Dark mission 04 - Sacrifice the Wicked

by Karina Cooper

  Kayleigh didn’t stand. As the friendliness cooled from her gaze, as chilly resolve settled under her skin like a mask, Parker didn’t look away.

  Her stare, direct and uncompromising, had been known to put even her toughest missionaries in a cold sweat.

  The Lauderdale girl held up well.

  But in the end, her gaze dropped to Parker’s desk. Flicked up again immediately as she rose, but Parker counted it a win. “Director—” Kayleigh paused. And then, quietly, “Parker. I’m only here to help.”

  “You can help by compiling a report on exactly what Sector Three is doing with my missionaries.”

  “They aren’t your missionaries.”

  Another finger of icy resentment snapped into place.

  No. Not all of them were, were they? Parker’s weight lifted off her hands. She rose to her full height, taller than her unwanted guest, especially in her black spiked heels. Her shoulders tensed under her suit jacket, but Parker’s voice didn’t raise. Didn’t ease above frigid calm. “You want to help?” She stabbed her index finger against the surface of her desk. “Get your people out of my sector.”

  When Kayleigh only studied her, Parker smiled in thin, red-lipped humor. She circled her gleaming wood desk, her heels clicking loudly as she strode to the door. “As I thought. Run back to your father and inform him that we’re Mission, Dr. Lauderdale. We look out for our own.”

  “Parker—”

  Parker yanked open the door. “That’s Director,” she cut in with arctic dismissal. Her voice lashed through the suddenly much more open space.

  Every head on the floor turned.

  “We will remain in charge of Domino, and we will catch the perpetrator. Your only job is to get your spies out of my teams. I trust that’s clear enough.” She watched as Kayleigh picked up her reader. Noted the set to the woman’s shoulders beneath her red blazer. She was angry.

  Probably a little humiliated.

  Good. Maybe it’d give her something to chew on. What was a little political suicide between rivals? Parker swallowed the tense ball of anxiety in her throat, meeting the woman’s gaze.

  “Very well, Director Adams.” The doctor hesitated outside the door. Turning, her full mouth tilted at a hard angle, she added, “I sincerely hope you don’t come to regret this.”

  “A threat, Doctor?”

  “No.” Kayleigh smiled. “In the interim, records show you’re behind on your medical ex—”

  Parker couldn’t help herself. With a flick of her wrist, the door swung shut. Slammed firmly into place, right in Kayleigh Lauderdale’s surprised face.

  It wasn’t enough. As anger streaked through her veins, sizzling hot, Parker stalked back to her desk. Sat in her custom-fitted chair.

  The nerve.

  She breathed in through her nose. Out, hard and angry, through her mouth.

  For that brat to pretend like her own predecessor hadn’t put Parker’s teams in jeopardy? Risked Parker’s missionaries like they weren’t anything but pawns in some greater political game?

  Her temper simmered.

  For the woman to make her little offer as if Sector Three weren’t sitting on some of the deepest, darkest secrets of the whole Church?

  Oxygen was key. Cool air. Long, slow breaths.

  This wouldn’t stand. It couldn’t. Parker didn’t have all the information. All she knew was that Sector Three forced Wayward Rose on her, on the Mission; forced Simon Wells on Parker. All in the name of what looked like a nasty cover-up.

  Her fists clenched on the smooth desk surface.

  Her agents worked hard. Lived dangerous lives. Every day, they hit the streets looking for signs of witchcraft, ready at a moment’s notice to take them down. Blood, bullets, fear, and pain. Her people understood the risks.

  Took on those risks to keep the city safe.

  Nobody would be allowed to drag them into danger. Nobody but her. Parker cleared every operation. Sector Three wouldn’t be allowed to change that.

  Not as long as she sat at this desk.

  Only now the truth was staring her in the face. Parker keyed in her password to the computer without looking at the screen. The password was twenty-two digits long, comprised of mixed-case letters, special characters, and numbers. All of her passwords, when a thumb lock wasn’t available, were different. And just as complex.

  Parker memorized everything.

  Within moments, a list of missionaries filled the screen.

  How many of them were still hers? How many of them could be trusted?

  That hard knot of tension bubbled into something sickly. Something heavy as lead and cold. All of her life, she’d dedicated herself to the cause. To the men and women who made the streets safe. Whether she’d been an information analyst or the Mission director, that dedication hadn’t changed.

  But had they changed around her?

  Unbelievable. The amount of damage done since Peterson’s betrayal would never be undone. Even if Parker could get to the bottom of Sector Three’s machinations, what would it prove?

  Bracing her elbows on the desk, Parker covered her face with both hands and allowed herself a brief moment of rest. But even as the darkness pressed in on her eyelids, her mind flicked through information, siphoned through the facts as she knew them.

  The Holy Order of St. Dominic ruled over all of New Seattle. Ruled, in fact, over much of the country—or what remained of the stable cities scattered across it. With power in the minimalistic federal government, it surprised no one that the Church maintained an active interest in the day-to-day affairs of the city the Order had rebuilt from the Old Sea-Trench up.

  The end result was a system of checks and balances that was listing too far to one side these days. The civic body took care of day-to-day business, the clerical stuff every city needed to run. The Holy Order’s Cathedral occupied one wing of the quad, providing holy communion for most of topside every Mass. It also served as the bishop’s seat of power.

  Bishop Applegate oversaw everything, from the secular to the ecclesiastical.

  Between them sat Sectors Three and Five. Research and Development and the Mission, respectively. For all intents and purposes, Sector Three’s clearance outstripped the Mission’s—Parker’s—but according to Church regulations, both directors remained on equal footing.

  Until now.

  Her first few petitions to the bishop had gone unanswered. Now, she wasn’t sure Applegate had even seen them. During her last debriefing, she’d spoken to a room full of advisors.

  And to Laurence Lauderdale, director of Sector Three.

  Parker had tried the usual channels. Now, with her missionaries’ lives on the line, she needed alternatives.

  Straightening, she unhooked her comm, flipped it open with a thumb, and keyed in Jonas Stone’s comm frequency by rote. Attaching the speaker to the shell of her ear, she waited.

  The line clicked over. “Uh . . . Great timing, Director.”

  Parker had stopped being surprised by the clarity of her lead tech analyst’s warm tenor. A few years and a set of living parents, and he could have become a fine singer for the culture feeds.

  Instead, he had to deal with her. “Operation Domino,” she said by way of greeting. She’d ease into the subject. “Talk to me.”

  “Oh.” The word was a sigh on the speaker, beset by a faint line of crackling static. “This sucks, ma’am,” he continued, as serious as she’d ever heard him. “We’ve got samples from the scene, hope to find something there. Every scene has come back negative.”

  “Of what?”

  “Anything helpful,” he replied dryly. “No fingerprints, no DNA aside from the dead hunter’s.”

  “What does Mr. Eckhart say?”

  The clatter of keys—as much a part of every call she’d ever had with him as his voice—halted for a moment. “Basically, ma’am? We’ve got no leads, no evidence, and nothing but speculation. It’s as bad as Ghostwatch.”

  “Timely lead in,” Parker said, frowning
. “Where are we there?”

  “About the same.” But irritation colored his voice. “Whoever this hacker is, they’re damn good.”

  Parker shook her head as she rose. “All our leads are frozen. This is not efficient, Mr. Stone.”

  “I know, I know.” A keyboard ruckus undercut his frustration. “Every time I put a tracer on this guy’s electronic footsteps, it leads to a dead end. It’s like he’s got something warning him every time I get close to his turf.”

  “A program?”

  “If so, he’d have to infect the entire city grid with markers. It’d be one fuck almighty of a program,” Jonas replied, then added quickly, “Er, sorry, ma’am.”

  Language was the least of her concerns. “Impossible?”

  “Impossible to hide,” he corrected. “It’s possible to make.”

  “But actually impossible to hide?”

  He hummed a thoughtful note. “Okay, really difficult. Even for me. To hide something like that, it’d be an extremely sophisticated piece of programming. It’d have to not just attach itself to city systems but disguise itself while it did it.”

  “Explain.”

  “Okay, say I’m a virus piggybacking on another system,” he said patiently. “The system is designed to sweep for anything out of the ordinary, like unapproved data or stagnant bits of code. So, I’d basically be sending out two parcels of data—a stream of encrypted communication, and a stream of junk data disguised as valid information to fool any seekers. The encrypted data would ride under that. Follow?”

  Parker let out a deep breath, perching on the edge of her desk. “So possible.”

  “Possible, and I’ll start looking for that,” he allowed, “but improbable.”

  She stared at the covered window, eyes narrowed. “I had a thought, Mr. Stone.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Someone is hunting missionaries,” she said evenly. “Someone is learning not only who they are but where they live, where they like to operate, where they are.”

  “Are you thinking the ghost is behind it?”

  “The thought had occurred to me.” But no, that’s not where she was going. “Follow me here. Ms. Long was murdered in the restroom of a lower street club. Although she was on duty at the time, Mr. Carver was not. He was murdered in his own home. Someone with intimate knowledge of the Mission has to be—”

  The frequency rattled, dissolving into static as Jonas’s sudden fit of coughing overwhelmed the mic.

  Parker’s eyebrow raised, her glance shifting to the comm unit on the desk. “Mr. Stone?”

  “Sorry!” He cleared his throat. Tried again when it rattled. “Sorry, I inhaled my energy booster. Man, that burns.”

  She rubbed at the bridge of her nose with one finger, grasping for what calm she could wrap around a sudden surge of impatience. “If you’re finished.”

  “Sorry,” he said again, a little rougher around the edges, but accompanied once more by clicking keys. “Ma’am, do you think Simon is murdering our people?”

  Did she?

  She looked down at her desk, stared through the clean surface. She didn’t want to believe it. Didn’t want to think that the man who’d tested the last dregs of her patience with a kiss that still sent flickers of aftershocks through her could be so . . .

  So evil.

  “Ma’am?”

  But why else would he be here? Just spying didn’t seem enough.

  “He’s the only link we have to the data from Wayward Rose,” she said crisply. “With Nelson dead, we have no way of knowing who else may be working for Lauderdale.”

  Jonas sucked in a breath, the air hissing between his teeth. “You’re talking full-scale conspiracy.”

  “At this point in time, I’m willing to track down any leads. No matter how—” Terrifying. Infuriating. “—disheartening.”

  “Aw, man.” She could hear the worry as thick as paste on the line; a worry she echoed. “All right. Where should I look?”

  Parker frowned, pushing the heel of her hand against the needling threat of a headache centered behind her forehead. Where should Jonas look? Simon was the only stamped agent she knew of.

  She needed an inspection. But all inspections were done by qualified medical personnel, and she couldn’t just order her missionaries to strip for her. Well, she could, as she’d done when Simon and his partner had first been placed with her, but that had been to inspect the seal specifically.

  And she’d skirted a few regulations in doing so.

  All medical personnel came from the labs, which meant Sector Three influence there, too.

  Damn it. And that was even supposing all of Sector Three’s spies wore the bar code.

  She needed Simon’s help.

  Wouldn’t get it.

  “Start with everyone Simon’s age, give or take a year or two,” Parker said, calculating quickly. “Disqualify anyone assigned before—” She hesitated.

  “I’d start with sixteen months,” Jonas cut in quietly.

  Her mind made the connection immediately. “Peterson’s exposure?”

  “I don’t know,” Jonas said, “but if I wanted to slip a mickey into a drink, I’d wait for a little confusion to serve as distraction, right?”

  “Good point.” And that would mean Sector Three had launched its campaign almost immediately upon her appointment. It was, she had to admit, what she would have done. If she were a backbiting political snake. “Do that.”

  The sign on the line echoed the one she wanted to give. “Okay, I’ll start running background checks on any agents acquired in the last sixteen months. I’ll bring up medical records, too. This’ll take a bit.”

  “I want you to go over the murdered agents with a fine-toothed comb, too,” she ordered. “We weren’t looking at them very closely. See if there’s a link between them.”

  “Aside from a tendency to hunt down witches?”

  A flicker of a smile tugged at her lips. “Aside from that.”

  “I’m on it.”

  “Good.” That was one thing covered. “Be in—”

  “There’s something else.”

  She raised an eyebrow as she studied the unit on the desk, raising a finger to the bridge of her nose. “What is it?”

  Jonas cleared his throat. “Are you, um, somewhere safe?”

  The other eyebrow joined the first. “Safe?”

  “I mean private,” he amended quickly. His voice, normally fairly casual even when talking to her, now strained. “Somewhere, you know, without ears.”

  “Yes,” she said slowly, glance flicking around her empty office. Bookshelves, coatrack, chairs. Lamps. “What’s going on?”

  He took a deep, audible breath. “While we’re on the subject, I have some information about that . . . thing. With the bar-code tattoos and stuff.”

  Her chest tightened with anticipation. “GeneCorp.”

  “Yeah.” He drew the word out slowly, and for the first time, Parker realized he’d stopped typing. As if he needed to focus intently on what he said.

  Or what she said.

  She worked to keep her eagerness out of her voice. “Well? What about it?”

  “So, you know that I . . . know people,” Jonas hedged. “I mean, you sort of have to, in this line, right?”

  “Get to the point, Mr. Stone.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” She could practically hear the wince in the acknowledgement. “I have a lead in to something that sounds big, and it’s from a source that really needs to not, uh . . . have questions aimed at him. If you know what I mean.”

  Following that took effort. “He . . . is willing to give us information in exchange for a certain amount of immunity?”

  “Yes,” Jonas said in relief. “That.”

  “About GeneCorp?” About the witches GeneCorp was cultivating. The human subjects churned out in lists longer than her arm. Anticipation gripped her.

  “Er . . . yes.”

  Parker slid off the edge of her desk, straightening from her p
erch, and carefully tucked stray tendrils of her hair back into place. “So meet with him.”

  “Um . . .” He sighed. “Ma’am, he wants to meet with you.”

  Her eyebrows knitted. Her? Unheard of. “This sounds like a trap, Mr. Stone.”

  “I promise you, it’s not,” he said hurriedly. “Really. It’s just that it’s really complicated.”

  She studied the surface of her desk, neat to the point of obsession, and traced two fingers along the ledge in absent thought. Complicated.

  Wasn’t it always?

  “I won’t ask you what you know,” she finally said, her lips turning up into a humorless smile as Jonas’s sigh of relief filtered through the speaker. “Yet.”

  “Right.”

  “But I need to know how credible this is.”

  He didn’t even hesitate. “Absolutely, one hundred percent credible, ma’am. Whatever he’s got, it’s going to be worth it.”

  And if whatever it was could help her in her Mission, then it would be exactly that.

  She nodded, once. “When and where?”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Kayleigh strode down the hall, her head buried in her digital reader. Like Simon knew it would be.

  He didn’t bother with greetings. “Where’s the docket?”

  She jerked in surprise. “Simon! What are you doing?” Her question ended on a surprised note as he grabbed her arm, pulled her out of sight around the corner. She stumbled, but she didn’t fold.

  She was too much her mother’s daughter to fold.

  Simon let her go as she pulled at his grip, her pretty blue-gray eyes narrowed in anger. Color rode her cheeks. “You have no right—”

  “Shut up,” he said over her, cornering her into the alcove wall.

  The shock in her eyes made the act worth it.

  The Magdalene Asylum had damn good security. Practically unbreakable. Compared to the other three sides of the Holy Order quadplex, the place was a veritable fortress.