by Rachel Caine
"Agent Cole was only trying to establish—"
"He was grandstanding, and you were helping him, and you both nearly got yourselves killed. Which in itself doesn't distress me, but now I've got about twenty people to investigate, the clock's running, and for all I know the major players have hopped a plane to Brazil. So you'll forgive me if I'm not pleased with the outcome of this little fishing expedition."
"Agent Cole," Lucia repeated, "was only trying to independently establish the truth of what our witness was saying about the chemicals. And if you've got twenty people to check out, then why are you wasting time with me?"
Jazz didn't bother to suppress a snort. "Wow. Gotcha, Agent Redhead."
He glared at her.
"Rawlins," she amended blandly. "Sorry. Pet name. I find red hair very sexy. It's distracting."
With a mighty effort, he ignored her. "So your information came solely from this witness, Susannah Davis. Is that right?"
"Yes," Lucia said. "Cole verified that there had been shipments of chemicals to the SubTropolis address. He was just confirming that the operations weren't really doing electroplating before bringing in a full team on the operation."
"Cole can answer for himself. You shot a man."
Lucia raised her eyebrows. "Agent Rawlins, I shot someone who was about to put your agent's ribs through his lungs!"
The door opened again. Agent Rawlins frowned in irritation as a woman—FBI, by the well-scrubbed look of her—stuck her head cautiously inside.
"Attorney's here," she said. "He's demanding to see her."
Rawlins swiveled his eyes back toward Lucia. "I thought you didn't want a lawyer."
"I don't think I ever actually said that."
She expected Borden, but when the female agent disappeared, the door opened wider, and a silver-haired man in an expensive suit walked in. His briefcase cost more than an FBI agent's monthly salary, Lucia felt sure. The suit was European, hand-tailored and impeccably elegant.
Milo Laskins, senior partner at Gabriel, Pike & Laskins, nodded briskly to Agent Rawlins, set his briefcase down on the table and handed over a card. "I represent Ms. Garza and Ms. Callender," he said. "Please explain to me why they're being detained."
"They're not being detained. They're—"
"—assisting you in your inquiries, to coin a British phrase?" Laskins didn't bother to sit. He gave the impression he wouldn't be staying long. His silver hair gleamed in the dim lighting, and so did his diamond stickpin. "Please, sir, I didn't graduate from Harvard yesterday. You're on a fishing expedition, trying to find something to level a charge against my client, who was, by the way, attempting to save the life of one of your own."
"She put him there in the first place. I don't like private investigators using my people to do their dirty work."
Laskins's white eyebrows rose, giving his electric-blue stare even more impact. "And if she hadn't called you in on a potential terrorist threat, I can only imagine how much difficulty she'd be in right now. She received suspicious information, and turned it over to the FBI. She offered to assist the authorities in their investigation. In the course of the investigation, she came to the aid of a federal officer in the performance of his duties and was unfortunately forced to wound one man participating in a suspected terrorist conspiracy. Do I have the facts straight, Agent Rawlins?" Rawlins's ears were red again, his face masklike. "More or less."
"You have all the information my clients possess in this matter. You have Ms. Davis, who was the source of the information in the first place. You have the location, and you have the players involved. Am I to assume that you have everything you need to conclude your investigation for the moment?"
"For the moment."
"Then I believe I'll escort my clients home at this time. As you know, Ms. Garza has recently been ill. Ladies…?" Laskins hadn't even opened his briefcase. Lucia had seen dazzling lawyering before, but this had set a land speed record. She stood up, Jazz close behind her, and followed Laskins out of the interrogation room.
Rawlins didn't say a thing. He said it very loudly.
Outside, the other FBI agents stared, but didn't stop them. McCarthy was waiting nearby, arms folded, leaning against the wall. When he saw Lucia he slowly straightened, hands falling to his sides. There was something in his eyes she couldn't read, except that it was strong, and it was all he could do to look casual under the pressure of it.
"All in one piece?" he asked.
"Still," she confirmed.
Laskins's hand closed on her upper arm in a viselike grip. "Downstairs," he said, and all of the smooth civility had disappeared from his voice. "Move it."
"Hey!"
He'd grabbed hold of Jazz, too. Lucia could have told him that wouldn't go over well, but not even Jazz was willing to start a physical confrontation in front of several rapt FBI witnesses. Laskins herded them to the door, tossed his visitor's badge on the receptionist's desk, and then steered them out into the elevator lobby. McCarthy followed.
Jazz yanked free as soon as the office doors closed. "Boy, you'd better not put your hands on me again, or—"
"Or what?" Laskins snarled. He was scary, for an old man. "Shut up, the lot of you. You're coming with me."
Lucia felt a weary flare of anger. "Or?" she asked. "Because I'd very much like to go home now. Can't your obligatory lecture on responsibility wait until tomorrow?"
"No," he said, and stabbed the elevator button with a forefinger. His jaw muscles were so tense she was surprised he could force words out. "Tomorrow is too late, Ms. Garza. Today may very well be too late. As I said, you're coming with me, and if you resist the order, then I have people who will enforce it."
"People?" Jazz laughed out loud. "Damn, this I gotta see."
The elevator doors opened, and Gregory Ivanovich gave them all a wide, lovely smile. The wolf was back in his eyes. "Do you?" he asked Jazz, and gestured politely for them all to get in the elevator. "Perhaps better if you don't see."
He was holding a gun. Gutsy, Lucia thought, considering that just feet away were six armed FBI agents.
He had the gun focused unwaveringly on Jazz's head. "In the elevator, my dear," he said—not to Jazz, to Lucia. "I would hate to have to create a mess all over the federal agents' lobby to make my point. No!" he said sharply, without shifting his gaze, as McCarthy moved forward. Ben instantly stopped. "You know I mean it. One at a time, into the elevator. My lovely Lucia first."
She moved in and took the opposite corner. She knew of no one with more iron concentration than Gregory; she'd seen him hold a target in the middle of a firefight, waiting for just the right second to pull the trigger. McCarthy seemed to have realized it as well; he came next, hands well away from his body. Laskins followed, standing behind Gregory.
Gregory smiled very slowly at Jazz, and made a tiny little gesture with his empty left hand.
She walked in, eyes still locked on his, full of fury and challenge. He held the stare as he released the Hold button and the doors rumbled shut.
It was a long ride down. Nobody spoke. Jazz never blinked. Neither did Gregory.
"Your name is Jazz, yes? Like the music?"
She kept on staring. He returned the gun to his shoulder holster with the fast, elegant gesture of a stage magician, about one second before the doors opened.
"You're crazy, dorogaya. I like that in a woman."
"You and me," Jazz said grimly, "are going to go a few rounds. You know that, right?"
"I look forward to the opportunity."
Laskins pushed forward, leading the way. McCarthy grabbed Lucia's arm. "Stay here," he whispered. "Go back up, get Rawlins—"
McCarthy was wrong. There was no chance—not even a small one—that if she went back upstairs the FBI could protect her. But that wasn't what made her step out to follow Laskins. It was Gregory Ivanovich, who knew her as well as anyone alive, putting two fingers to the back of Jazz's head and miming pulling a trigger.
She didn't know what La
skins would do, but she knew Gregory. All too well.
Chapter Fourteen
There was a big black limousine in the parking lot across the street and it held all of them comfortably. Or uncomfortably, thanks to the tension in the passenger compartment. It was a long, silent ride, but the landmarks were familiar. Lucia exchanged a quick look with Jazz, who raised her eyebrows and widened her eyes. Lucia shrugged.
The limousine turned down the slope of a parking garage, and parked on the top level, next to the elevators of…their own office building.
"You're kidding," Jazz said flatly.
"You may be assured, Ms. Callender, that I'm deadly serious today," Laskins said. "There's nothing I'm finding remotely amusing."
Gregory Ivanovich hustled them into the elevators and upstairs. The doors had been opened wide into their office suite, and all the lights were on. No one there. At least, Lucia thought, Pansy hadn't been caught up in this mess. That was some comfort.
Laskins opened the doors to the big conference room, with its long, gleaming table and recessed lighting.
It was full of people, who were chatting among themselves in a pleasant buzz of sound. Twelve—no, fourteen of them. Sixteen, counting Laskins, who took a chair at the table, and Gregory, who leaned against a wall, seeming entirely at home. Lucia scanned the other faces quickly. Laskins was the very image of a successful lawyer, but there was a tired, unkempt-looking woman who might have come straight from tending her kids. A tall, thin black man who wore glasses and looked like a professor. A slender, well-dressed young woman with understated jewelry and the unmistakable aura of wealth.
The buzz died down as everyone's attention focused on the newcomers.
"Let me guess. The Cross Society," Jazz said, just as Lucia was about to. "Wow. Imagine how impressed I am. No, go on. Just imagine."
The stay-at-home mom smiled. She was the only one who did.
"Not the entire society, obviously, merely a few key players," Laskins said, and shut the doors. "Be seated, the three of you."
"Where's James?" Jazz asked.
"James?" Laskins echoed, as if he'd never heard the name before. Lucia felt a twinge of anxiety, and saw it in Jazz, as well.
"James Borden, you asshole. Where is he?" When Jazz got scared, she got belligerent.
"Mr. Borden is on an errand. It's quite an important one, actually. Be seated, Ms. Callender. We don't have a lot of time."
Gregory stepped forward and pulled out a chair. He performed an extravagant comic-opera bow. Lucia tried to send Jazz a message in a last, quick glance, and slid into an empty chair on the other side of the table. McCarthy took the one next to her.
Gregory bowed again, even more comically.
Jazz gritted her teeth and sat.
"What in the hell is this, Laskins?" Lucia asked. For answer, he held up his hand. Gregory stepped forward and put something into it.
A red envelope.
"This," he said, "is a duplicate of what went to Ms. Callender earlier in the day," he said. "It was waiting for her when she arrived back at her temporary home in Manny Glickman's warehouse. Go ahead. Open it, Ms. Callender."
Jazz just stared at him. Didn't reach for it. After a long enough pause that it became clear she wasn't about to comply, Lucia reached over and took it. She opened it and took out a single white sheet of folded paper.
On it was written, DO NOT ALLOW LUCIA GARZA TO CARRY THROUGH WITH THE INVESTIGATION, OF J&J ELECTROPLATING.
No letterhead, no signature. Lucia looked up at Jazz, who returned her stare without flinching. There was something fierce in her eyes.
"Did you get it, Ms. Callender?" Laskins asked.
"Yes," Jazz said. "I got it."
"Then why did you fail to follow instructions? Do you not yet understand the seriousness of the situation? When you fail to follow our instructions, people die."
"Yeah, and guess what? When we do follow your instructions, people die," Jazz said. "I'm sick of operating in the dark. No more of these mysterious bullshit messages from nowhere. You want to enlist us in your army of do-gooders, you'd better damn well convince me how holding off on busting a bunch of terrorists is doing good!"
"It's not your job to question how or why we give these instructions!" Laskins bellowed. His face had gone entirely red, so mottled Lucia was afraid he was going to clutch his chest and hit the floor.
"Bite me!" Jazz screamed. "You guys treat us like trained monkeys, and you know what? We can make our own decisions. Isn't that why we're so damn valuable to you? Because what we do matters?"
"Yes," said the thin black man, farther down the table. He'd helped himself to a cup of tea, Lucia saw. By the looks of other cups around the room, they'd also started the coffeemaker. They'd certainly made themselves thoroughly at home. "Yes, you do make your own decisions. And you have no idea how much chaos that creates, do you? Presumptions are made about how the time stream will run—they have to be made, or we'd never be able to predict any outcomes at all. You are a fulcrum upon which events turn. And when you don't do as we've asked, you upset everything."
The hausfrau next to him laughed apologetically. "You've lost them, Jeffrey." She put a plump, motherly hand over his and gave Lucia a warm smile. "You have to imagine the scope of what we're talking about, ladies. It's not just an either-or proposition. It's like the biggest pin-ball game you can imagine, with a hundred thousand balls in play, and a million flippers, each of which has a simple decision to make. Do or don't. You see, it was a simple decision we made on your behalf—don't move on the terrorist information. In connection with about fifty other simple decisions, it cleared the way for something important to happen. However, now all of that is unclear again, the ball randomly bouncing. We can't control what we can't foresee."
Lucia looked around at all of them, all the quiet faces, ranging from scowls to smiles. "You're all…psychics? Like Simms?"
"Oh, no." The man called Jeffrey sipped his tea and looked put out at the question. "There are only a handful of genuine psychics in this world, you know. Fifty or so, in any generation—"
"Sixty-two as of last week," murmured an old, creaky gentleman two chairs down. He blinked at Lucia benignly from behind thick, magnifying lenses.
"Edgar, it doesn't matter. I wasn't trying to be precise, I was—"
"Precision is important," Edgar said. "I wouldn't want our new friends to think we weren't precise. My, no."
Jeffrey shot him a grim look. "As I was saying, I could give you the exact mathematical equations about how we derive the existence and location of these people, but I doubt it would mean anything to you. To put it simply, we are a kind of clearinghouse. In addition to Simms, who founded our organization, we maintain facilities in which quite a number of precognitives are housed and cared for. They give us predictions—some, as many as hundreds each day. We feed these into a sophisticated mathematical model, and from that, we see the shape of things to come. Not in detail, you understand. In generalities. The psychics themselves are specific, but in combining their prophecies you lose the—the details. You understand?"
Lucia exchanged a fast look with Jazz. Why isn't Borden here? She couldn't tell if Jazz was thinking about that; her partner looked closed and coplike, utterly unreadable. Just like McCarthy, next to her. How much of this had he heard before? How much did he believe? Not enough, obviously, if he'd finally broken with the Society and gotten himself tossed in jail for his troubles.
"Yes, I understand," she said, although she was fairly certain that she didn't. "You get hundreds of predictions a day. Somehow you create scenarios out of blending all of them together, to show you the future."
"No," Laskins said. He'd recovered some of his calm. His color was a hot pink instead of deep red, and he'd seated himself again. "Not the future. A—sketch of the future. A rough outline of it, with some details in place to give it structure and scope."
"And if you don't like what you see," McCarthy said, "you just figure out which pinball lever
s to push until you get what you want."
It was as if they'd forgotten he was there. All eyes turned toward him. If he felt the weight of it, he didn't let it show; he was reconfiguring a paper clip into steel origami, and he kept right on doing it.
"What they're not telling you," McCarthy continued, "is that they're all about the greater good. Excuse me, the greater good as they see it. So if a couple hundred people have to die in an upcoming terrorist attack, well, those are acceptable losses if that still takes us down the path they want us to follow."
"People die," said a young woman dressed in ill-fitting blue jeans over a skeletal frame. Her arms were frighteningly thin, as if she'd just come from a prison camp. But since her skin had a tanning-salon glow, Lucia was fairly certain that it was the gauntness of fashion, not famine. "You can't make decisions like this based on individuals, it makes everything worthless. You have to take a wider view than that."
"I'm sure that's a great comfort to the dead," Lucia said. "That they died for a reason."
"Everybody dies for a reason," Laskins said. "We just try to make it a better reason than random chance."
"That apply to all of you, too?" McCarthy asked. They looked surprised. "No. Didn't think so. That's just for the rank and file, right? The chorus? The spear carriers? The guy on the left, in the back row, whose name we never know? It's okay if he dies for a reason. Not if your own kid does." He got up, staring at them in bitter contempt. "I told you before, I'm not playing your game."
The gaunt woman smiled cynically. "So you've told us," she said. "Have you informed your friends that we provided the information that got you out of prison? In return for your cooperation?"
McCarthy slowly bent over and put his hands flat on the table, staring at her. If looks could kill… Lucia shuddered at what was in his face. She'd thought Gregory had the wolf in him, but this was something else again.
"I'm not working for you." He said it softly, but it was loaded with meaning. "You have no idea what it costs me, but I'm not doing it. Do you understand me? You can send me back to prison. You can kill me. You can't make me do what you want."
