The fact that she hadn’t told me she wanted me to see them. Either because she was making a point or because there were other cameras placed elsewhere that she wanted me to miss.

Or both. It was probably both.

It was also far too late in the game for these power plays. I understood the impulse, though. Max wasn’t a thief, like I was. She avoided being directly targeted and spent an inordinate amount of effort to remain as invisible as possible. My war with the Magi had, without meaning to, destroyed the anonymity she tried so hard to maintain. With that stripped away, she was falling back on old habits.

When CJ and I entered the main area, I paused long enough to identify everyone present. Where they sat, how they carried themselves, where their eyes went…every detail told me something about where their heads were at. I lacked Devlin’s natural skill at reading people; I was going to have to get really good at it, right now, if I wanted to make any progress.

The Twins were, of course, positioned at the far end of the space with their backs facing the wall. Akumi wore a freshly pressed business suit – black pants, black jacket, white shirt with no tie- and was casually using something small and sharp to pick dirt from beneath her fingernails. Kira had on the same pristine white shirt, but he’d paired it with jeans, studded black boots, and his wolf fur jacket. He didn’t seem nervous, so much as aware. Even though his hands were jammed into his jacket pockets, and his posture seemed almost comically relaxed, his eyes took in everything and everyone. I didn’t miss the fact that, between the two of them, their field of vision covered the entire room.

Kira nodded curtly at me as I entered. Akumi’s eyes swept over me, not pausing for a millisecond, and then returned to her fingernails. They weren’t being openly antagonistic, which was nice. But they also weren’t necessarily on my side. Both of the Twins had arrived in Dallas for their own reasons, which had nothing to do with me or the Lady. Their mission did involve the Magi, though. There might be something useful there.

The Texan sat a deactivated table top game of some sort. He’d spread papers across the surface of the table and appeared to be engrossed in perusing those documents. His hat dangled precariously from the back of his chair, along with a comically large revolver in a holster. Every few moments, he glanced up from his work, sighed, then returned to reading. The girl from the junkyard was at the other end of the table, fidgeting and trying her best not to look in the direction of the Twins.

When he saw me, he attempted a cocky smile but even he seemed to realize that he was failing. Instead, he allowed the grin to fade, showing me just a glimpse of fear beneath the surface of his placid expression, and lowered his eyes back to the papers. Junkyard girl didn’t even pretend to be anything other than terrified. She almost rushed over to question me, but visibly stopped herself from leaving the table. Both of them were having very real, human reaction to the danger we were in. The Texan’s fear, however, wasn’t for himself, if the glances away from the papers were any indication.

And then there was Max. She’d set herself up in a corner with no fewer than three computer towers and six monitors. Ethernet cords ran from those towers into wall sockets like a giant, electric spider web. She didn’t look up from whatever she was working, but she did raise one hand to point at an empty area in the large space. One of the monitors in front of her must have been a camera feed, then.

While I couldn’t tell where her attention was focused specifically, the fact that she’d dedicated precious real estate to monitoring her own surroundings told me a lot about her psyche, too. But I’d had a read on her since our first meeting. This was just additional background.

Frizzle worked next to Max on her own laptop, coordinating emails and messages from her own network of students. She looked up momentarily, frowned at me, and started to say something. Max shushed her and pointed, again, for us to take a seat.

CJ and I sat and waited. It didn’t take long before she stood up and walked to a place near her father, but not at the same table. He began gathering up papers and, without needing to be told, the Twins moved closer to where we all were.

“Aright,” Max said, when everyone was seated or leaning, “you wanted a meeting. Start talking.”

I hadn’t been able to formulate everything I wanted to say, but I didn’t have any more time to strategize in my head. Between the Twins’ impatience to be acting and Junkyard Girl’s general terror, any hesitation could be seen as weakness. I couldn’t afford to be weak.

“In one way or another, everyone in this room has been involved with what’s been happening in Dallas these last few days,” I began. “Some of you more than others, obviously.”

“Obviously,” Akumi said. She’d started back up with her fingernails as soon she’d taken her seat. Her torso was angled slightly toward Junkyard Girl, which made the girl even more uncomfortable.

“Well, things are worse now,” I said. “I’d get into the details, but we’ve only got about twenty-four hours before those details are irrelevant, so I’m just going to skip to the main point. They have my friends now. They’re going to hurt them, maybe kill them, if I don’t get them back in the next twenty-four hours. And I’d like all of you to help with that.”

Akumi and Kira didn’t react. Max had already known what I wanted. Presumably, she’d filled her father in on my intentions, because he only nodded once, as if he were affirming something for himself. And Junkyard Girl just seemed confused.

“These people are dangerous?” Kira asked.

“Incredibly.”

“Then your friends are already dead. How would we help you with that, even if we wanted to?”

“They aren’t dead.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because they wouldn’t be dead unless they gave the Magi what they’re after,” I said. “That didn’t happen yet.”

“Not to put too fine a point on this,” the Texan drawled, “but the kind of folk you’re talking about got ways to make people talk. And your people have been gone for…what, a couple hours?”

“Give or take,” I admitted.

He spread his hands wide and lifted his shoulders a millimeter.

Unbidden, images of torture and suffering flashed through my mind. I pushed them as far back in my thoughts as possible. “They haven’t talked. Not yet, at least.”

“And how do you know this?” Akumi asked.

“Because I’m still alive,” I snapped. “Because we’re all still alive. If the Magi had the information they want, they’d have killed everyone in this room just to make sure there weren’t any loose ends.”

That line got a period of stunned silence. Even the Twins – well, Kira, but Akumi was impossible to read – seemed slightly taken aback.

“These are not the people you think they are. They aren’t…limited, in the same ways.”

Max cleared her throat. “Limited? What’s that supposed to mean?”

I directed my answer to the Twins. I’d have to get them on board or I wouldn’t have any muscle in the conflict to come. “I haven’t looked into your history, so I’ll just ask. You kill people professionally, right?”

They didn’t even look embarrassed. “When necessary,” Akumi said. “Or when ordered to.”

“But you keep it to the people in the lifestyle, people like us, right? Underworld denizens, who knew, basically, what we were getting into?”

She gave me a long look and didn’t answer the question.

I shifted tactics. “You try to keep the cops out of it, don’t you? At least make an effort to keep tings from spilling over into the civilian world, because that’s more trouble than it’s worth. Right?”

Akumi seemed content just to stare at me, but Kira actually cleared his throat and answered for both of them. “Yes. Essentially. Why?”

“Because these people don’t care about things like that. If anything, they want the attention. It shows how powerful they are to the whole world. If you wanted to kill someone, you’d…what, sneak into their hotel room or set up a sniper shot or whatever else it is that you do? The Magi will just firebomb the block.” I paused, just long enough to let that sink in. “The fact that we’re still alive means they aren’t coming for us. But they will come for us.”

“Why?” Junkyard Girl asked. “What did I do to get on the radar of anyone like that? I just fix cars?”

“You helped us,” I said. “And Barrett knows that you helped us. When he reports to his bosses, they’re not going to stop and wonder if we told you our entire master plan. They’ll just grab everyone, consequences be damned, and sort it all out later.”

“I’m…I’m not supposed to be involved with anything like this? I just…I keep my head down, I try not to get on anybody’s bad side. But now I’m being targeted? Just because I helped you one time?”

“I’m sorry,” I said sincerely. “I really am. We didn’t know this was going to happen, but it did, and all we can do now is work forward from here.”

“People have wanted to kill us before,” Akumi said. Behind her, Kira nodded his agreement. “They have failed. Why should I fear your enemies, when I do not fear my own?”

“My enemies are your enemies,” I said. “They already took your brother hostage because he happened to be in the wrong place. By this time tomorrow, both of you will be actual targets. You’re good, but that kind of attention is more than anyone can handle.”

“Like you and your team?”

“My team and I weren’t alone,” I countered. “And we went out of our way to avoid their actual attention.”

“My brother is with me. I will not be alone either.”

I bit back a sharp response and thought. Why was Akumi being so stubborn? She knew better. And neither of the Twins had ever displayed any particular pig-headed behavior in the past. This was obstruction for its own sake, which didn’t make any sense.

“If you didn’t want to listen,” I said, “you wouldn’t have come. So why did you come?”

Akumi and Kira exchanged a few sentences in hushed Japanese. I happened to look in the Texan’s direction, in time for him to raise a surprised eyebrow at the Twins. Of course, he spoke the language.

“We owe you a debt,” Kira said finally. Akumi went back to her nails, but her focus was clearly on her brother. “We have not forgotten. But this thing that you are asking for is not repayment. It is suicide.”

“It’s only suicide if -”

The Texan raised a hand to cut me off. “I’ve been doing some reading. Trying to make sense of all this, with what little information I’ve been able to get my hands on in the last couple of days. Sarah, I got to tell you that these people are nasty. You know that, don’t you? The kind of bad business they’ve got going on?”

I nodded. “Not everything, but I know about some of it.”

He turned slightly so that he could address the entire room. “Gun-running. Human trafficking. Drug and slave trade. Now, I can’t be sure that they’re running all of these operations…but I also can’t say for certain that they aren’t. I can’t say for certain. You understand how much that scares me?”

“If that scares you,” I said, “it should be even more frightening to think about the kind of force they’ll start using if they think it’s necessary.”

Fear flashed across Junkyard Girl’s face and I knew I’d said the wrong thing. She was on the verge of bolting already. I didn’t necessarily need her – if anything, her complete lack of experience could prove detrimental – but I kind of liked her. Mila kind of liked her, too. If we let her run off into the night, there was no telling what she might do or say to draw attention to herself.

“I have a family here,” she said. “My brothers and sisters don’t know anywhere else. You’re saying they’re in danger, too? That someone might be coming for them because of something that I did?”

I could have sugar-coated it. I wanted to. But tiptoeing around stark reality had never helped anyone in the history of the world. And avoiding uncomfortable truths, or simply looking away from things that upset me, had resulted in my team’s capture.

“Yes. Basically.”

She swallowed nervously, eyes widening involuntarily, and looked to Max. “Can you help? Maybe you can..get us out of town? Hide us somewhere until this is all over with?”

“I could do that,” Max said. I groaned internally. “’I’ve got enough fake names and backgrounds to cover everyone in this room. Hell, if Sarah’s guest wanted to disappear too, I could make that happen.”

The Texan nodded his agreement. But he didn’t say anything and he didn’t adjust his posture, so I assumed more was coming.

“The smartest thing we could do would be to vanish. I’m not a fighter. Sarah isn’t one, either. Even if we were, this isn’t the kind of fight you can win. We should run,” Max said. She sighed. “But we’d be running forever. We couldn’t ever be sure that they weren’t waiting right around the corner, about to pounce. Sarah’s right. If we’re going to do anything, we have to do it now.”

I was surprised to hear agreement from her, but I didn’t let that surprise show on my face. I looked at Akumi. She’d been the loudest voice in opposition. “If you run, you will always be running. There’s only one thing that we can do to stop that from happening.”

She glanced up. “And that is?”

“Hit them first,” I said. “And hit them hard.”

Akumi exchanged a look with Kira. He shrugged one shoulder before reaching into his shirt to remove a necklace with a small, circular item on it. Akumi produced a similar necklace. She read something in Kira’s eyes and nodded.

She turned back to me and showed me her teeth. “Tell us what you have in mind.”

One battle down, but I didn’t actually know what I wanted to do to stop Barrett and the Magi. Frizzle, mercifully, saved me from having to create an answer on the fly.

“About that,” Frizzle called from the nest of computers. “I think we’ve managed to reassemble most of the fragmented data, with the help of you ‘friend’ Minerva.”

I nodded and locked eyes with Akumi. “Right now,” I said, “I want to see what the Mouse left for us to find. You in?”

Chapter 167

I could not, in fact, explain.

Even as I went over the particulars of the situation at the gala, I felt all of the crucial details slipping away. With the benefit of hindsight and without the additional drive provided by an adrenaline dump, it was easier to critically examine everything that had happened. While it had been unfolding in real time, it had seemed like my only option was to take action, to put myself in the line of fire, in order to keep the innocents from getting hurt in my place.

But that wasn’t really true, was it? Nothing I’d done had actually influenced Hunter’s actions. In the end, the kidnapper had only left when Devlin caused a suitably large distraction and forced his hand. As soon as the cops knew something was going on inside the gala, there’d been no other option for Hunter but a hasty retreat. Now that I had that knowledge, I could have called for that distraction at practically any point. If I’d acted quickly enough, my father not have been injured. I wouldn’t have needed to take myself hostage at the last minute, daring Hunter to make a move and bluffing him with my life on the line.

Devlin listened and waited as I explained, then gestured for me to step into a side room, away from Mila, Barrett, and the others. Tension was obvious in his shoulders and his arms, but he held himself together until we were more or less alone.

Then, he whirled on me and attacked the story’s inconsistencies and my own bad choices with a ferocious will. “You tried to engage them? To play them?”

“Devlin, I called you. You had to know I was trying something.”

“I thought that you didn’t have any other options,” Devlin said. “I thought that you’d been forced into that position, not that you’d literally volunteered for it!”

“You know, you weren’t in the room.” My protest sounded flimsy to my own ears, so I could only imagine how weak it sounded to him. “I did what I thought was best, with the information I had at my disposal.”

Devlin pinched the bridge of his nose and started pacing. “What you thought was best? You thought the best move was to deliberately antagonize the man holding an entire ballroom hostage? The man who, let us not forget, is directly connected to a mass murder that we personally witnessed the aftermath of?”

“He didn’t do that,” I said lamely.

“Assuming that he’s telling the truth about all of that,” Devlin said, “and assuming that he isn’t just blowing smoke to minimize his own culpability, that doesn’t absolve him. It isn’t like he held off on the murder because of moral complaints, Sarah. He says that he didn’t do it because it was messy.”

The subtext was clear: if he thought he could get away with it, he would have.

“And it wouldn’t have been messy to shoot up a ballroom filled with some of the richest and most powerful people in Dallas?”

The words formed in my head and made their way past my lips before my conscious mind had a chance to consider them. Devlin and I both heard that sentence at the same time, basically, and I had a split second to realize that bringing up my familial wealth and power might not be the best mood with arguing with Devlin.

He went completely still and closed his eyes for several seconds. When he spoke again, his voice was dangerously low. “You think that your money makes you…I don’t know, invincible?”

“It’s my family’s money, not mine,” I said immediately, then winced. I hadn’t meant to offer that as a rebuttal, but the response was an automatic thing.

“So it’s your family that’s supposed to protect you when these kinds of things happen?”

“Dev, I-”

He held up a hand, eyes still squeezed shut. “You were in there with barely any support. What little support you did have, you sent away. Did you think about what would have happened if something had happened to Mila? What would you have done, Sarah?”

I had faith in Mila’s ability to handle herself. If something had magically happened to take her out of commission, I didn’t believe for an instant that she’d go down without making a lot of noise. But I had a firm grip on my wayward mind now and I kept myself from saying anything out loud. Devlin hadn’t gone quiet because he’d calmed down. He’d gone quiet because, subconsciously, he wanted a long vocal runway to get up to speed. Interrupting him now would just reset the timer on the metaphorical time bomb.

“He would have killed you, Sarah. But he wouldn’t have done it immediately. If Hunter had known – if he had even suspected – that you knew the things you know, he would’ve taken you and your family with him when he ran. And he would have gotten those secrets out of you. He would have found a way to make you talk and, when he got everything you have to give, he would have killed you. And, facing that kind of threat, you decided that your best move was to send your only protection somewhere else?”

But it was my sister. The thought came fully formed into my head, poised and ready for me for throw back in my defense. I bit down on my bottom lip to make sure that sentiment didn’t sneak out on its own volition.

I knew that I’d made mistakes, but there also hadn’t been very many choices available. With the information available to me, at that point, my only real choice was to act and hope for the best. It was the kind of risk I’d spent my entire professional career avoiding, but working at range wouldn’t have been an option, even if the Mouse wasn’t laying siege to my digital network. Still, I’d tried to minimize my own exposure – to a certain extent – and I’d effectively outsourced the most dangerous aspects to the ones trained in those fields: Mila, primarily, with some effective assistance from Barrett.

Devlin’s volume had been steadily rising. That was familiar enough; he and I had argued often enough that I knew the rhythms of his temper. It turned bitter, unexpectedly, and the sudden shift in tone jarred me like a wrong musical note.

“I guess he was there with you, though,” Devlin practically spat out. “So you probably felt perfectly safe, no matter what else was going on.”

I stared at him for several seconds, mouth slightly agape as I processed that. It was like he’d pulled the thought out of my mind. His words made sense – I understand their meaning and the implication just fine – but my mind refused to move past them.

“Are you serious right now?” My own voice sounded practically frigid, like someone else was speaking through me. “Are you seriously making this about that? Now? With everything we’ve got to deal with?”

To his credit, the change in Devlin’s expression told me that he knew he’d gone too far. He opened his mouth to say something, paused to reconsider, then spoke anyway. “That isn’t what I meant, Sarah, you know-”

“No, actually, I don’t think I do know, Devlin. Why don’t you explain it to me? Please, tell me what’s really bothering you.”

I don’t know what I would have done if he’d actually offered a defense or attempted further explanation. He kept his mouth shut though and shifted his weight slightly. I realized after a moment that he was bracing himself for my counterattack.

“Barrett,” I said, stressing his name for effect, “doesn’t have any reason to be here, dealing with this shit alongside us. But things got bad at the gala and he was there, so I don’t know what else you thought I was going to do. Should I have turned down his help because his presence pricks your ego? Would that have been better for you?”

“You had Mila with you,” Devlin said. He sounded and appeared to be chastened, but he also wasn’t backing down. “You’re right, things got bad. You didn’t know how bad they could have gotten, either. So why would you escalate things like that?”

“It sure as hell wasn’t because Barrett was in the same room,” I snapped back. “What would you have done, in that same situation? Would you have teamed up with Mila to run away, leaving everyone else in that room to deal with a pack of pissed off kidnappers and hirelings?”

“I…I don’t know, Sarah, but that’s not what I’m saying.”

“What are you saying, then?”

“You don’t know what you’re doing!” A burst of emotion filled his voice with agency and heat, breaking through the subdued tone he’d lapsed into. “Not in the field, not like that. It’s dangerous, it’s stupid, and you’ve been doing it more and more lately.”

“Stupid?” I repeated. “This is exactly the sort of thing you do. Is it stupid when you do it?”

He ran a hand through his hair before responding. “Of course, Sarah! It’s the stupidest thing in the world! I’m better at throwing a punch now than I’ve ever been, but the people we’re going up against are carrying guns and they’re playing for keeps. Every single time I go into the field, I’m putting my life on the line. And for what?”

“Because, if you don’t, the Lady’s going to stop protecting us and we’ll have to deal with the Magi directly?”

“I do all of that – put myself in harm’s way, face down gunmen, take these impossibly stupid risks – so that you don’t have to. God, how do you not know that?”

He and I locked eyes, backs straight and chins jutting toward each other. The fact that Devlin would allow his jealousy to interfere with his thinking wasn’t just out of character, it was actively insulting.

“I don’t need you to protect me from my own choices,” I said. “I’m a big girl, Devlin, and I’ve been playing in the big leagues for a long time.”

“Not like this, you haven’t,” he retorted.

“This isn’t about the gala and you know it.”

I didn’t mean to say that out loud, but it slipped out anyway. The air around us seemed to still and settle, the tension in the room growing sharper and more dense at the same time. Devlin eyes narrowed briefly, intensely, and then he looked away.

“It’s my name on the line here,” I said, lowering my voice but cranking up the intensity. “My family who’s going to be in danger if this falls apart. I will do whatever I have to make sure that they’re safe. If that means I have to work with someone I don’t like to make sure that the people I care about don’t find themselves facing another group of kidnappers, I will do it with a smile. And if I can do it, you sure as shit can get over your jealousy and keep your eye on the prize.”

Devlin didn’t say anything for several very long seconds. When he finally did speak, it sounded like the life had drained out of him. “I’m sorry, Sarah. I…I get it. Okay.”

I hadn’t realized that I’d clenched my fists. Gradually, I became aware of them again and of the sharp pains caused by my fingernails digging into my palm. I forced myself to relax and, thankfully, didn’t feel any blood from the grooves I’d been steadily gouging into my own skin.

Devlin looked like I’d slapped him across the face. A part of me – a large part, in all honesty – wanted to go to him, to comfort him, to reassure him, or…other things. I wasn’t sure what. But the rest of me was still furious and that anger was only being fed by the remaining dregs of adrenaline that hadn’t quite left my system before the argument started. I couldn’t make myself let go of that anger, but I didn’t want to kick Devlin when he was down.

Instead, I spun on my heel and stalked out of the back room. I allowed the door to slam shut behind me as I returned to the main area.

The Texan was pretending to read something on his phone. He wasn’t trying very hard to look innocent, though. At some point, Michel had returned and he’d brought the Twins with him. Both Akumi and Kira seemed completely uninterested in anything except for a hushed conversation between the two of them in a language that sounded reminscent of Japanese, but wasn’t exactly the same. I couldn’t decipher what they were saying, whatever language they were using

Mila had taken over a side table and populated it entirely with different weapons and varying pieces of her gear. There were knives, a handgun I hadn’t known about, and various clips of ammunition. She was about halfway down the line of equipment. As I watched, she checked each piece thoroughly for damage or rust, wiped it down for prints, and then carefully returned it to its sheath or holster or secret pocket. Her attention appeared to be entirely on the task, which meant that she was almost certainly eavesdropping. I knew that she could do that sort of thing without paying the slightest bit of conscious attention.

Max had put on a heavy duty pair of noise canceling headphones and hunched over a keyboard to focus on her work. From where I stood, I could make out the occasional line of code or series of Boolean operators, but the whole of it went by too fast for me to make much sense out of it. She didn’t turn around until Barrett, who sat on the desk to one side of her, bumped her with his knee and nodded in my direction.

She shifted the headphones so that one ear was unobstructed. I could see that she was thinking her way through what to say and I cut her off before she could even begin to find the words.

“Please tell me that you’ve found something useful.”

Max blinked twice, slowly, before she answered. “I borrowed some of the code you were using on your own bots,” she said, “and paired it with one of my own programs. There are more links to the chain of dummy accounts and shell companies, but I think we’re starting to go in circles.”

“Nothing about the Mouse?”

She shook her head. “Minerva is turning up some dead ends or hitting blocks that don’t make sense. I think you were right, and we might be able to learn something based on the things it won’t reveal, but it’s obviously a lot harder to figure things out by looking at the negative space.”

“So it’ll take more time?”

“It’ll take more time.”

I turned to Michel and the Twins. “You three know what we’re dealing with now and how we’re hoping to handle it?”

Akumi was the one who answered me. “You hope to find whoever is sending these people after you and the two of us?”

“I think I have a good idea about some of that,” I said. “Right now, I’m not as interested in who as I am in where.”

Akumi’s eyebrows lifted. “Why? I thought that you wanted information so that you could hit them where it hurts the most?”

My hands began to clench into fists again, without my conscious direction. “Right now,” I said, “I’m just interested in hitting someone. We can figure out to make it hurt later.”

Kira said something to Akumi in that language I didn’t understand. She replied, nodded once, and turned her attention back to me. “We will help, if you need us to.”

It wasn’t a question or a request. I understand, through implication, that she and her brother would either work with us or they’d work parallel to us, but they weren’t going to be put on the sidelines.

“Fine,” I said. “Anyone else have something to add?”

“Your sister,” Michel said softly. “She is at the hospital, with your parents.”

“According to her, “ Barrett said, “your father got lucky. He’ll have to spend a day or so being looked after, but they aren’t worried about anything going wrong. Or, I guess they aren’t any more worried than doctors usually are.”

“Is that all?” I asked.

Barrett shook his head. “She wants to talk to you. To us, really. She says that she has questions.”

I was tired, physically and emotionally. I still wanted to be sick somewhere private. My gown was still in one piece, thankfully, but panicked sweat and fear had soaked through the fabric to the point where it would probably require some sort of fabric-based wizardry to return it to any sort of usable condition.

The door to the backroom was still closed, too. Devlin hadn’t returned to join the conversation. And I was still angry.

“She’s not the only one,” I said to Barrett. “Come on. You’re driving.”

Chapter 130

The jolt of panic that shot through my body was expected. What surprised me, however, was the wave of intense focus that followed in its wake. In an instant, I thought through a half dozen different ways that the Mouse could have tracked down Max and considered twice as many implications. With my mind suddenly forced into overdrive, it only took me a fraction of a second to assess the situation and come up with a course of action.

“Is this place burned?” I asked Max.

She shook her head, hesitated, then shook it again. “I…I don’t think so. As soon as I spotted the surveillance on the old theatre, I got away from there. He’s probably still waiting for me there.”

“But you took precautions?” Devlin chimed in. He stepped past Max, so that he could peer through the secondhand computer shop’s front window. The passage of time had caked enough dirt and grime on the glass that they were borderline opaque, but that didn’t stop him from straining his eyes. “Just in case?”

“I ditched everything from the fair,” Max said, “except for the hard drive with your recording on it.”

Devlin turned to me. “Sarah?”

I understood the question without him having to speak it aloud. “It’s just hardware,” I responded. “It doesn’t transmit any data that could be tracked or identified. If no one tailed her here from the old theatre, they won’t be able to get to us through the hard drive.”

“Good.” He shifted his attention back to Max. “Can you still do whatever you needed to do from here?”

Max took several deep breaths to calm herself. It wasn’t until the Texan, taking long strides to cover the distance as quickly as possible, wrapped an arm around her that she seemed to settle slightly. “I have the parts here. I think. I don’t know for sure.”

“Whatever you need, we can get for you,” I said.

Mila helped Michel into a seated/reclined position against the wall before she spoke. “How did he find you, though? Did you make a mistake?”

“Caelum…it’s possible,” Max admitted, “but I don’t know how. He’d have to monitor everywhere I could possibly be, at any given moment, and then he’d still have to be incredibly lucky. We were on an unused frequency, but that kind of traffic wouldn’t look any different than a Bluetooth headset from a distance.”

I wasn’t quite as versed in communications technology – or, more specifically, intercepting and eavesdropping on communications – as Max, but I’d had more than enough in-the-field practice with my own homebrew earbuds. When we were on the job, a basic equation had to be balanced, with regards to our equipment. If we wanted to be absolute certain of our privacy, the construction and tuning of our earbuds would take time and money. Over the years, I was more or less certain that I could make our lines borderline untraceable…if I had the time to devote to that task.

When time wasn’t available, however, we were forced to choose expediency over efficiency. Bluetooth headsets had been the primary method, back during those first few fumbling jobs. They were easy to use, simple to acquire, but also incredibly easy to intercept. In a setting like the fair, however, Max and I had both hoped that no one would bother noticing a single transmission among the thousands or ten of thousands that would have been taking place all around us.

“From a distance?” Akumi asked. She was perched on the edge of a table, one leg dangling freely in front of her. Her brother leaned against the wall where Michel sat/lay. Even though they were both perfectly calm, I couldn’t quite suppress the feeling of unease their presence inspired in me.

“Without getting too technical,” I said, “we were in the middle of a crowd of people. Some of them are going to keep their Bluetooth on all of the time; some of them would be making phone calls or sending picture messages. In the thick of that, it’d be almost impossible to pinpoint a specific signal.”

As soon as the words left my mouth, I realized my mistake. We’d planned to stay at a safe distance…and then I’d decided to go into the theatre. And, when I’d gone in after Devlin and the rest, that had forced Max to come closer to the building as well.

I caught Max’ eyes and saw that she’d come to the same realization. She started to open her mouth but, before her lips could part more than a centimeter, I shook my head. No one was looking at me except for her, so the gesture went unnoticed. Max’ lips stayed slightly parted for a second or two and then she slowly closed them.

It could have been embarrassment or shame that kept me from speaking out. I didn’t know and I couldn’t really spare the time to plumb the depths of my emotions. Likewise, it could have been pure ego or a desire to avoid another chastisement from Devlin that pushed me to silence Max.

But I didn’t think so. There were too many people in the room, too many unknown variables with secrets all of their own. Giving away a potential weakness – or even acknowledging that a weakness had been identified – seemed like a bad idea. I could talk to the core members of my team about it later. But with the Twins and Barrett in the room…my gut instinct told me that the smart play was to keep quiet.

Instead of speaking out, Max cleared her throat dramatically and shrugged the Texan’s arm from around her shoulder. “What do we do now?”

Of the people in the room, about half – the Texan, both Akumi and Kira, and Michel – looked at Devlin. The remaining people – Mila, Barrett, and Max – turned their eyes to me. Devlin and I exchanged a look before, with a subtle incline of his head, he gestured for me to take the lead. It was the first interaction we’d had since the fair that hadn’t been tinged with bitterness or anger.

“Any equipment we used at the fair should be scrapped,” I said. “Even better, if we can find a way to rig up some of what’s remaining and send it far away, we might be able to buy ourselves some free time.”

“I can talk to Adel,” Mila said. “She could probably use the extra scrap metal. Michel can come with me.”

Michel still wasn’t speaking, but he did nod in agreement.

“You,” I said, pointing at the Texan, “do you still have any contacts in the area that you can reach out to? Discreetly?”

He frowned for a few seconds. “I might,” he drawled out, after an eternity. “Depends on what you want ’em to do, really.”

“Nothing dangerous,” I assured him. “But we’re still going to need someone to scout out that abandoned firing range the kidnapper mentioned.”

Akumi hopped off of the table, rolling her shoulders one at a time. “We can do that,” she said.

I blinked at her. So did Mila. “You can do…what, exactly?”

“The range,” Akumi clarified. “Kira and I will go there. Tomorrow night, after he has rested.”

I’d seen her in action. It would be stupid to turn down the assistance of a proven asset in the field. But Mila had warned us all already about Akumi’s sense of loyalty. While she wasn’t a fickle person, the hitwoman had a flexible sense of morality and conviction. She’d stand up for her brother against anyone who tried to hurt him. During her days in the Yakuza, I imagined that it was her twin, not any fidelity to the local crime lords, that kept her working productively and achieving results.

That was fine, when we both had the same goal: identify the kidnappers and retrieve Kira. But if things went sideways, how could I know that she wouldn’t cut ties and abandon us to our enemies?

“Why?” I asked.

“You…” Akumi paused and spoke quickly to Kira in Japanese. He responded in the same language, along with a few sweeping gestures that included all of us.

“I what?”

“You helped us,” Akumi said. “When you did not have to, you helped me to find my twin. For that, I owe you.”

“We owe you,” Kira added. He coughed and winced with the words.

“That’s not the only reason, though, is it?” Mila asked.

Akumi turned to her and her lips thinned to a vanishingly small line. “No,” she said. “I would speak with whoever ordered his kidnapping, as well. I would prefer to…discourage other people from trying this again.”

A chill ran up my spine at the implication. Something told me that her version of discouragement would leave the kidnapper’s boss incapable of retaliation. Which, ultimately, would probably serve as an awfully good object lesson to any suitably motivated party: if you want the Twins, you’d better kill the Twins. Both of them, at once. Leaving one free to act was just suicide.

“What will you do with them?” Akumi asked. She thumbed a finger over her shoulder, in the direction of the back storage room.

“Like I said, we’ll call the cops.” Satisfied that no one was peeking through the other side of the dirty windows, Devlin shrugged with one arm. “I’ll see if there’s anything else I can get out of them – now that one of their number has spilled the beans, the rest of them are probably in there arguing over who can give the best information – but I doubt it. Most of what they know, we already know.”

“And we don’t know anything they don’t know,” I said. “Leaving us mostly at square one, as far as this operation is concerned.”

“I wouldn’t say square one, exactly,” Barrett said. He’d stayed mostly quiet through the discussion, no doubt collecting information to be used at a later date. It was irritating, but not untenable. We hadn’t explicitly said who Max was, digitally speaking, and we hadn’t voiced our suspicion that the Mouse, Caelum, and the kidnapper’s boss were, in fact, all the same person. I really needed to be better about monitoring what I said and around whom I said it, though.

“Oh?” Devlin asked. Then, as if the question jogged his memory, his eyes widened slightly. “Oh.”

The Texan’s whole body swiveled from one man to the other, in a way that would’ve been funny in less dire circumstances. “What’s this now?”

In answer, Barrett reached into his pants pocket and, after a moment of rummaging, withdrew the black box he’d shown us after our encounter in the park.

“You’re just carrying that around with you,” Devlin asked, incredulously.

“Where else was I going to put it?” Barrett countered. “I can’t fence it, because I don’t know what it is; but it’s sure as shit worth something to somebody and I’m not about to let it get away from me, just because I haven’t figured out much I can get from it.”

Max stared at the black box, mouth open. I noticed her expression at the same time as the Texan, but I spoke before he could. “Max? Do you know what this is?”

“I…I think it’s a hard drive,” she said slowly.

“I’m not bad with computers,” Mila said, “but even I know that hard drives don’t look anything like that.”

“Not normal ones, no,” Max said. “But I was…researching different methods of transferring information a few months ago, trying to help Dad streamline his business. There were a few projects in the works, mostly overseas, but those trials were with tiny amounts of information.”

“How tiny?” I asked.

“A few megabytes, at the absolute most. It seemed like the projects I was…following…weren’t taking it seriously. Or they weren’t really interested in pushing the envelope. Either way, I thought everything had stalled out a few years ago.”

“But this box?”

Max held out a hand to Barrett. When he hesitated a second too long, I bumped him with my shoulder. Sighing, he let the box drop into Max’ outstretched palm. “If you’re keeping that,” he said, “I expect an invoice and appropriate payment. “

The Texan waved down his concern. His full attention was on Max. “So? You think it’s really what we’ve been looking for?”

“It could be,” she breathed in response. “I’d have to order an RFID transmitter to find out. There are a lot of tiny components I might be able to spoof the signal, as long as whoever built this wasn’t expecting that type of attack.”

Before Devlin could say anything, I took it upon myself to explain Max’ thoughts. “The hard drive is…like a locked door. We don’t have the key, so Max has to try and make one before we can figure out what’s on it..”

“If anything’s on it,” Barrett corrected.

I nodded. “Unless you’ve got any better ideas, though, I think you should go ahead and accept that you might not be getting back your newest trinket.”

Barrett heaved a sigh, but kept any complaints to himself.

“Is that hard?” Devlin asked. “Finding the right key?”

“Hard’s not the right word,” Max said. She’d found a legal pad and was busily jotting down the names of various parts and computer programs she might need. “It’s complicated and tricky and it might not work, but I wouldn’t say it’s hard. It’ll just take time to find the exact right frequency.”

“How much time?”

Max glanced up from her legal pad. “I don’t know that,” she said. “I can’t know that. I could land on the right combination tomorrow morning; I might not get the numbers to work correctly for another two weeks.”

Two weeks. The timer on my personal data – our jobs, our real names, in addition to a full dossier on every false identity we’d used over the years. Not just us, but contacts in the Underworld, former clients, banking information for anyone who’d wired us funds in payment. There was a real possibility that, with the data I’d accumulated over the years, the Mouse would be able to wreak untold havoc on anyone I’d ever come in contact with, both personally and professionally.

“They wanted that,” Devlin said. “Whoever hired the kidnappers gave Hunter specific orders to retrieve it. And since we think we know who might have behind those orders…”

He trailed off slowly, leaving enough space in the room for those of us in the know to fill in the blanks. If it was the Mouse, there might be something stored on the hard drive that he wanted or that he considered dangerous. If it was the Magi…we’d been able to savage their supply chain, from top to bottom, with the information we’d gotten in England. A cache of names and numbers stored on a hard drive could be incalculable.

“It’s a race, then,” I said. “Either we get something on the people sending kidnappers and gunmen after us…”

“Or they figure out who we actually are,” Mila finished.

No one said anything in response to that.

It felt like a full minute passed before Barrett cleared his throat, loudly and deliberately. “I’m playing catch up, so excuse me for asking the obvious question. But what happens if they find out who you are?”

The oppressive silence that fell over the room was answer enough.

Chapter 129

The back room of the computer shop was deathly silent for several excruciating beats, as Devlin slowly walked in a wide circle around the kidnappers.  Even blindfolded, they tried to follow the sound of his footsteps with their heads.  He didn’t speak until he was right behind them.

“We’re not without some understanding for your position,” Devlin said. He was still using the exaggerated accent he’d adopted for the meet.  “You took a job.  Probably taken a lot of jobs like it.  And you couldn’t have known in advance that it was going to go this way, right?  Odds are, you four and the rest who got away, were just expecting a quick grab followed by a payoff.  Business as usual.”

The men weren’t gagged, surprisingly, but they still chose not to answer.  Three of them stopped trying to turn around to face Devlin and sightlessly ahead instead.  The fourth kidnapper – the one who’d hesitated back at the theater – swallowed nervously and turned in the direction of his partners for a fraction of a second before he did the same as his cohorts.

Devlin noticed the infinitesimal moment of doubt and gave Akumi a slight nod before he started talking again.  “Here’s the problem, though.  You did take this job and, because you did, the four of you are in some pretty serious trouble now.  And honestly?  There’s not really a lot I can do to help you out of it.”

Akumi took a step closer to the men.  “No,” she said.  “There is not.” 

Except for speaking, she didn’t make any openly hostile moves and, to my eyes at least, her body language was calm and relaxed.  The kidnappers all flinched away from her anyway.

Devlin walked back in front of the kidnappers.  “Now hold on a second,” he said.  “Let’s think this through, shall we?”

She’d already stopped anyway, but the effect of his action gave off the impression that she was at least willing to respect his authority.  It was a subtly crafted bit of showmanship that in no way represented reality, but the kidnappers couldn’t know that.  When had Akumi and Devlin worked out this act?  They couldn’t have been at the computer shop long enough to come up with a whole plan.  Or was it purely instinct on their part?

Either way, it seemed to be working.

“Call the cops,” the fourth man said.  I’d pretended to be confident often enough to recognize false bravado in someone else’s voice.  “We can take the time.”

Devlin barked out a harsh laugh.  “The cops?  Us?”

“You know who we are,” Akumi said softly.  “You must have known that when you accepted this contract.  There will be no cops for you.”

The fourth man opened his mouth to say something else, but the kidnapper next to him elbowed him in the ribs.  Both men gasped in pain from the effort, but it served its purpose; the fourth man fell silent again.

“You don’t happen to know which of your friends hurt my friend, do you?” Devlin asked, abruptly changing his tone into something more conversational than adversarial.  “A friend of ours says he’ll be alright, given a few days to recover, but I just don’t know.  It wasn’t one of you, was it?”

I followed Devlin’s extended arm as he pointed to where Michel and Mila stood.  Michel looked bad – slumped posture, uneven breaths, and beads of sweat on his forehead from the simple exertion of standing – but he met their eyes with blazing intensity of his own.  For her part, Mila seemed content to lean against the wall of the back room, arms crossed under her breasts.  Her shoulder holsters were visible, even though she wasn’t carrying a gun at that exact moment. 

“No, probably not,” Devlin concluded.  “That’s probably for the best, honestly.  The ladies can get a bit confrontational about the kind of thing.  But I don’t have to tell you that, do I?”

The kidnapper farthest to Devlin’s left coughed and cleared his throat.  “What do you want?”

Accents weren’t my thing, but I could recognize that this particular kidnapper and the Texan sounded very similar to each other.  It wasn’t identical, but it was certainly near enough that I could safely assume this man was at least from the same state.

“Answers,” Devlin said immediately.  Then, he sighed and shrugged again.  “But you don’t have answers.  I mean, sure, maybe you could tell me the name of your boss…but that’s not going to be his real name and we all know it.  And he’s the one who made contact with the actual client, not you, so I don’t actually think there’s much you could do for me, even if you wanted to.”

“Then why did you bring us here?”

Devlin hooked a thumb over his shoulder at Akumi.  She’d lowered her empty hands to her side, fingers twitching as if they wanted to make a fist without her consent.

“The man you kidnapped from the boathouse was her brother,” Devlin said simply.  He didn’t need to clarify who she was.  “Which…maybe you knew that, maybe you didn’t.  But if I didn’t give her someone to hold responsible for hurting her family, she would very likely have taken out their anger on us and I’m not really in the mood to serve a stand-in for a beating someone else earned.”

“We didn’t know nothing about that,” the first man said.  “It wasn’t personal or anything.”

“It wasn’t personal for you,” Devlin clarified.  “Did you think it was personal, Akumi?”

She responded by cracking the knuckles on one hand, a finger at a time. 

“Yeah,” Devlin said.  “I think you’re going to have a tough time convincing her of that point.  But, by all means, feel free to try.”

I wasn’t sure how much of the back and forth between Devlin and Akumi was scripted or improvised.  I certainly wasn’t sure how serious either of them were.  He’d stop her before she killed anyone – I was reasonably confident in that – but would he even be able to stop her from assaulting them?  Could Mila?  How close did he think he could come to unleashing the sort of violence I’d seen at the theater without losing the ability to rein it back in again?

“What do you want?”  The first man repeated. 

Devlin tapped an index finger against his bottom lip and strolled casually in a small circle in front of the kidnappers, feigning deep thought on the matter.  “I honestly don’t know what you could do for us,” he said, almost as if to himself.

“We know things,” the fourth man said quickly.  “More than he thought we did.  We were listening.”

“More than who thought you did?”

The fourth man hesitated and, as if prompted, Akumi began to crack the knuckles on her other hand.  “He goes by Hunter,” he rushed out.

Devlin rolled his eyes.  “Of course he does.  And what’s your name?”

“Ben,” he said.

“Shut up, Ben!” The first man in line snapped.

Devlin delicately placed his foot in the center of Ben’s chest and pushed.  With his hands restrained and his body injured, the first man fell backwards without the ability to catch himself.  His shoulder hit the ground first, eliciting a sharp hiss of pain.

“I was talking to Ben,” Devlin said.  “Don’t be rude.”

He was still speaking calmly, as if he were discussing the weather or the specifics of some recipe.  I knew that he could be cold and clinical – some might have even described him as detached, depending on the situation – but I’d never seen Devlin like this.  Even if he was just playing a part, I couldn’t see the line where his character ended and Devlin began. 

“Now, Ben,” Devlin said, going down on one knee so that he was level with the kidnapper, “you were saying something about Hunter?”

“Th-this is my first job with him,” Ben stuttered.  “He’s not from these parts, he said, so he needed locals to make sure he knew how to get around.”

“How did he find you?”

“I don’t know how, he just…he just did.  Gave us all an advance of cash to make sure we’d show up when he needed us.”

“Wait,” Devlin said.  He held up a hand for emphasis.  “When did he do that?”

“A month ago?” Ben guessed.  “Maybe two months?”

That tracked with the timeline we’d been assuming.  The operation to grab the Texan and Max was too well-organized and funded to be a spur of the moment thing.  As was often the case, our presence and intervention must have thrown everything into disarray and the kidnappers, desperate to keep their timeline, went off book to deal with our unplanned presence.

Although…everything didn’t quite line up neatly.  They’d brought guns to the boathouse, but there must have been easier opportunities to grab the Texan before he’d even reached that location.  After all, he hadn’t even hired bodyguards until after Mila and I encountered him at the Speakeasy.  And the sheer number of men seemed overkill, if their intention was just to snatch the Texan and Max, throw them into the back of a van, and deliver them to a mysterious third party.

I furrowed my brow as I tried to put the pieces together in my head.  Either the kidnappers had planned for someone’s intervention and had, therefore, procured additional manpower to begin with; or they’d intended only to take the Texan and Max, but had waited to make their move for some reason.

Neither option made sense.  We were missing something.

“And if you’d gotten away with it?” Devlin pressed. “Where were you supposed to take us?”

“Hunter didn’t tell us that,” Ben said. “Thought that someone might decide to cut him out of the job.”

Devlin scoffed. “And I’m sure that you fine, upstanding professional kidnappers would never have thought to do something like that.” He waited for a beat or two before speaking again. “What else do you have? Because a fake name and a non-answer isn’t going to be enough to stop my friend from taking out her frustrations on you.”

While Ben had been the first to give up information, none of the other men seemed particularly eager to stop him from talking. If the men weren’t personally loyal to Hunter – and how could they be, if they’d only just met him within the month? – they had no reason to keep any pertinent information to themselves. Faced with the threat of Akumi’s personal attention, and lacking the motivation to protect their employer, they would talk. The fact that they weren’t talking, then, led me to believe that they honestly didn’t know much about Hunter’s master plan or who was really paying their bills.

“He didn’t call them,” Ben said, after an incredibly long stretch of silence. “The client, I mean. He never called them.”

“What do you mean?” Devlin asked.

“Hunter tried to keep it secret, but a few of the other guys, we…we started wondering if this was all just a set up. You know, get us to do the heavy lifting and then leave us behind or kill us after everything’s done. After he killed the guys who shot up the boathouse…”

“You figured you shouldn’t be loyal to him, if he wasn’t going to be loyal to you?” Devlin suggested.

Ben shook his head. “It wasn’t about loyalty. More like we realized that he was capable of it, and most of us didn’t think he had it in him.”

Something about that sentence confirmed one of Devlin’s ideas. He nodded softly to himself and his lips moved soundlessly. Then he shook it off and returned his attention to the restrained man. “So, you went snooping around for something to use against him, if it came to that. What’d you find?”

“After the boathouse thing, Hunter got us all to go dark for a while. There’s an old shooting range out in Wylie that shut down a few years ago. We were hiding out there while Hunter worked out how to get to you.”

I made a mental note to look into the shooting range, but I doubted anything useful would come up during a routine search. And, by the time either Max or I assembled the tools and equipment necessary for a more thorough investigation, Hunter would have long since scrubbed the building of anything that might lead to him. Still, there was always the odd chance that something useful might have been left behind.

“He kept this laptop with him,” Ben continued. “Bulky thing, but he wasn’t ever more than a few feet away from it. One night, he told us all to keep watch and went into the range’s office. I went off to see what he was doing.”

“And?” Devlin prompted.

“He was talking to someone. I couldn’t open the door without tipping him off, but he wasn’t being real quiet. The other person didn’t sound like a person…it was like a computer, you know?”

Digitizing one’s voice wasn’t uncommon, in our line of work. With effort, the process could be reversed, but it wasn’t generally worth the trouble. If someone wanted to hire Hunter anonymously, an VoIP connection and a digitizer would be more than enough to keep someone’s identity secret. It didn’t point to anyone in particular.

“What did they say, Ben?” Devlin asked.

“Whoever it was on the other end of the call wanted him to find something,” Ben said. “They said there was a chance that it might be here, in Texas, and that it was important to keep an eye out for it.”

Devlin’s voice lowered slightly, just a fraction, but the effect made him sound much more menacing. “Did the voice say exactly what it was?”

“Hunter asked, but they wouldn’t tell him,” Ben stammered out. “They said he didn’t need to worry about it but, when we, uh…”

“When you threw me in the back of a van,” Devlin finished, twirling his finger in the air for emphasis. “I know this part. Get to the things I haven’t already figured out.”

“When we had you in custody,” Ben continued, “Hunter was supposed to look for a black box. They said it’d be small enough that you could hide it on your body somewhere. And if you didn’t have it, then…”

My mind started to race. The black box…the black box that Barrett had stolen from Atlanta? We still didn’t know what the purpose of the box actually was, but I couldn’t connect the dots in my head. Someone had hired men to kidnap the Texan, presumably to get their hands on Max. But that same individual – or individuals, I supposed – had also wanted their hirelings to pursue a box that hadn’t even been in the same state?

I caught Barrett’s eyes and saw that he was trying to run the numbers himself. Devlin looked at me, then Barrett, and then focused his attention back on Ben. He didn’t turn away quick enough for me to miss the furious glint in his eyes.

“What else, Ben?”

“Nothing! That’s it! Hunter didn’t tell any of us about it, so I just figured…I just figured it might be a little extra bonus, is all. But then your friend hit us and…”

“And that’s all she wrote,” Devlin said. “I’m going to be honest with you, Ben. I don’t know that anything you said is going to be all that useful to me.”

Ben, and the other kidnappers who had remained silent thus far, flinched at the mere implication.

“But,” Devlin continued, after a dramatic pause, “I’m going to talk it over with my associates. Because I’m a man of my word and all that. If we decide it’s useful, maybe we will just turn you over to the cops.”

“You said you weren’t going to get them involved!”

“The only alternative is that I leave you to my friend’s tender mercies,” Devlin said. “Because we can’t have you guys coming after us again, now can we? So, while we’re talking this over, why don’t the four of you decide which outcome you’d prefer.”

He gestured for us to follow him back into the main area of the computer shop. The Texan was right on his heels and the rest of us came in pairs – Mila and Michel, Kira and Akumi, Barrett and myself. When we were a safe distance away from the back room, but not too close to the front entrance, Devlin seemed to deflate.

“We know more than we did,” he said, mostly to himself. “Even if we don’t exactly what we do know, now.”

Akumi stepped forward, intent on saying something, but her mouth snapped shut as the front entrance to the computer shop banged open. Both Akumi and Mila crouched, hands flashing to hidden weapons; only Mila relaxed slightly when we recognized Max, gasping for air.

“What is it?” I asked her. That pinprick of doubt, of uncertainty, had returned.

“I went back to the abandoned theater,” Max said, between gulps of air. “To get some things that would help me go through the audio files from the earbuds.”

“And?”

“Someone was following me,” Max said. “I think…I think, somehow, he knows who I am.”

Chapter 128

It was easier to deal with my parents than I would have expected. Virginia might have calmed the waters, after Barrett and my sudden departure, but that didn’t fully explain how accommodating Raymond and Elizabeth were. Ultimately, I decided to attribute their changed behavior to our earlier conversation. They knew that something was going on with me – less than Virginia, although she didn’t really as many details as she probably thought she did – and that knowledge, all on its own, seemed to be enough that they were content to give me a little more leeway.

Relatively speaking, of course. Even the most relaxed version of Elizabeth was still fairly high strung. She insisted on another dinner date, including both me and my fake husband, so that I could tell her more about my situation. I had no intention of doing that, but I agreed to the request, just so that we could head over to the secondhand computer shop posthaste.

Max, Devlin, and the Texan had taken the van and headed off to the meeting spot. Akumi and Kira would, presumably, steal someone’s car from the parking lot in order to facilitate their own trip. We could’ve ridden with them, but I wasn’t in the mood for anyone’s company at that exact moment. Even Barrett’s uncharacteristically silent presence grated against my nerves. I wanted to be alone to process what Devlin had said. But, since that wasn’t in the cards, I steeled myself to power through.

“Did you drive?” I asked Barrett.

“I rented a car,” he said. “Elizabeth wanted us to ride in together, though. I think she was hoping to catch you where we’re supposed to be staying, so she could guilt you into coming with us.”

“Lucky her. I just happened to be here anyway.”

Barrett shrugged. “For a given value of lucky, I guess. So, uh…where are we headed?”

I remembered that Barrett had, mostly through circumstance, not actually been to the secondhand shop. In fact, he knew very little about the Texan or much of what had been going on in the city. How much he’d been able to overhear or piece together wasn’t immediately clear to me, though.

“There’s a shop,” I said. “I can give you directions until we get close. We should probably park the car a block or two away, though.”

“Just being cautious?” Barrett asked. “Or are you worried that someone might be following us?”

Until that moment, I actually hadn’t been considering that possibility. Now that he’d spoken the words out loud, however, I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that he was onto something. The kidnappers were being bundled up by Akumi; even if they gained the will to struggle against her, none of them had the skills or physical capacity to do much to her. Certainly not with Kira, wounded as he might have been, standing nearby. And I was also fairly certain that none of the groups walking past us recognized me.

Still, there was a needling sensation right at the back of my neck and no amount of internal rationalizing seemed able to get rid of it. Instead, I shrugged, and gestured for Barrett to lead us to his car.

The rental was an unremarkable sedan, khaki-colored and almost clinically boring. It was the kind of car an aging English teacher might drive to work, not the vehicle a high-flying cat burglar would pick for himself.

Barrett noticed me examining the car. He ran a head over his scalp, almost nervously, and chuckled. “I don’t normally find myself staying in the same town long enough to worry about being spotted,” he said. “So this is a new one for me.”

“Life is all about overcoming challenges,” I replied. It took a minor exertion for me to give him a slight smile. “Come on, let’s get on the road.”

We drove through Dallas at a respectable, law-abiding speed, and followed every rule of the road with exacting detail. The idea that someone might have tailed us lingered at the edge of my thoughts the entire way. In the distant past, Devlin and I had taken a job in Prague that had necessitated extended surveillance of a target. While we’d been casing the target, he’d spent hours lecturing about all the ways one could spot a tail, how to follow someone without being seen, and about a half dozen different techniques for losing someone without seeming to have noticed them.

I ran through all of those and put each one into practice, as best as I could. I noticed no suspicious cars and recognized no familiar faces appearing in unlikely places. Anxiety and paranoia mixed and mingled into an nauseating feeling in my gut, but I couldn’t make myself relax.

“He was wrong, you know,” Barrett said. He didn’t look away from the road as he spoke.

“Wrong about what?”

“You. I mean, what you did. Even if he did have it under control – and I don’t think he actually did, but that’s not important – you couldn’t have known that. You did what you thought was right.”

Personal experience with Devlin’s inexplicable ability to get out of near-certain death traps gave me a slightly different perspective than Barrett. If my ex-husband said he knew what he was doing, it was just smarter to bet on him than against him. Even when he didn’t have an idea, or when he was playing it entirely by ear, he still always found a way out. Either the universe provided or he made the universe provide.

Or…well, at least he’d always survived in the past.

“You don’t understand,” I said quietly. My eyes stayed fixed on the rear view mirror.

“I don’t,” Barrett admitted. “I don’t do the whole team thing, for obvious reasons. But I do know that people aren’t supposed to leave their partners in trouble, no matter what conversations were had beforehand. Do you really think he would’ve hesitated to go in after you, if he thought you were in danger?”

I didn’t answer the question out loud, but my own thoughts spoke loud and clear inside of my head: of course not. To save me, Devlin would’ve walked over hot glass and blown the entire operation. I mean…he would’ve done that for any of us, really. But that selfless streak was heavily influenced by a nearly suicidal streak that had always worried and frustrated me. Since our conscription into the Lady’s service, it seemed he’d kept a tight leash on those tendencies. Did that mean, then, that I’d somehow picked them up in his place?

A shudder ran through me at that thought.

“If it had been me,” Barrett said, “in that situation, I wouldn’t have read you the riot act for doing it. That’s all I’m saying.”

“Would you have done it?” I asked. “If you had a teammate, I mean. And if you knew – or at least suspected – that something bad might happen to them. Would you have gone in to the theater?”

“Nope,” Barrett said immediately. The answer was so quick, so sharp, that it momentarily took me aback. He waited a few moments before elaborating. “But I’m not a good person. You, on the other hand, are.”

I scoffed. “Let’s not forget how we met.”

“You don’t follow the law. That makes you a criminal, but it doesn’t make you bad. Anyone who’s spent more than ten seconds around you would’ve known that you aren’t the type to stand by and let bad things happen to people.”

What might have been a glowing compliment to anyone who wasn’t a habitual lawbreaker came off instead as a gentle rebuke to me. Barrett might not have said it explicitly, but I could read between the lines: you’re too good for this work and that’s going to get you in trouble.

Well, I was already in trouble and my employment with the Lady had nothing to do with any sentimentality. No point trying to catch that had long since sailed away.

The rest of the drive passed by in silence. My vigil became less intense after a while and I settled into a rhythm of glancing at the rear and side mirrors every few minutes, just in case. Nothing abnormal popped out at me. He parked the car in an empty lot two blocks away from the used computer shop and we walked the rest of the way there. Barrett started patting himself down for a moment, which allowed me to get a few steps ahead of him.

The Texan stood on the curb, taking a long drag from a stubby cigarette, eyes closed in thought. When he removed the cigarette from his lips and opened his eyes, he looked directly at Barrett and me.

“Now that wasn’t the plan, was it?” the Texan asked.

“It worked, didn’t it?” I countered. Devlin might have been able to take shots at me, but I’d be damned if some nameless cowboy would do the same.

The Texan raised both hands in surrender and my eyes temporarily tracked the lazy, winding trail of smoke rising from the cigarette between his fingers. “Don’t think I’m complaining about it,” he said quickly. “I’ve been around for enough to know that nothing ever goes the way you think it will. Best you can do is figure it out in the end.”

“You were in the field?” I asked.

He smiled. “I’ve heard stories, I mean.”

I decided against following that line of thought. Instead, I stepped closer to him, leaving Barrett just a few steps behind me, and whispered quickly under my breath. “Who else is here?”

“The twins, with a few uncomfortable fellas all tied up. The driver, your bodyguard, and the other one…what does he even do?”

“What about Max?”

“Wanted to break down the equipment,” he said. “Why? Should she be here?”

Barrett knew nothing about Max: nothing about her connection to the Community, her connection to me…hell, he didn’t even know she existed. I wanted to keep some things secret as long as possible.

“If you get a chance, tell her to stay in the wind until we need her.”

The Texan, mercifully, didn’t waste any time asking questions. He nodded and then flicked his eyes up over my shoulder. I turned in time to see Barrett approaching, a lighter clenched in one hand.

“Mind if I borrow one of those?” Barrett asked the Texan. “I forgot mine in the car.”

With an expert, practiced flick of his wrist, the Texan both opened his pack of cigarettes and made one of them protrude slightly ahead of the others. Barrett whistled in appreciation before selecting the protruding cigarette and lighting it.

“So?” Barrett asked, after two or three drags. “What’s next?”

“Way I see it,” the Texan said, “we got a lot of unanswered questions to deal with.”

“Who are the kidnappers working for?” I suggested. “What did they want with you?”

“I wouldn’t mind knowing how they’re getting paid, either.” The Texan considered his pack of cigarettes and then decided against lighting another one. “Can learn a lot about a man with that.”

“If it’s electronic, I…know someone who might be able to follow the trail,” I said, quickly amending what I’d been thinking due to Barrett’s presence. “That might not lead anywhere, though. Anyone putting in the slightest amount of effort could make it…not impossible, but too difficult for it to be a plausible tactic. Or so I hear.”

“No such thing as bad intel,” the Texan said, touching a finger to the side of his nose. “Anything we can find about these fellas is something we need to find out about them.”

“Here’s something you guys seem to be overlooking,” Barrett said. He lowered his cigarette which, somehow, was almost halfway finished. “Did the kidnappers have any other jobs while they were in Dallas?”

I blinked at him.

“I mean, think about it,” Barrett said. “They weren’t the most highly trained team, so it’s not likely their financier went through the trouble of flying them over from overseas. But that wasn’t a group of garden variety local thugs, either.”

“What’re you saying, son?”

Barrett’s eye twitched at the last word, but he didn’t show any other reaction. “I’m saying that, if their employer found the best squad of kidnappers within the region, but didn’t want to just hire the best, it’s possible that they were after someone with knowledge or expertise that only a Texas native would have.”

“And why would he or she want that?” I asked.

“Because it’s easier to catch prey on the run if you know where they’re going to run to,” Barrett said.

The three of us stood there for a beat. If Barrett was right – if he was even close to right – that meant the kidnappers had planned on their remaining targets to run. It meant that any of the local corners where someone might hide to wait for the heat to die down could be compromised already. And, most frightening of all, it would mean that the kidnappers’ financier knew enough to expect us to keep some of our people in reserve.

The pinprick at the back of my neck grew stronger.

“Well, that’s ominous,” the Texan finally said.

“It’s just a theory,” Barrett replied. “But it does make sense.”

“Theories are one thing. Facts…now, facts are a whole different thing.”

Barrett flicked the rest of his cigarette into the street. “Let’s go get some facts then, shall we?”

The Texan opened the door into the computer shop. When Barrett and I were inside, he locked the door behind us. We walked through the building and into the back room. Most of the assorted computer odds and ends had been pushed to the side, clearing out a space for the four kidnappers.

They were awake, at least, although their pained expressions made it clear that they weren’t exactly happy about that development. Each of them was securely tied down with knotted ropes that linked their wrists and ankles, in addition to handcuffs for added effect.

Akumi and Devlin stood at one side of the room; Mila, Kira, and an obviously impaired Michel stood at the other. All four of them were facing the center of the room, intently focusing on the men. At the sound of the back room’s door closing, only Devlin glanced up. His eyes went to the Texan first; then, they met my gaze briefly before slowly, deliberately, sliding over to take in Barrett at my side.

I prepared myself for another scathing rebuke. None came. Instead, Devlin rolled his shoulders one at a time and blew out a long breath. When he spoke, it was with the voice I’d come to associate with his coldest, most ruthlessly focused persona.

“Well,” he said to the restrained kidnappers. “Now that we’re all here, I think it’s about time we get down to business, don’t you?”